The 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time God and the Vineyard
The three parables that we have had as the gospel reading for the last two Sundays and for today have a lot in common. They all mention a vineyard, its owner, and people that work for Him. The three parables are self-explanatory for the most part: the vineyard is the earth, God’s creation, the owner of the vineyard is God and the people to whom the vineyard is entrusted are all of us, the human race who are represented by the laborers in the first parable, the children or the two sons in the second parable and the tenants in today’s parable. One more thing that the three parables have in common is that in all of them the ones to whom the vineyard is entrusted are somehow the source of conflict. In the first parable the laborers who worked the whole day were not happy as they learned that some of their companions, who worked for an hour only earned exactly the same amount of money as they did; in the second parable one of the sons is disobedient but has a change of heart and does what he is supposed to do; meanwhile, the other son, who appears to be obedient to his father, who appears to be a good son ends up being disobedient and sinning against his father. This son says one thing but does exactly the opposite; his actions reveal that he is not the kind of person he is pretending to be, he is not the kind of person he claims to be. Now, in the last parable we can notice that those to whom the vineyard was entrusted are even more wicked than their counterparts in the first two parables. In the first parable envy is mentioned while in the second parable there is a direct reference to disobedience and we can infer that there was hypocrisy, dishonesty, and inconsistency as well. In the third parable the tenants are greedy, arrogant and murderers. We can see their greed in their desire to own the vineyard; we can see their arrogance in their lack of respect for the son of the owner of the vineyard and for the owner himself, they didn’t accept their humble position as tenants, they wanted more, they wanted to make themselves equal to the son of the owner, the heir, they wanted to become the sole heirs and the sole owners of the vineyard and to achieve that they killed others, they became murderers. In the three parables we can see how evil escalates: it began with envy, and from there it went to disobedience, hypocrisy, dishonesty and inconsistency, and from there it went to arrogance, greed, violence and murder. The tenants in the parable are a clear reflection of what humanity is, as a whole, right now. We have come to believe that we own the earth and that we can do whatever we want with it and its fullness. We have forgotten that the earth and all its fullness belongs to God (Cf. Psalm 24:1; 1 Cor. 10:26) We have forgotten that everything we think we own is going to be taken away from us. We talk in terms of my and mine; my family, my house, my car, my country, my life, my friends, my savings, my money; but the question is: do we really own anything? Is it there anything we can rightly claim as our own? Apart from our sins I don’t think there is anything else we can claim as our own, even our souls belong to God, he created them.
We are facing difficult times right now because we are misusing and abusing the little authority we have as stewards or tenants. The Covid-19 pandemic is linked to the way we treat animals. We have been warned that animal factory farming is going to cause pandemics but, as always, we don’t listen. We have treated everything entrusted to us so badly. We have done a lousy job as stewards of God’s creation; our greed and our cruelty do not seem to have any limits.
May almighty God have mercy on us all and give us the opportunity to make atonement for our sins and for all the damage we have done to his creation.