Amadeus
(Is.55:6-9; Phil.1:20-24, 27; Mt.20:1-16)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of classical music’s most remarkable composers. He was born in Salzburg, Austria, and starting from the age of only five, he composed over 600 masterworks in only thirty years.
When he was 25, he moved to Vienna, the home of another composer, an ambitious man named Antonio Salieri. Their relationship became turbulent and is the subject of Miloš Forman’s extraordinary movie, Amadeus, which won eight Academy Awards in 1985. [i]
This film depicts Salieri as a deeply religious and hard-working man who promises God that he will live a chaste, disciplined, and industrious life if God will make of him a great composer.
For years he works slavishly, climbing Vienna’s musical ladder. He’s convinced that his strict obedience has earnt God’s favour. But then Mozart arrives as someone vulgar, childish and arrogant; everything Salieri is not. Yet, at the piano, Mozart is simply a genius and Salieri is filled with jealous rage.
Salieri looks up at the crucifix on his wall and accuses God of being unfair. He cannot understand why a just God would pour such talent into a frivolous character like Mozart, while letting him wallow in mediocrity.
There’s similar resentment in today’s Gospel, in Jesus’ Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. Several workers are hired at dawn. They follow the rules and slave all day under the hot sun. But when evening comes, the landowner outrages them. He gives those who have worked for barely an hour the same wage: a full day’s pay.
The first-hired workers aren’t upset about being underpaid; they got what was promised. They are complaining because the latecomers are treated equally. They cannot accept the landowner’s generosity.
They are suffering from Salieri’s syndrome: spiritual envy.
How often do we fall into this same trap? How often do we resent newcomers getting the same rewards as those who have been doing the right thing for years?
Some people even get uncomfortable thinking about the saints who were once terrible sinners. But God’s kingdom isn’t based on merit. It’s founded on grace.
St Dismas, for example, was the Good Thief who was crucified next to Jesus. He had spent his life breaking the law, and yet at the last minute he turns to Jesus, asking to be remembered. But Jesus doesn’t say, ‘It’s too late.’ He rewards him by saying, ‘Today you’ll be with me in paradise.’
Dismas is the ultimate eleventh-hour worker in God’s vineyard. He wins heaven at the very last moment.
St Angela of Foligno was a wealthy Italian woman who spent her life indulging herself. Then, at the age of forty, she lost her family and had a vision of St Francis. She sold everything she had, gave it all to the poor and became a Franciscan and a great teacher of prayer.
She shows us how God can take a shallow heart and set it ablaze in an instant.
And then there’s St Mark Ji Tianxiang, the Chinese doctor who was an opium addict. His parish priest refused him the sacraments for thirty years because of his chronic addiction. But he never stopped going to Mass, praying, and begging God for mercy. Then in 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, he was arrested for being a Christian. He went to his execution singing hymns, and died a martyr’s death.
By the strict rules of the day, Mark was a failed Christian standing idle at the edge of God’s vineyard. Yet Jesus gave him the highest crown of heaven: sainthood.
In our society, we tend to take a transactional view of things: if I do this, then I expect to get that. Our laws reinforce this thinking, and many of us expect even God to comply. But as Isaiah says in our first reading, God’s ways are not our ways. God does not think like we do.
Human fairness demands that you get exactly what you earn. But divine mercy provides exactly what you need to be saved. The landowner in today’s parable gave the latecomers a full day’s pay because he knew their families needed it.
God acts out of our need, not our merit.
At the end of the movie Amadeus, Salieri is a broken old man being wheeled through an asylum. He calls himself the ‘patron saint of mediocrity’ and shouts, ‘I absolve you all!’ It’s a tragic, hollow mockery of the priesthood, reflecting a lifetime of keeping score and resenting God’s gifts.
Our challenge is to rise above such bitterness. When we see God pouring his blessings onto those who don’t seem to deserve them, we should rejoice rather than grumble. The truth is, none of us really deserves God’s mercy. We are all sinners.
So, let’s be grateful that God is so generous with his blessings. He gives his mercy to all who open their hearts to him.
[i] Amadeus. Directed by Miloš Forman, performance by F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce, Orion Pictures, 1984.