Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

October 8, 2017

          The last three years before coming here to St. Ambrose, in addition to my work as vocation director for the Diocese, I had the privilege and the joy of teaching senior theology at Assumption High School.  And I remember my first year when it came time for my student’s first test, I put together a test that I thought was pretty reasonable; easy even.  And there were some who did just fine, but not nearly as many as I had thought should.  And for some, it didn’t go well at all.  So, of course, the next test I readjusted, in hopes of raising up some of those who were obviously struggling.  It helped some, but there were still more than I would have expected who failed or nearly failed.  So, I started to review the day before every test, practically giving them the answers to every question on the test.  When it came time for the final, I would even bring donuts to try to incentivize being present for the review.  I gave study guides, I extended deadlines for homework, I dropped the lowest score on their weekly assignments in the final average, I offered to meet with students one on one, and I negotiated on project grades.  In short, I made every reasonable accommodation I could.  If anything, I felt like a pushover.  But after all of this, I still had students who always seemed to be on the cusp of failing.  Now, I don’t know everything that may have been going on in their lives (and I know there were some very difficult situations), but I really felt like I had done everything that I could.  In the words of the prophet Isaiah in our first reading: “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I had not done?  Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes?”  I’m guessing the teachers and professors in the chapel today know this feeling well.

          I suppose what I had not accounted for was the fact that despite all of my efforts to help my students succeed, they still had to show up, to study, and to apply themselves; they had to choose to take advantage of all that was at their disposal for their benefit.  And, there were always some who consistently refused.

          It occurs to me that, in a sense, this is how God must feel all the time.  Truly, what more could God have done for us that He has not done?  God has given us everything: life, health, family, friends, food, shelter, mind and body.  And that’s just on the natural level.  Think of all of the supernatural graces that God has given us, especially through the sacraments: a new birth in grace and the seven-fold gift of the Holy Spirit in Baptism; a strengthening and unsealing of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation; the gift of His very self in the Eucharist, our food for the journey; mercy for past sins and the grace to do better in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  God has held nothing back, not even His own Son. As Saint Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians: “What do you possess that you have not received?”  There is nothing lacking in God’s love for us.  We can never say to God, “If only you had loved us more…if only you had loved us better.”  What more could God do for us that He has not already done?

          Given this, shouldn’t the spiritual life, the Christian life, be a walk in the park?  Well, I guess we still have to show up and to apply ourselves.  We have to choose to take advantage of all that is at our disposal for our benefit.

          One of my favorite things to teach about with my high school students was the mystery of human freedom.  God could have made us very well programmed moral and spiritual robots who always obeyed the commandments, and gave God fitting honor and praise in our worship, in our words, and in our lives.  But God knew that this would be hollow.  And so, God gave us free will, even though He knew that we might well throw it back in His face (as we have done time and time again).  God did this because He knew that this was the necessary condition for authentic love.  A merely “programmed” loved or, worse yet, a forced love is no love at all.  God would rather give us everything and every reason we need to say “yes,” to say “I love you,” and to really mean it, without forcing our hand (even at the risk of having His love rejected), rather than to have us simply “go through the motions,” like a child forced to apologize to a wounded sibling.  In other words, in His love for us, God makes Himself vulnerable to us.  That is something worth pondering some more in your own prayer.

          And so, when Jesus starts off this parable using the same imagery as Isaiah in our first reading, He knows that His audience (“the chief priests and the elders of the people”) will get it.  They will immediately pick up on this language.  And without out even having to say it, Jesus knows they will fill in the rest.  They will remember where Isaiah says, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I had not done?  Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes?”  This is what will be in their minds as Jesus then goes on to explain how the landowner was rejected over and over again in his efforts to obtain the produce from his vineyard.  More than this, those he sent to collect were beaten, stoned and killed.  This is a not so thinly veiled reference, no doubt, to the prophets, and more recently to John the Baptist (in a sense, the last of the prophets).  Then, of course, the landowner sends his own son.  I wonder who this could be?  Even the son is rejected and killed, as in their twisted logic they think that somehow this will gain for them his inheritance.

          Why would the tenants to this?  Or more personally, why do we sometimes reject God?  I think it is that we forget that we are “tenants.”  We forget that we are stewards of the “vineyard” and of our lives, and we take ourselves instead for the landowner.  We forget that we are creatures and take ourselves for the Creator.  Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would become Pope Benedict XVI) in one of his homilies on creation and the fall put it this way:  “Here we can at once say that at the very heart of sin lies human beings’ denial of their creatureliness, inasmuch as they refuse to accept the standard and the limitations that are implicit in it.  They do not want to be creatures, do not want to be subject to a standard, do not want to be dependent.  They consider their dependence on God’s creative love to be an imposition from without.  But that is what slavery is and from slavery one must free oneself.  Thus human beings themselves want to be God.”  And so, ironically, God in His love makes Himself weak and vulnerable, but we, in our pride, make ourselves all-powerful, invincible.  God, in His love, becomes one of us, human, in the Incarnation, but we, in our pride, try to fashion ourselves into gods.

          What is the antidote to this pride?  How do we prevent ourselves from slipping into this way of thinking?  Perhaps part of the answer at least comes in our second reading, in Saint Paul’s exhortation to the Church of Philippi:  “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.  Keep on doing what you have learned and received and heard and seen…Then the God of peace will be with you.”

          My brothers and sisters, as we begin this new week, I pray that we will take advantage of everything that God has provided for our flourishing, educationally, morally, spiritually; that we would not reject God or fail to render to Him the produce that is properly His, but as “tenants” of this earth and stewards of these gifts to offer all that we have and all that we are upon the altar of authentic, self-giving love.