Gospel Commentary MT 21:33-43
Allow me to propose three words: patience, pain and praise, and a
few questions for our reflection on today’s readings.
Patience
I went to confession last Saturday. God’s patience with me is
extraordinary. Over and over, down through the years, our Heavenly Father has
extended His compassionate mercy to me. While I am able to rejoice greatly in a
measure of growth in prayer and virtue over time, I still bring many of the
same struggles and sins to confession … and God is faithful to His promise of
mercy.
Jesus recounts a parable for us in the Gospel today that
highlights God’s tremendous patience. The parable is about a landowner who goes
to great measures to carefully prepare a vineyard and then sends out his
servants at harvest time to gather his produce. The tenants treat the
landowner’s servants very poorly, beating one, stoning another and even killing
a third. The landowner then sends out other servants, more numerous than the
first ones, who are treated in the same fashion. The landowner, who represents
God, exercises remarkable patience with his tenants. One could argue that his
patience was unreasonable and certainly inappropriate from a business
perspective. The landowner is unexpectedly willing to keep giving a second
chance to his ungrateful, recalcitrant tenants.
Do I spend enough time rejoicing in the patience God has
exercised with me over the years?
Pain
I think that this was one of the most painful parables for Jesus
to tell. It is a little too close to home … it is His story. The Landowner is a
clear reference to God, the Father. The servants generally are understood to be
an allusion to the prophets and judges in the Old Testament, like Jeremiah and
Samson, whom the people stoned, beat and killed. God spent a long time, more
than 1,000 years, teaching and shepherding His flock, gradually revealing
Himself, His love and His truth to the Hebrew people. However, many of the
chosen people remained hard-hearted and selfish.
I get sick to my stomach imagining Jesus say these next few
lines. “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.”
Do you strive in your prayer life to better understand the
suffering Jesus endured for your sake?
Praise
In your everyday life, what do you find yourself praising? The
weather, a nice meal, certain sports victories (the Redskins are 2 and 1)? St.
Paul in the first reading today gives us a practical application of a challenge
he issued in Rom 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by
the renewal of your mind so that you may discern what is the will of God, what
is good and pleasing and perfect.” In this verse from Romans, Paul is teaching
us that the grace of Christ, the grace of conversion, demands the renewal of
our minds.
In today’s reading from his letter to the Philippians, Paul
challenges us to reflect critically about the things we think about, even the
things we praise. The Apostle to the Gentiles states, “Finally, brothers and
sisters, 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.”
God is inviting us through Paul the Apostle to spend more time
pondering and praising those things that are true, honorable, just, pure,
lovely and gracious. This does not mean that we should not praise the Lord for
nice weather, a meal cooked with skill and love, or even a new and improved
University of Virginia football team. Rather, it is an invitation to ponder
deep, lasting and moral beauty and goodness.
A young person recounted to me recently a very intense commitment
to live in a completely chaste relationship with his girlfriend. I spent some time
praising God for His grace in this young person’s life.
What will you praise God for tonight as you prepare for bed?
Fr. Peterson is director of mission
and development for the Youth Apostles.