27TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - A
Matthew 21: 33-43
In the history
of salvation, God manifested his great love by entering into a covenant
relationship with man. But what did God get in return? Rejection!
Yet God remained faithful, loving and merciful.
In the book of
the prophet Isaiah in the first reading, God is depicted as the vine dresser and
Israel as the vineyard in this covenant-relationship. God gave the best of
everything to Israel but Israel had always been unfaithful, stubborn and
ungrateful. Jesus in the parable of the tenants reminded the Jews about
their stewardship in the vineyard and predicted their obstinacy and the evil
intention of their hearts. The Jews did not want to give the produce of
the harvest because they wanted to take by force the vineyard to themselves.
First they killed the Prophets who were God's messengers and eventually they
killed the son of the owner. At the end, the parable of Jesus became his
own living story: he was rejected and killed by his own people! The rejection
of Jesus did not end with the Jews; there is a continuous hatred and rebellion
against God. In the course of time we saw this in the attempt to suppress
Christianity by all means in the different stages of Church history. One
of these is the time of martyrdom which in spite of the shedding of the blood
had always been the glorious and golden age of the Church. History will
always be a silent witness of how evil tried to trample goodness underfoot with
all the horrifying mechanisms of ethnic cleansing, genocide, “otherization”,
religious war, all in the pseudo-name of justified cause for the advancement of
humanity. We see this concretely in the present time when hundreds of thousands of our Christian
brothers and sisters who by the witness of their faith were killed in the
Middle East countries. We pray for those
who are being persecuted and driven away from their lands and are experiencing many forms of
inhumanity because of their religious belief.
We pray for peace in the hearts of those who are in power to do such
barbaric acts in the name of religion.
Since
the beginning of time man had always wanted to seize power and to be in
control. In short, there is this inner longing to become god!
Self-sufficiency and egoism have always been the altars by which man elevates
himself without the need of God. The deification of man will always be
the temptation to prove man's supremacy over anything else that exists.
This is not just true with atheism or pseudo-religions but more importantly
even within the sacred walls of our own Church.
We come face
to face with the dilemma of the presence of Church leaders and ministers who
because of their weaknesses continue to wound the Body of Christ and also those
who are faithful in their vocation yet being persecuted by their own ranks and
by the world.
Where do we
see ourselves in the parable? First we
acknowledge the fidelity of God who in his great mercy and love gave us the
best of everything. This privilege to be called in his vineyard (the
Church) entails the corresponding responsibility
of carrying in ourselves the seed of the Kingdom. With all the graces that we
received, God prepared this seed to grow
and mature so that it will yield fruits ready for the harvest at the appointed
time. These fruits are the good works of
our hands, small and grand, ready to be shared to the world. We may have laboured and toiled to the best
of our abilities but it was God who brought them to fruition. The tenants in the parable refused to give
the fruits of the harvest to the owner of the vineyard because they thought it
was theirs to keep. When we have done
something good, we acknowledge the goodness of God bursting into the
world. We are just mere stewards of charity by which God blesses others so that
those who have less in life will have a little bit more when they receive a
part of our selves.
Our arms are too short to strangle God; our hands are too weak to kill him. God
is in control, not us; God is the one glorified, not us.
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