This Sunday, Christ Will Arrive For His Vineyard Today. Will You Receive Him?

We each have a vineyard in our soul, where all we produce comes from God and belongs to God. Do we give it back to him?

Here are five takeaways for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: The Parable of the Tenants is an allegory about salvation history. But that’s just a start.

Sunday’s Gospel reading comes from Matthew Chapter 21, after the Entry into Jerusalem. It begins by saying, “Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people, ‘Hear another parable.’” Jesus tells a story about a landowner’s son being killed by tenants at his vineyard. Given the time and place of the story, it is only about the significance of his death; its claim about his divinity helps lead to his death.

The parable is a tight allegory: The landowner is God, the tenants are sinful humanity — religious leaders of the old covenant in particular — and the servants he sends are the prophets. After they reject the prophets, they reject even the landowner’s son, the heir to his father, who represents Jesus.

But just as Jesus’s passion and death is both about salvation history generally and about each of us personally, this story applies to our lives as well. In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas includes commentary in his Catena Aurea making this point.

“A vineyard has been let out to each of us to tend, when the mystery of baptism was given us, to be cultivated by action,” it says.

Second: That makes this parable about each of us. We should examine what it says about our personal Christian lives.

Jesus begins: “There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower.”

The landowner, God, gives us everything we need. He gives us a garden in our soul — and the protection of a hedge and a watchtower. He provides for our food, safety, work — and our delight, since a vineyard exists to produce wine.

Jesus continues: “Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey.”

Notice how God gives us the means to get all the good we can, but leaves the rest to us and our free choice. We have to work for him in the vineyard; we have to tread the grapes and ferment the wine; and we have to “pray and watch” from the tower he built. We have to make an effort for our Christian life to thrive.

Next, Jesus says: “When vintage time drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to obtain his produce. But the tenants seized the servants and one they beat, another they killed, and a third they stoned.”

“Servants one, two, and three are sent us when the Law, the Psalms, and Prophecy are read, after whose instructions we are to work,” says Aquinas’s Catena. We can think of the servants as the moral teaching of the Church, the prayer life of the Church, and the Scriptures.

Then, Jesus says: “Finally, he sends his son to them, thinking, “They will respect my son.’  … [But] they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.”

This son is Christ himself, who in our personal life we treat this same way all too often, says the Catena. He “is beaten and cast out when the Word is treated with contempt, or, which is worse, is blasphemed.” Sins stop his progress in our life, which stops the progress he meant to make for others through us.

Third: The readings spell out the consequence of refusing to take care of what God gives you.

Jesus asks his listeners what the consequence will be, and they say landowner will punish the bad tenants for murder and give his vineyard away.

The First Reading describes the same thing, and it turns out that this scenario is a great way to understand God’s judgement, which in the end is the natural result of God’s attempt “to obtain his produce.”  Even though it is God’s world, and his goods, we tenants don’t want to give him what is his. We want to take it from him — or, worse, give it to his enemy. That is a self-defeating strategy, and it defeats us.

The first half of the reading from Isaiah is all about how God, the vine-grower, built his vineyard and “spaded it, cleared it of stones, and planted the choicest vines; within it, he built a watchtower and hewed out a wine press.” In other words, God prepared the soil, chose the plants, provided protection and readied for the harvest.

The second half of the First Reading is about how he will now undo each of those things:

“Now, I will let you know what I mean to do with my vineyard,” Isaiah says. The Lord will “Take away its hedge, give it to grazing, break through its wall, let it be trampled! Yes, I will make it a ruin.”

When we withdraw ourselves from the Gift-Giver, we lose the gifts he gives.  “I will command the clouds not to send rain upon it,” he says. Then, he gives the gifts to someone else. As the Psalm reminds us, “The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.” But the Church becomes the new keeper of the Kingdom after the crucifixion of Jesus.

But keeping in mind the personal vineyard we each have, we can see how neglect brings the same ruin to our souls. Rejecting the commandments leaves us exposed; refusing to pray deprives our vineyard of the water it needs; and ignoring Scripture means that, as in the Parable of the Sower, our vineyard is overgrown, overcrowding our lives with lesser things and killing our souls. Our soul will go the way of a garden that we don’t tend. What could have been the beautiful source of life and energy in our lives will be a particularly nasty bed of weeds.

Fourth: It is clear why vineyards are a beautiful metaphor for the Kingdom of God.

God fills our lives with graces, and puts all the pieces in place so that, with a little cooperation, great things will happen. How great? Vineyards are places where God takes his creation, adds our work, and makes something amazing. In our daily Christian lives, we turn water and work into wine through our efforts in the vineyard of our soul.

In the Second Reading, St. Paul describes the spiritual “wine” we produce this way: “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” To receive that immense peace, he asks us to raise our gaze to him.

• Look at “whatever is true, whatever is honorable;” in other words not fads, fashions and scandals, but those things which are proven, lasting and wholesome.
• Look at “whatever is just, whatever is pure,” he says — so not at what is petty, mean or lustful.
• Dwell on “whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious,” he says — not what is shocking or harsh, but what is edifying.

To sum it up: “If there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things,” he says.

Taping Paul’s list (Philippians 4:8) beside your computer screen would be a great way to check yourself about where you spend your time online. There is good in the culture. Cultivate your garden there.

Fifth: We will soon meet the son whom the tenants rejected.

When Jesus spoke to the elders and chief priests of his time, he warned them that if they kill the Son of God, “I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”

We are that people. In the Alleluia verse before the Gospel, we heard the words Jesus addresses to each of us:

“I have chosen you from the world, says the Lord, to go and bear fruit that will remain.”

He comes to us, his tenants, as the son and heir of the Father, in the Eucharist. But instead of rejecting him and his kingdom, at Mass we will line up and give him our “Amen,” accepting him into the vineyard of our soul.

There, if we allow him to reign, we will receive his nourishment, protection, purpose, and delight.

Image: The Parable of the Wicked Tenants,
Andrey Mironov, Wikimedia.

By Tom Hoopes