October 5^th 2014. TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Gospel: Matthew 21:33-43

Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

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GOSPEL:                             Matthew 21:33-43

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people :
‘Listen to another parable. There was a man, a landowner, who planted a vineyard; he fenced it round, dug a winepress in it and built a tower; then he leased it to tenants and went abroad. When vintage time drew near he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his servants, thrashed one, killed another and stoned a third. Next he sent some more servants, this time a larger number, and they dealt with them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them. “They will respect my son” he said. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, “This is the heir. Come on, let us kill him and take over his inheritance.” So they seized him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They answered, ‘He will bring those wretches to a wretched end and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will deliver the produce to him when the season arrives’.
Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:

It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone.
This was the Lord’s doing and it is wonderful to see?

I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken from you
and given to a people who will produce its fruit.’

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . Jesus tells the parable of the tenants who refuse to give the due fruits of their labour to the vineyard owner. They even kill the owner’s son in order to gain permanent possession of the vineyard. At the end of the parable, Jesus asks his listeners what will happen to those tenants. The listeners reply, “They will be killed violently and the vineyard will be given to other tenants who will produce the right fruits in due season”. This Gospel might sound harsh to our ears. Where is God’s mercy? Will we have a miserable end if we do not produce the goods that God expects from us? Shouldn’t God tolerate our waywardness and still bestow salvation and happiness upon us? Don Fabio responds by saying that the Gospel is not harsh but honest. Real love involves an aspect of purification and pruning. We have attitudes and habits that are incompatible with the Gospel. God wishes us to be rid of these habits, and this requires a painful process of cauterization. God’s love is not some sort of warm, fuzzy feeling that says “Yes” to everything. God wishes to bestow on us a wonderful vineyard in which we can bear fruit that will last. If we persist in pursuing our self-centered interests, then we simply cannot produce the fruits that God wishes us to produce. This is not harshness but truth. The fruits that we could have produced will be produced by other “tenants” who are not bogged down in the self-centered mire in which we are wallowing. The problem is that we think we can live the “faith” whilst still remaining masters of our own destiny. We think that the vineyard is ours, something that exists to produce fruit for ourselves. But the vineyard is not ours! It belongs to the Lord! Our lives are not our own. We must be pruned and cut by the Lord until we learn the inestimable joy of being able to produce fruit for the Lord.

The New Testament parable seems even harsher than the Old Testament one! But is “harsh” the correct word?

This Sunday the first reading and the Gospel fit together perfectly. The same story is told in the New Testament as in the Old. We might expect that Jesus would soften the tone of his parable with respect to the Old Testament version. Isaiah tells the story of the love of the Lord for his vineyard. The land is given every sort of care and attention in order to produce the most wonderful fruit, but the harvest turns out to be a disaster. The Lord then speaks to the keepers of the vineyard. “I have given you everything, and what do I receive in return? I expected justice but receive the spilling of blood. I looked for righteousness but hear the cries of the oppressed”. In the Gospel, Jesus addresses a similar parable to the Pharisees and chief priests, to the elite of the people who have been cultivated in the ways of God. They have been blessed with the gifts of heaven, in the same way that the vineyard keepers were given a vineyard complete with a fence, a winepress and a tower. When the master asks for the fruit of the vineyard, the response is violence and bloodshed. This is the story of Israel who rejected the prophets and messengers of God. In the parable, Jesus recounts how the tenants also reject the son of the landowner. The son is put to death so that the tenants might take possession of the vineyard. Sometimes people think that the Old Testament presents the harsher face of God, whilst the New Testament focuses more on his mercy. But this is not a complete picture. The development from the Old Testament to the New cannot be summed up in such simplistic terms.

Love involves pruning, cauterizing, and purifying that which is incompatible with true love

God reveals himself to us in a gradual way, and we come to know him gradually as he progressively reveals his face. But God does not change character as we progressively come to know him! We speak to children in one way, to adolescents in another way, and to adults in a still different way. God has revealed himself to humanity from the beginning as a merciful God. In the fullness of time, his Son is born of a woman and achieves our redemption. But the apparent harshness at the end of Jesus’ parable leaves us shocked. Jesus asks his listeners what the owner will do with those tenants who have behaved so badly. The listeners reply, “He will bring them to a miserable end and give the vineyard over to others who will produce real fruit”. And Jesus agrees. Those tenants will lose their vineyard and the stone that had been rejected will become the corner-stone. This is not a comfortable parable for any of us! It is a tough lesson that we must take on board seriously because there is an aspect of love that prunes, cauterizes, purifies. Love is incompatible with certain things. Love sometimes involves saying “No!” in a determined fashion. The capacity for true love requires the ability to distance oneself from certain things. Love is not some kind of warm, fuzzy feeling that assents to everything. Real love involves passion and single-mindedness. Helping other people to grow necessitates being able to say “No” to them in certain situations.

The apparent harshness of the Gospel is the simple “No!” of love

This Gospel contains within it the “No!” of love. There is a particular self-centered attitude that God wishes to counter in us. Our refusal to bear fruit is not something that God can sit easy with. There is a very common trend even among those who consider themselves to be “religious”, and this is the tendency to believe that we can have the faith and still remain the masters of our own destiny. We are inclined to think that the vineyard is ours and we can use it for the kind of self-centered fruits that suit us. But the vineyard is not ours! The vineyard belongs to the Lord and our lives are not our own! We are called to bear fruit and to do so we must be pruned and cut, as the parable of the vine in the Gospel of John tells us. There are certain attitudes and habits engrained within us that must be rooted out and rejected. Quite often we are reluctant to allow God to be placed at the centre of our lives, and this reluctance can lead to the loss of the vineyard that the Lord wishes to bestow on us. We must not be ambivalent towards such incompatible attitudes. This Gospel calls on us to bear fruit. That which impedes us from bearing fruit cannot be given a place in our lives. If we continue to harbour such incompatible habits and attitudes, then we must resign ourselves to losing all that the Lord wishes to bestow upon us. This is not harshness. It is simply the truth.