“Yes, God’s vineyard is the House of Israel, and the people of Judah that chosen plant.” Isaiah 5: 1-7
“I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.” Matthew 21: 33-43
The gospel-readings chosen for last Sunday, today and next Sunday all contain parables which, according to Matthew, Jesus told in the week leading up to his arrest, torture and execution. We need to remember that Jesus’ telling of these three parables followed close upon his entry into Jerusalem during which he was publicly acclaimed by a large crowd. The reception he was afforded clearly angered the Jewish religious leaders. Jesus further alienated them by the angry manner in which he overturned in the Temple precinct the tables of the money changers and of the sellers of animals used in sacrificial offerings. The three parables that Jesus proceeded to tell were clearly directed at those leaders, leaving them in no doubt that he saw them as no better than their ancestors, who had failed to heed the prophets and other messengers God had sent to guide them. That long line of messengers and prophets had been ignored, rejected and, in some cases, even killed. In his telling of the parable in today’s gospel-reading, we hear how Jesus identified himself with the landowner’s son who was murdered by tenants whose ambitions knew no bounds.
While today’s parable directly confronted the religious leaders with whom Jesus had tangled on numerous occasions, like all of his parables, it challenges all who dare to identify themselves as his disciples. So, there is something in it to be heeded by all of us. Today’s First Reading from Isaiah is designed to help us understand the significance for us of Jesus’ parable.
The reading from Isaiah is really an allegory of the way in which God’s saving love had been directed not only to the People of Israel but to the whole of humanity. It is framed like a song about a loving God who blessed humankind with the gift of the earth and the responsibility of nurturing it as caring tenants. But what began as a song of praise for God’s generosity declined into a lament for humanity’s failure to accept God’s generous invitation into collaboration. The religious leaders of Jesus’ time would have been familiar with the Prophecy of Isaiah. They would not have been slow to realise that the message of Jesus’ parable was a direct criticism of them and of their failure to exercise a responsibility that had been entrusted to them.
When Jesus, at the conclusion of his parable, asked his audience, what the property owner would do to the tenants who had turned against him by murdering his son and servants, their answer was substantially a repetition of the vicious and violent conduct practised by the rebellious tenants and which the parable had roundly condemned.
Isaiah’s allegory and Jesus’ parable taken together add up to a commentary on the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, which recorded how God had created the world and entrusted it and all its creatures to humankind for care and nurture. We human beings were appointed by God as tenants of creation not as owners. In the course of history, we have exploited, polluted and destroyed the blessed gift of our common home. The parable of Jesus identifies God as the landowner and humankind as the insensitive, negligent and destructive tenants. There have been times, too, when we have ignored or overlooked our most vulnerable and needy brothers and sisters with whom we are meant to collaborate in nurturing and caring for the creation in which we are tenants and for which we are invited to be responsible stewards.
In this context, we would do well to remind ourselves that the late Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si named all of us as stewards responsible for the care of our planet Earth, our Common home. In his beginning paragraphs, Pope Francis named us as modern-day tenants, equivalent to the tenants in Jesus’ parable, with a serious responsibility to care for God’s vineyard, our sister Earth who cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, “we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.” (Laudato Si, paragraph 2, The Holy See, 24th May 2015)
In August 2015, Pope Francis announced that, on September 1st each year, Catholics would celebrate a “World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation”. In doing so, he stated: “ We need always to keep in mind that, for believers in Jesus Christ, the Word of God who became man for our sake, the life of the spirit is not dissociated from the body or from nature or from worldly realities, but lived in and with them, in communion with all that surrounds us” (Laudato Si’, 216). The ecological crisis thus summons us to a profound spiritual conversion: Christians are called to “an ecological conversion whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them” (ibid., 217). For “living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience” (Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis, the Holy See, 6th August 2015)
Let’s conclude this reflection with the encouraging words about prayer that Paul addressed to his community of Christian Philippians in today’s Second Reading, when he reminded them that only by being grounded in a prayerful relationship with God would they grow into caring deeply about all that happens in the world around them and not slip into becoming anxious. Surely that’s a good reminder for us, too.