27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
My dear parishioners.
God Is Good!!! All the Time!!! And All the Time !!! God Is Good!!!
Up to this point in his book, Isaiah has been calling for a change of heart within the people of Israel. They wandered away from God, and Isaiah urges them to return. In this oracle, Isaiah gives them a vivid picture to impress upon them just how much they disappoint God with their sinful ways. Initially, Isaiah’s words appear to be merely the lyrics of a lovely song about a friend and his vineyard. Only at the end of the oracle does the surprising revelation come that the song is really about God and God’s chosen people.
Today’s parable of the vineyard is a reworking by Matthew of a similar story in Mark 12:1–12. It is an allegory about salvation history that Matthew has sharpened into a controversy regarding why Jesus was killed. The focus of the controversy includes a sharp criticism of Israel’s leadership. The dispute is not with all Jews, but rather with Jewish leadership that has proven to be incompetent and ultimately replaced. 1) The vineyard Israel. The parable has assumed the form of an allegory. The vineyard represents Israel, the tenant farmers are Israel’s leaders, the householder is God, the servants are the prophets, and the son is Jesus. The story opens with a description of a typical absentee landlord leasing his property to tenants who would care for it while the owner would be gone for long periods of time. When the landowner would return, he expected to collect payment from the tenants for the land. They, in turn, would be able to keep a small percentage of the profits.
Refusal to pay. A crisis emerges when the tenants decide not to pay the landowner. They kill the servants sent to collect the profits numerous times. For some strange reason, the landowner thinks that if he sends his son, the tenants will respect him. The tenants think that somehow by killing the landowner’s son, they will gain his inheritance. The landowner, however, is still alive and so no inheritance would be available even in an honest situation, which this is not. Nevertheless, the tenants throw the son out of the vineyard and kill him. This is all a symbolic story about the killing of Jesus and the incompetent Jewish leaders.
The question is asked. “What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?” The answer is that he will have them killed and then lease his vineyard to other tenants. He will give it to tenants who will produce its fruits. Some read this as the rejection of the Jews by God and their replacement by the gentiles. That interpretation does not hold up under careful examination. This is really about the rejection of certain Jewish leaders and their replacement with new and competent Jewish leadership. Matthew sees this as an intra-Jewish dispute, and not the replacement of the Jews by the gentiles. Later, that will in fact happen, but not at this time.
Excerpts from “Sunday Homily Helps”, is used by permission of Franciscan Media. www.FranciscanMedia.org. All rights reserved
Sincerely in Christ,
Fr. Aloysius