TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME A

[cappie]

“Let me sing to my friend the song of his love for his vineyard.” Isaiah started his allegory in the First Reading as if he were singing a ballad. Jesus borrowed Isaiah's outline and created a parable that summarized salvation history and his place in it. 

What are we to make of this Gospel tale of greed and mayhem, violence, and murder?

The point of the story seems so obvious to Jesus’ hearers that they leap to it without a moment’s hesitation. The landowner, they declare in moral outrage, “ 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.” The story must have also resonated with the early church community, for it is one of only a very few of Jesus’ parables recounted in all three of the so-called Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke. sadly, the world has not changed all that much in the time since Jesus told his parable.

The parable, of course, is about us as much as it is about thieves – about us as much as it is about the “chief priests and the Pharisees” who come to recognize themselves in Jesus’ words. The priests and Pharisees at least deserve begrudging credit, if not for their actions then for their insight into their own motivations. They want to arrest Jesus for his words and be rid of him. They knowingly seek to neutralize his potent message of God’s righteousness and Kingdom. What they do not know – and what we sometimes forget – is that it cannot be done.

No matter where we live or what we have, we are all no more than tenants in God’s Kingdom. Nothing ever truly belongs to us. In the final analysis, everything we have has been lent to us. Everything is borrowed for a time. As the old saying has it, we are living on borrowed time – quite literally. Like the priests and Pharisees of this narrative, we too might wish the world were different, that tenants were owners and servants, masters. But it is not so.

It is more than a coincidence that the liturgy calls us to contemplate these readings on Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and the final day of the worldwide observance of the Season of Creation. Jesus was warning his critics that the time was short for them to come around to collaborate with what God was offering through him. Pope Francis is giving the world a similarly urgent message today he tells us that sister Earth herself "now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her" by plundering and "seeing ourselves as her lords and masters." In response, says Francis, we are called to an integral approach to ecology that hears "both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor."

“The Kingdom of God,” Jesus says in explanation of the story, “will be … given to a people that produces the fruits of the Kingdom.” And the fruits of the kingdom of which Jesus speaks have nothing to do with grain or grapes, much less dollars and cents. If we miss that, we miss the point of Jesus’ parable entirely. We miss the Kingdom at work in our lives. For, the Kingdom is, in fact, ours – but only to the extent that we give in turn to others of all that has been so generously given to us. In God’s Kingdom, finally, that is the only way tenants become landlords.