The 27th Sunday of Year A

Isaiah 5:1-7

Psalm 79

St Paul to the Philippians 4:6-9

Matthew 21:33-43

      We are in the days before the Lord’s passion again in the Gospel reading from Matthew. Another parable about a vineyard and today’s first reading makes clear how easily his hearers would have recognized that Jesus in a parable about a vineyard is talking about them. Long before, Isaiah in our first reading had composed that seemingly happy song for harvest time that in the last stanza turns into an expression of God’s judgment on his people.
God as gardener, cultivator, is a recurring image in the bible. We see in Genesis and the account of creation a poetic description of how God has brought into being a world that he finds very good, human beings to whom he can entrust responsibility for it and of course the mystery of evil there within that beautiful garden. With our scientific knowledge of the countless ages through which God has brought the universe into being and how life has developed through time can only marvel all the more.
     Here in this corner of the universe as it were, God has brought into existence a creature with whom he is capable of being in relationship. In Human beings God can expect a return in praise and a free response to his invitation of friendship.
     In this, Keats’ ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ there is a beautiful atmosphere of ripeness and plenty in our gardens and countryside, gold, russets, the lights of berries and fruit. It can help us to have a greater sense of the harvest being ready. And in the end we are that harvest. In us God has brought into existence a creature, poor, earthenware vessels though we are, creatures capable being making a return to him in praise, creatures made in his image to reflect the beauty of his goodness, creatures capable or returning love for love to Love in the creation that he loves. And yet in and of ourselves we are the poor tenants who do not render a proper return.

        We can see further into this mystery of God creating us for relationship with him in the mystery of his Son made man; the incarnation. Jesus is man and yet he allows St Peter to recognize that he is God’s son. At his baptism and at his transfiguration the voice from heaven says ‘this is my beloved son’. Jesus tells us that no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the son chooses to reveal him. And we, he invites us to share in that relationship: The eternally begotten Son teaches us to pray ‘Our Father…’ and speaks of My Father and your Father.
          In Matthew’s Gospel it is only days away from the rejection and murder of the Son of the parable. But Jesus makes of his passion, sacramentalized in the mass, the means by which in communion with the Son the tenants can make a proper return; His Father can receive the share of the harvest that he has sent his son to collect.
When Jesus instituted the mass at the last supper, he took a ritual that had roots in the harvest offering of bread and wine and made it the sacrament of the offering of his body and blood and with him all creation.

        In this mass we can make a proper return to the owner of the vineyard. By accepting communion with Jesus we can offer with him our lives, our world and all of creation to the Father. Let us welcome anew in this mass that relationship of love into which God is calling us, that despite sin is all the more possible in Jesus, and is the destiny for which we have been called into existence.

D. Peter