In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Dear Fathers, brothers and sisters: nd Spraznecom! Happy Feast!
This weekend we have had one of those holy weekends with the Feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God yesterday and today the celebration of the Afterfeast. The Feast of the Birth of the Mother of God stands as the gateway of the new ecclesiastical year, and is also the start of the story of our salvation through Jesus Christ. For it is only through the birth of the Mother of God that we would in turn have our Lord Jesus Christ who would become incarnate taking His very human nature from her alone. As the day after the feast, in the Church Calendar, it is traditional to commemorate the one or ones that made the present Feast possible. Thus today we particularly celebrate the Righteous parents of the Theotokos who we in fact commemorate at the dismissal of every Liturgy – Joachim and Anna. In today’s Resurrectional Gospel, we are also reminded of the holy and righteous servants that the Lord sent to Israel, which of course included Sts Joachim and Anna. Let us now turn to our Father St Jerome of Stridon to make sense of today’s Gospel.
Just as with last week, today our Lord gives us another parable to consider which was told against the Scribes and Pharisees who continued to harass and stalk him as He continued preaching and healing. Our Gospel reading starts –
“Hear another parable: There was a certain landowner who planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a winepress in it and built a tower. And he leased it to vinedressers and went into a far country.
In his commentary St Jerome identifies that the vineyard stands for Israel being a well-known metaphor in the Old Testament, such as Isaiah 5:7 which says that, ‘The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel’. The Landowner is the Lord. The Hedge, St Jerome suggests is either ‘the city’s walls or the help of angels’ and the Winepress refers – ‘to the altar’. Finally, the Tower refers directly to the Temple. The Lord thus gives everything that Israel needs for its spiritual and material health, and then gives it space to realise this in freedom. When the parable refers though to the landowner, leaving and going to ‘a far country’, this should not be interpreted, St Jerome clarifies –
by means of changing his residence, for where can God not be present, who fills all things … But He seems to go away from the vineyard so that He might leave the free choice for labouring to the vine-dressers.
As we have said so many times, our Lord always leaves us free to choose Him. He does not impose Himself. He always leaves our freedom in tact.
Now when vintage-time drew near, he sent his servants to the vinedressers, that they might receive its fruit. And the vinedressers took his servants, beat one, killed one, and stoned another.
As St Jerome says,
He had given the Law to them and had commanded them to labour in this vineyard that they might exhibit the fruit of the Law by their works.
However, despite the love and care with which our Lord treats His people, what do they choose to do with their freedom? Rather than giving hospitality and care to His servants, honouring them as the servants of the landowner, instead they our aggressive, violent and act shamefully towards them. St Jerome even identifies who the different servants are – the one who was beaten was the Prophet Jeremiah, the one who was killed may be referring to the Prophet Isaiah who was sawn in two. The one who was stoned such as Naboth who was stoned, incidentally and very appropriately for refusing to give up his ancestral vineyard to Ahab and his wicked wife Jezebel.
Again he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did likewise to them.
But despite the fact that all of these previous servants had been killed or beaten, the landowner does not give up or simply come to throw out the tenants immediately rather, as St Jerome shows, He shows immense patience and longsuffering. Moreover, He sent more servants and frequently, so that, ‘he might provoke the evil tenants to penitence’.
Then last of all he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
There is such poignancy in this line, ‘They will respect my son’. This of course is what should have happened when God became Incarnate and came to His own people. But sinful human nature led in an entirely opposite direction. Of course, God knew that Israel would treat not only His servants, the prophets and the righteous, shamefully and he was not, as St Jerome says, ‘ignorant of the outcome … God is said to be – or depicted – as uncertain, so that the free will in man may be preserved.
But when the vinedressers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’ So they took him and cast him out of the vineyard and killed him.
There is something so calculating and demonic about the way in which the vinedressers plot to kill the son of the landowner, but it directly parallels of course the envious and malevolent way in which the Scribes and Pharisees plotted against the Lord, as against an innocent Lamb. Interestingly, modern biblical archaeologists are agreed that the site of Golgotha was indeed outside the second wall of the city of Jerusalem, so that the Lord was crucified outside of the vineyard.
“Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vinedressers?”
They said to Him, “He will destroy those wicked men miserably, and lease his vineyard to other vinedressers who will render to him the fruits in their seasons.”
What is especially chilling about this question at the end of the parable is that it is asked by our Lord, who is also to be identified with the Son spoken of in the parable, and directed to the Scribes and Pharisees who at that very moment were also plotting his death and destruction. The Pharisees and Scribes thus themselves predict what would come to pass, that God would lease the vineyard, the Church to new tenants, to us the Gentiles from whom He would expect fruits in due season. As St Jerome says –
Now the vineyard is leased to us, but it is leased to us on the condition that we give back to God the fruit at the proper time.
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone which the builders rejected Has become the chief cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing, And it is marvelous in our eyes’?
Again, in this topsy-turvy world of the Kingdom of God, those who have been rejected, those who
have been persecuted are exalted and placed first.
Therefore, just as the vine dressers receive the vineyard, so these stonemasons have received the stone, which they either lay in the foundations, according to the architect Paul, or in the corner, that it may join together two walls, that is, two peoples’
Dear Fathers, brothers and sisters: as St Jerome reminds us, the vineyard has now been passed onto us to care and cultivate and to produce the works and fruits of the Holy Spirit. Just as in the time of the Old Testament Church as now in the Church of the New Covenant, there are people who are wicked tenants rather than righteous servants. We can think of course of Sts Joachim and Anna as outstanding and righteous servants of God who through a Godly life and marriage, full of struggle and faith in God, would produce that most beautiful of fruits our Lady the Theotokos. Likewise, we can also think of St Kieran of Clonmacnoise, that outstanding Irish ascetic whose short life on this earth, numbering the same years as the Saviour, would nevertheless lead him to become one of the great monastic founders whose monastery at Clonmacnoise would be home to thousands of monks. Will we be obedient to God and work hard in His vineyard, or will we be negligent, envious and disobedient like those wicked tenants?
Holy Joachim, Anna and Kieran pray to God for us!
Amen.