HOMILY FOR THE 27TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (YEAR A)
By: Father Anthony O. Ezeaputa, MA
THEME: By Hook or By Crook!
The chief priests and elders of the people reject God’s invitation to repentance that God extends to them. They believe that Israel is theirs to manage as they see fit and would go to any length to silence anyone who challenges them to repentance. It is against this backdrop that Jesus compares them in today’s gospel (Matthew 21:33–43) to covetous and traitorous tenants.
Two factors that count against the chief priests and elders are their failure to listen to John the Baptist and Jesus Christ and their refusal to change their religious worldview. These two factors should serve as a wake-up call for us to purify our religious, moral, and social values.
Consider the following: Are you imprisoned by your religion or religious convictions? Do you intimidate, argue, belittle, and threaten those who disagree with your sociopolitical viewpoints? How are you different from the chief priests and elders of the people? They were prisoners of their religious and traditional beliefs, and they were willing to murder to defend them.
The first takeaway today is the need to evaluate the lens through which we experience the world on a regular basis. “In a higher world, it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often,” according to St. John Henry Newman. Periodic evaluation of our worldview is a prerequisite for growth and positive change.
In today’s parable, a landowner planted a vineyard, leased it to tenants, and went abroad. When harvest time arrived, he sent three servants and later his son to his tenants to collect his produce, but his covetous tenants seized, beat, stoned, and killed them.
A parable is like an argument in that it makes listeners think and respond to what they hear. This is precisely what Jesus does by asking the chief priests and elders what the owner of the vineyard will do to those tenants when he comes (Matthew 21:40).
The chief priests and elders answer that he will lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times. Jesus then makes the point in his parable that the kingdom of God will be taken from the chief priests and elders and given to a people who will produce its fruit.
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We can all be guilty of excessive desire for material things, even other people’s possessions. The tenants in today’s parable want their landowner’s productive vineyard either by hook or by crook, and it leads them to a multitude of sins.
The second takeaway today is self-control and the regulation of our desires. Covetousness—a strong desire to possess something, especially something that belongs to another person—breeds a thousand other sins and crimes, including murder, robbery, cheating, adultery (cf. 2 Samuel 11; 1 Kings 21:1–16), etc. (Catechism, 2535).
The ninth commandment forbids lusting and the carnal desire of another’s spouse; the tenth commandment forbids harming or even killing our neighbor to obtain their possessions. While the ninth promotes respect for the institution of marriage, the tenth champions buying and selling as a means of acquiring the items we desire.
Let’s make a commitment today to occasionally reevaluating our worldviews so that they don’t imprison us. Resolve to open wide the windows and doors of your hearts to God through his Son, Jesus Christ. As Saint John Paul II admonishes, “Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ.”
Let us also pray for contentment in God and contentment in what God has given us. It is when our contentment in God decreases that inordinate desires for possessions or other people’s possessions increase in us. And let us pray and work to become worthy, faithful, and fruitful stewards of his vineyard through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
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