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The Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

“The vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel” (Is 5:7). In this verse taken from today’s first reading, the prophet Isaiah depicts Israel as a vineyard that produced bad fruit: wild grapes. This is an image of Israel’s persistent sin, iniquity, wickedness, vice.

Building upon this imagery of Isaiah, Jesus presents us with the Parable of the Wicked Tenants in today’s Gospel (Mt 21:33-43), which follows the Parable of the Two Sons – the Gospel reading from last Sunday.

Jesus, in the tradition of the prophets, is speaking in parables. In the Old Testament, prophets would turn to parables when the audience hardened their hearts.

In today’s Gospel, the vineyard is Jerusalem. The hedge around it is the city walls. The tower is the Jerusalem Temple. The tenants are the leaders of Israel. The beaten and killed servants are the Old Testament prophets. The son, who was thrown out of the vineyard and killed, is Jesus, God’s Son who was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem on Calvary.

Today’s parable is a prophetic judgment against the leaders of Israel: “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew that he was speaking about them. And although they were attempting to arrest him, they feared the crowds, for they regarded him as a prophet” (vs. 45-46).

The final line of today’s Gospel goes like this: “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit” (v. 43).

If we, the vineyard of the LORD, the Catholic Church, are the people spoken of in today’s Gospel, then we should be asking ourselves if we produce the fruit our LORD speaks of: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:20).

In the second reading, St. Paul exhorts his audience in the Letter to the Philippians to “keep on doing what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me” (Phil. 4:9). In other words, we are to emulate the life of Saint Paul as a model of how to live and to live out the instruction handed on through him to us.

This is the reason the Church canonizes saints: to give us authentic role models by which we are to act by the gift of the new life received in baptism then restored or renewed in the other sacraments.

The saints are precisely those to whom the kingdom has been given. Filled with the life of the Spirit, they were remade in the likeness of Christ made the will of the Father their daily bread. Likewise, we who were made holy at our baptism are each called to this same holiness, which will culminate with the joy of heaven.