This weekend we hear Jesus tell a parable in the Gospel of Matthew which, like last week’s parable and the many before it, is a story where familiar imagery to the locals is used to tell a greater theme yet ends with a twist aimed at a certain audience.
In last Sunday’s parable Matthew asked us to consider that the Kingdom of God is open to – and is even being filled with – “those kinds of people” that the religious leaders do not consider worthy of entrance into heaven (prostitutes, tax collectors and other sinners). This weekend we hear again of the vineyard and how the landowner sends people to collect the fruits of the vineyard from those land tenants who have leased the lands and raised the crops. When the landowner’s collectors come, they are stoned and killed—even the landowner’s son who is sent is not safe and is put to death. The story ends with the landowner replacing the tenant farmers with new peoples. In this parable, we can see the landowner as God and the new tenants as Christians, now placed in the vineyard that was once the province of the people of Israel, God’s chosen people.
Father Timothy Senior, a Catholic scripture scholar, warns us not to read anti-Semitic feelings into this story. We are told by Fr. Senior and by the Church that Christianity does not supersede the Jewish people. Yet among many Catholics today, see the Old Testament as being “replaced” by the New Testament. But that is incorrect. Rather the Church views the New Testament as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, “because the New Testament is hidden in the Old, and the Old
is made manifest in the New,” according to Michael Steier, D.Min., Associate Director of the Secretariat of Evangelization and Catechesis of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In fact, I have heard others note that: “The Old Testament is related to the New in the way that a bud is related to a flower and an acorn is related to an oak.” The people of God in the Old Testament are compared to children; in the New they have come to adulthood (Galatians 4:1-7).
How do we then understand today’s vineyard parable and apply it to our faith lives today? As we view the Old and the New Testaments as being connected and we understand that it was not that the Jewish people “reigned’ as God’s chosen ones for a time and then the throne passed to Christians, what we must see is ourselves today is a continuation of the “chain-link fence” of the people of God--and now today we are the continuation of the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ today. Why has Jesus called us into being, given us Baptism, placed us in His Mystical Body on earth—the Church—and gives us His Holy Spirit to guide us and lead us to His Will? Because He want us to do something! It is as simple as that. So, what are we doing to carry on His public ministry in the time and place where we live?
We all know of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy and the Beatitudes. And while we may not have read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is hard to find someone who hasn’t heard of it, if they go to Mass regularly. So what am I doing to be a Disciple of Christ?
Our Catholic faith asks us to make our faith active, to bring it to life—in very practical ways—the beliefs we hold with action. Our active faith is to be seen as the life of the Church—from each parish’s many ministries of social outreach like Feed the Hungry, St. Elizabeth’s House, Pantry Partners, Neighbors and Need to the Archdiocese’s Archbishop’s Annual Appeal and all of its good works in Connecticut’s civil life, to the role of the Universal Catholic Church in the
world—from peacemaker to wound-healer, from hospitals for the poor, to the Knights of Malta’s outreach to the sick and vulnerable in our city’s poorest neighborhoods, to the food, homeless and battered women’s shelters that abound in our nation, to elementary and secondary schools and colleges and universities, from the thousands of Catholic Charity’s offices meeting the
needs of refugee, immigrants and the poor in both rural and urban locales, to our global Catholic Relief Services, and even the Pope’s personal charity of Peter’s Pence, to the Little Sisters of the Poor, our Franciscan brothers—and so many more. That Catholic chain-link fence which was first posted by Jesus Himself more than 2,000 years ago remains being built today so that human dignity continues and thecommon good is reinforced. Today’s gospel asks us: when the vineyard needs planting, when the harvest needs to be collected—will we be part of Christ’s ongoing mission and ministry or will we fight the landowner and destroy what He has prepared for us. Catholic Action—we should all be some part of it. What’s in your future plans?