Homily for the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today is the third Sunday in a row with a Parable set in a vineyard, the vineyard being the symbol of Israel. In today’s Parable, the Vineyard Owner (God) entrusts the stewardship, development and harvest to the Workers (His Chosen People).

Since the Vineyard was to be the meeting place between God and His people, the Workers were to be not just stewards of the Vineyard, but stewards of the Covenant… that well-defined relationship with God that God Himself initiated, and to which He remains perpetually faithful, even when His people do not. Thus, the Covenant provided a real-life. real-time connection with the Divine Life of God.

We heard Jesus say in the telling of the Parable, “He dug, planted,” and so forth, which means that God not only initiated , but provides for the infrastructure of the Covenant, and then gives His people the lighter task of maintaining it. It was God’s intention to continue the cultivation but His efforts were met not just with resistance, (Adam and Eve) but with murder: (first Cain slaying Abel, and then the martyrdom of the Prophets.)

Putting to death the Voice of God in the Prophets severs the tie between God and His People. Putting to death the Word of God within oneself, while seeming less drastic, also severs the union of God and Man: surpassing the effect of Original Sin, now entering into the realm of Mortal Sin.

So, to intervene personally, the Vineyard Owner sends his own son, thinking: “They will respect my son.” But the people claim the son’s inheritance as their own and put him to death. The shout, “Come let us kill him!” in the Parable would eventually become “Crucify him!” in the real-life Passion of the Lord.

Just as the Workers in the Parable did not want to be stewards of the Vineyard, but Owners, so the Chosen People did not want to be stewards of the Covenant, but Owners.

Something similar can happen for us today when we choose not to be stewards of the Faith, or of the Church, but owners, accepting some Church Teaching while dissenting from, or rejecting others.

Tacit approval of values contrary to God’s Covenant and Commandments… the witness and proclamation of the Prophets in ancient days… and, finally, in our day, dissenting from or outright refusing to accept the Teachings of the Church handed down to us by Our Lord Himself, containing grave matter such as putting to death the Innocent, is contrary to the Divine Will of God, and, therefore, gravely sinful. God entrusts the Faith and the Church to each one of us as stewards rather than owners so that the Faith and the Church remain essentially His, not ours.

Now, as we move through this Respect Life month, we come face-to-face with societal “values” subverting the sanctity of human life working their way into a conscience that may be dulled by lack of prayer, or a dearth of Sanctifying Grace.

Different claims can emerge, as we often hear:

“It’s my body”…   which can lead one to support abortion
“It’s my life”…   which can lead one to support physician-assisted suicide
“It’s my identity”… which can lead one to support same-sex “marriage” and the gender dysphoria that rages against personal holiness.

When we put to death the Voice of the Church by claiming ownership of the Moral Law for ourselves and therefore re-defining it, we put to death the Word of God, not only His spoken commands, but the Living Word of God: Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord’s ominous statement, “It will be taken away from you” is no idle threat, it’s exactly what happened to the Jewish People who did not keep the Covenant and were left in the dust when Jesus founded His Church… and could happen again in our own lifetime if we fail to live Christ-centered lives.

We live in an era and a society which have been called “post-Christian”, but which, in reality, have devolved into not merely post-Christian, but “anti-Christian”. If we buy into the post-Christian message of ego-centrism or hyper-individualism… if we do not re-claim the world for Christ, nor strive to live and proclaim the Gospel of Life… Our Lord tells us that the Kingdom which has been entrusted to us will be taken away from us. And then, where will we be with our self-determinism, failing to have acceded to the Will of God in the realm of Sanctity of Life?

God entrusts the Faith to every generation. The cultivation of the Faith in our time will have as a priority to proclaim and protect the sanctity of all human life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.

So, a few challenging questions emerge: In our inherited time in salvation history:
+ Shall we be complacent with the Faith entrusted to us?
+ Shall we be complicit with, and accommodate our moral values to, cultural thinking which adamantly denies the sanctity of life, or the dignity of the unborn?
+Or shall we be faithful workers in the Vineyard of the Lord?