The Kingdom of God Will Be Taken Away From You and Given to a People That Will Produce its Fruits

10-08-2023Weekly ReflectionFr. Manasseh Iorchir, VC

This weekend, the First Reading and the Gospel provide two parables that describe the covenant relationship between God and the People of Israel. These parables provide a historical explanation for God’s dissatisfaction with the People of Israel that ultimately gave rise to the formation of the “New Israel” (The Church), an expansion of the national relationship God had with Israel to a universal relationship that includes all people who believe.

In the First Reading, the Prophet Isaiah employs the use of a beautiful poetic song to depict this relationship. God is introduced as Isaiah’s “friend” who owns a vineyard on a strategic and fertile site. He invested his energy, talent, time and livelihood into His vineyard and even dug and prepared a wine press in hopeful anticipation of a rich harvest. Isaiah’s “friend” is shocked to witness the vineyard produce wild grapes that were rotten in spite of all He had invested in it. His first reaction is to call on the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the people of Judah to judge between Him and his vineyard. Then, God informs us about what He is going to do with the disappointing and underachieving vineyard: He will let His justice take effect and bring about the total destruction of the vineyard. Towards the end of the First Reading, God reveals that this vineyard is the “House of Israel.”

In the Gospel passage, Jesus presents to the Chief Priests and the elders of the people a similar, yet slightly different, parable. Like in Isaiah’s Oracle, He demands to know what their opinions are about the kind of retribution the vineyard owners should be expected to seek after He was shortchanged by the tenants whom he charged with looking after the vineyard. We should note that this parable represents one of the encounters between Jesus and the religious authorities of that time that so irked them that they ultimately decided that He had to die. In the parable, Jesus spoke to the religious authorities about a landowner who planted a vineyard, invested effort and resources into it, handed it to tenants and went on a journey. Here we note not only the investment of effort and resources of the landowner in the vineyard, but also his investment of trust in the tenants. At harvest time, the landowner sent servants to collect his expected produce from the tenants. They responded by seizing the servants, beating one, killing another and stoning a third. The landowner sent more servants who received a similar treatment. The landowner finally rolled his last dice: he sent to them his heir, thinking “they will respect my son.” However, rather than respect him, they saw in his disappearance an opportunity to fraudulently appropriate the vineyard to themselves. So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard (his legitimate inheritance) and killed him. Like “Isaiah’s friend” in the First Reading, Jesus availed His audience the opportunity to pass judgment on the tenants and prescribe appropriate punitive measures. Their self -condemnation was total: 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. If only they knew that they were the tenants Jesus was talking about they would have been more merciful and conciliatory in their response. Israel, the vineyard of the Lord, was being mismanaged by the religious authorities. God had sent prophets to warn them but they rejected and even assassinated some of them and were in the process of rejecting the heir to God’s kingdom and giving him a shameful death outside of Jerusalem, the city of His ancestor David. This parable was meant to warn them of the consequences that were bound to follow their obstinate and unrepentant disposition: Israel would be replaced with a “New Israel”, the Church which would have universal appeal and worship God in truth and in Spirit. The Readings remind us too that God is very much interested in the “fruits” we produce as members of the New Covenant.

May we always be conscious of the fact that with God, personal accountability is required in the relationship we have with Him and with others, and that our commitment to this Covenant is only as good as the fruits of love we are able to bear.

Please be kind and may God bless you.

Fr. Manasseh