TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
8 OCTOBER 2017
Because
Saint Matthew wrote his Gospel to Christians who had been converts from
Judaism, his earliest readers would have immediately understood the imagery he
uses. As the Responsorial Psalm proclaims,
the people of ancient Israel saw themselves as a vine transplanted by God from
Egypt into the Promised Land. With this
image, Isaiah reminds his people that they had become his vineyard not because
of their own efforts, but because of God’s choosing them as his people. It was God had terraced the fertile hillside,
spaded it and removed the stones, planted the choicest wines, and set up a
watchtower to protect the vineyard from animals and thieves. He had even hewed out a wine press, to
transform the grapes into the choicest wine.
Isaiah
tried to warn God’s Chosen People that they would be overrun, not because of
any defect on God’s part, but because they had chosen to ignore the terms of
the Covenant made through Moses. But
they did not listen, and the Assyrians destroyed their kingdom. Jesus speaks a similar warning to the
religious leaders of his day. His Father
had sent prophets to warn their ancestors to remain faithful to the
Covenant. They had rejected them. Now they are about to take God’s Only Son
outside the city walls and kill him.
They think that the produce belongs to them, instead of God. Like the brothers of Joseph who sell him into
slavery out of greed and jealousy, they resort to violence.
It is easy
to judge the mistakes of the religious leaders and congratulate ourselves for
being the new tenants of the Kingdom of God.
This parable of Jesus is not only directed to them. It is directed to us. As the current tenants of God’s vineyard, we
cannot make the same mistake and think that everything belongs to us. That happens when a young man makes his final
car payment and thinks, “Now it’s all mine.”
He forgets that his father had cosigned for the car loan and made the
first payments when he was in college. A
mother asks her two year old to share his cookie with his younger brother. The child forgets that his mother had given
him the cookie in the first place. A
football player is enshrined in the Hall of Fame and talks about how hard work
got him this far. He forgot all the
unsung linemen who opened the way for him to run for touchdowns. A man looks at his huge portfolio and boasts
that he has worked hard to become wealthy.
He forgot the blessings he enjoyed being born into a family of means and
intelligence.
Whenever we
forget that we are tenants of the Kingdom of God and not the owners, we can
easily fall into the violence of the tenants in the parable. In thinking everything is ours, we can become
very greedy and go to any lengths to protect what we think is ours. However, when we recognize that everything is
a gift from God, we give thanks for the abilities that God has given us and
work together with the Lord to produce much fruit in our world.
When the
Lord comes to claim the produce of the vineyard, he will not care about wealth
or fame or pleasure or any of those things that we define as success. The Lord will be looking for fruit. Saint Paul makes a list of the fruits which
are part of the Kingdom of God.: peace,
truth, honor, justice, purity, loveliness, graciousness, and union with
God. He writes to the Philippians (and
to us) from his prison cell. As the
Apostle to the Gentiles and a faithful tenant, he has worked tirelessly for
God’s Kingdom. In facing his own
execution, he encourages the Philippians to have no anxiety, knowing that they
face persecution from the Romans and hatred from their Jewish brothers and
sisters. They can be free of any
anxiety, because God is in charge, and they are the tenants. The same is true of us, if we take today’s parable
to heart and work as faithful tenants of God’s Kingdom in our midst.
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