The 27th Sunday of Ordinary, October 4, 2020

Matthew 21:33–43

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people: “Hear another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey. 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. Again he sent other servants, more numerous than the first ones, but they treated them in the same way. Finally, he sent his son to them, thinking, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.’ They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?” They answered him, “He will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times.” Jesus said to them, “Did you never read in the Scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes? Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”

“They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.”  Jesus ends his parable with these words, and then questions the chief priests and the elders of the people about it.  The Lord usually ended his longer parables, such as this one, with one or more characters being put to death, imprisoned, or threatened in some way.  The major exception is the parable of the Good Samaritan, and it stands out precisely because it ends on what, to us, is a positive note.  But for the Jews who first heard the Lord Jesus tell this parable, it would have proved most disturbing, indeed, a virtual overthrowing of the world as they understood it.  The parables taken as a whole remind us that Jesus, as he himself said, came “not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10, 34).  That is, not only would belief in him would break up families and friendships, but it would force believers themselves to deeply examine their lives and all their preconceptions.  It is one thing to accept the reasonableness of the proposition that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; it is quite another to learn that our most cherished thoughts and beliefs are at variance with God’s thoughts, and that we must change, as a consequence.

Jesus confirms this by quoting Psalm 118, 22, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes?”  What we reject, God chooses.  Interestingly, Psalm 118, along with such Psalms as Psalm 2 and Psalm 110, was recognized by the Jews as speaking of the Messiah who was to come.  They had the words about the Lord choosing the humanly rejected stone before their eyes all along and did not understand the reality it signified.  This lack of recognizing the meaning of this verse disturbed the Lord throughout his ministry.  At one point he turned to the people who were dissatisfied with him as a possible Messiah despite the miracles he had performed: “John [the Baptist] came neither eating nor drinking; and they say: He has a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say: Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners” (Matthew 11, 18-19).

It is our familiarity with the mysteries of our salvation that makes it hard for us to truly understand them to the point, almost, of being aghast at them, just as it prevents us from seeing the horror that is often found in the dilemmas and other outcomes posed at the end of Christ’s parables.  The Lord wants very much to shake us up and to see with our eyes and hear with our ears.  By delving into the parables and studying their background and thinking about what Jesus is actually describing we can gain a deeper appreciation of these mysteries.  By refusing to gloss over the situations that occur in them, by refusing to add our own optimistic endings to them, we can look at what the Lord wants us to know.  When I was a seminarian I volunteered to spend a summer in a Spanish immersion program in Mexico that was run for men studying for the Priesthood.  I encountered a number of things which bothered me, including the scorpions that crawled under our bedroom doors at night, and the volcano that smoked away in the distance.  But the most troubling thing I discovered was the crucifixes the Mexicans decorated their churches and homes with.  The wood of the crosses would be real wood, crudely cut.  The crosses looked like instruments of torture.  There was nothing of the perfectly symmetrical, smooth-surfaced crosses, painted in neutral tones, that I was used to.  And the bodies on those crosses were right out of a bad nightmare.  To accentuate the humanity of the figures, Mexicans used human hair on them, affixed to the heads in such a way as to make the suffering perfectly clear.  The figures were painted in a ghastly fashion.  They were absolutely repugnant, but probably very accurate.

We have to look at the Crucifixion of our Lord as it really was in order to understand anything about the Resurrection and about his love for us.  So let us take a hard look at our Lord’s words, to know him and ourselves.