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MONDAY OF HOLY WEEK, Year A: March 17 2008

The Wicked Tenants

Jesus is in Jerusalem — in the Temple. The brief moment of triumph which we call Palm Sunday has passed and it is now the following day. Jesus is aware that despite yesterday's enthusiastic 'Hosannas' the hostility of the ecclesiastical authorities is mounting, and that the final clash, the final showdown, between Himself and them is inevitable and imminent. That is the context in which He tells the story of the Vineyard and the Wicked Tenants.

The image of Israel as the Vine, tended and cherished and nurtured by GOD was a dominant one in the Jewish imagination. 'You have brought a vine out of Egypt,' the Psalmist sang, 'you prepared the ground for it: it took root and filled the land'. 'Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit': so the prophet Hosea celebrated the nation's identity. This was one of the ways in which the Jews thought of themselves — GOD's choice and fruitful vine. And across the portico of the Temple in Jerusalem they placed a vine branch made of gold to remind them of their identity and vocation and of GOD's care for them as His chosen and favoured people.

' The prophet Isaiah depicts GOD as a lover, caring for His vineyard, His People, looking after them with tenderness and delight. A pleasant vineyard ... 'I the Lord am its keeper; every moment I water it. Lest anyone harm it, I guard it night and day.'

So GOD cares for His people tenderly and lovingly: pouring upon them the rich abundance of His grace and blessing. But the love affair is not an easy one. The prophets constantly remind the people that although GOD unfailingly offers them His love and care, they for their part reject Him again and again. 'What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done it?' 'When I would gather them, says the Lord, there are no grapes on the vine [...] even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them.' 'I have persistently sent my servants the prophets to them, day after day, yet they did not listen or incline their ear.'

Those listening to Jesus as He told His story would have probably realised that He was talking about the history of the nation, the Chosen People — how throughout the centuries GOD had sent prophets to them to call them back to Himself and to their first love, but they had been rejected and persecuted by those to whom they had been sent.

The prophets had testified to GOD's yearning love for Israel, aching over them, longing for their response. But it had all been in vain: 'the more I called them, the more they went from me'.

But, says Jesus, the divine patience is even yet not exhausted: the Owner of the Vineyard will make one final appeal. 'I will send my beloved Son: it may be that they will respect Him'. But He too — like those who have preceded Him — is rejected:'they cast Him out of the Vineyard and killed Him'.

What did those listening to Jesus make of that final twist of the story? All the other details were obvious enough — the Vineyard, the patient and persistent Owner, the rejected messengers. But what about this last figure in the drama? And what about the one telling the story: this Jesus of Nazareth? Was he part of the story? Was he a prophet, like all those others who down the centuries of Israel's history had appeared on the scene? Or might he be GOD's final appeal, GOD making one final attempt to plead with His people? Might he be this Son, the 'beloved Son', and would he be rejected, 'cast out [...] and killed'?

We can only guess what the ordinary people listening to Jesus might have made of the story. But we do know what the ecclesiastical authorities made of it — the 'scribes and the chief priests'. The Evangelist recording the event tells us that 'they perceived that He had told this parable against them and they wanted to lay hands on Him at that very hour'.

The parable also tells us what was in the mind of Jesus as He recounts the story. In making the sending of the 'beloved Son' and His death the climax of the drama, Jesus is signalling His awareness that His destiny is closing in on Him and that danger threatens. He is also indicating that He is completely and profoundly at one with GOD's purposes for His people — that He is the 'beloved Son' sent by the Father to act on His behalf.

Our Lord's story of the Vineyard and the Wicked Tenants, and the circumstances in which he tells it, raises for us the question of what is the Vineyard for which we have responsibility, and how does GOD speak to us and claim from us what He has entrusted to us? Who are His messengers?

For He is not a GOD who is aloof, remote, distant and silent. Rather, He is a GOD who comes to us where we are, addresses us, initiates the conversation, and invites our response.

And how does He do that? How does He approach us and speak to us? Who are His messengers, His prophets?

The fact is that GOD can only address us from the only reality which each one of us has — and the only reality we have is our life, with all its complex web of relationships and responsibilities, with all its circumstances, its ups and its downs, its good times and its bad times. There is nowhere else from which He can speak to us; and there is nowhere else, no other place, in which we can hear and receive His word. GOD does not speak to us from some special and rarefied level of reality; He does not as a rule go in for deafeningly trumpeted religious extravaganza. It is from my world as it is now — it is from myself as I am now — that GOD enters into conversation with me.

What this means is that we have to be alert to His presence which is waiting all the time to break in on us — usually in unexpected and surprising ways, and yet almost always in what is ordinary, familiar and close at hand.

And that is the Vineyard — the situation, the circumstances, in which each one of us lives his or her life. A Vineyard is a place of cultivation, a place of growth and development. And that is how it is with every human being. Each one of us has been given a life to live, and we are all bound up together with one another. And no doubt we try to do our best and make the most of what has been given to us.

Perhaps for some of us things haven't worked out quite as we had hoped for, and we carry the disappointments and hurts of the years. Or we may feel that our achievements are modest, and that the promise of our early years has not been fulfilled, and that there are many failures and defeats: that we have not loved wisely or well.

But no matter what we may be feeling about ourselves GOD is there with us, speaking to us, inviting us to receive something, to endure something, to learn something, to enjoy something.

And the other point which the parable is making is that although GOD trusts us so much that He gives us the responsibility for managing the Vineyard of our lives, in the end the Vineyard is not ours to claim for ourselves as of right. The Vineyard belongs to Him — to the One who speaks to us in all that befalls us, the One who sends His messengers in the events and circumstances of life to encourage us and challenge us and lead us into His truth, seeking to draw us to Himself.

We are the tenants of the Vineyard — the tenants of our lives — not the Proprietor; we are the stewards, not the Owner.

So then, as with all of Our Lord's parables this one, the parable of the Vineyard and the Wicked Tenants, works on many levels.

Firstly it is an exposition of Jesus's understanding of Israel's relationship with GOD throughout the centuries — a relationship characterised by obstinate resistance to the claims of GOD upon our life and love.

Jesus then goes on to speak obliquely of Himself as the final point — the turning point — in that history of stubborn rejection — the 'beloved Son' who like those who have preceded Him will be brutally cast aside and killed, thereby bringing the Vineyard to an end.

And finally the parable reminds us that we are to be open and receptive to the GOD who comes and speaks to us in all that befalls us — in the ordinary and commonplace events and circumstances of our life.

In other words, as well as being a parable which points towards the Passion, it is also a parable about what is entailed in being a human being: a tenant in the Vineyard of the life which GOD has leased out and entrusted to us, and in which He comes to us and looks for the response of our welcome and the hospitality of our love, for which we need the gift of ears and hearts that listen.