Having the Same Mind In Us That Was In Christ Jesus, Twenty-Sixth Sunday (A), October 1, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
October 1, 2023
Ezek 18:25-28, Ps 25, Phil 2:1-11, Mt 21:28-32

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In last Sunday’s first reading, God said to us through the prophet Isaiah, “My ways are not your ways.” In today’s first reading, God tells us what his ways are relative to how we use our freedom. “When the just man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall die for … the iniquity that he has committed. [But] when the wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is lawful and right, he shall save his life.” To man’s complaint that “the way of the Lord is unfair,” God responds by saying, “Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” God, who is merciful and just, is merciful to those who convert, and just to those voluntarily who turn away from his mercy and love. God tells us that anything less than that would be unjust, rewarding people for doing evil or failing to be loving to those who change their ways for the better. But his will is obviously for us to turn to him always, receive his merciful love, and live.
• This is the context for us to understand the parable Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel about the two sons, which could just as easily be called the parable of the two priests, religious sisters, parishioners, college students, or daughters. The same lessons Jesus out of love was trying to communicate in the temple of Jerusalem to the chief priests and elders of the people he is here in this sanctuary trying to communicate to us.
• In the parable Jesus employs the image of working in his Father’s vineyard to encapsulate human life. There are two essential aspects of our life. The first is to be attached to Jesus Christ, the Vine, and to his Father, the vine grower (Jn 15:1-8). The second is to be a worker in his vineyard, to bear fruit. Jesus tells us during the Last Supper that if we remain in him and he in us like branches on the vine, then we will bear fruit and that our fruit will last. He also tells us that he never ceases to call us to this relationship with him and this work with him in the Father’s vineyard. Last Sunday, he gave us the beautiful image of going out to hire laborers for the vineyard at dawn, nine, noon, three and five, saying that if we responded to his invitation, went into the vineyard and worked hard, he generously would give us all the same lifetime wage.
• We see God’s generous mercy on display in the image of the first of his sons, who reminds us, in a way, of the first of two sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the one who initially treats his Father as dead and refuses to live in his house, but who eventually comes back repentant and receives the Father’s love. Today, Jesus describes that the first son initially refused when his father said, “Son, go out and work in the vineyard today,” but afterward changed his mind and went to work. After the parable, Jesus implies that this is the proper way to understand those prostitutes and tax collectors and other types of sinners, who even though for lengthy periods of time they said “no!” to the sixth, seventh and other commandments, eventually converted and were now living and working in the Lord’s vineyard, building up and entering into his kingdom.
• The second son responds to his father’s command saying respectfully, “I will go sir,” but never acts on that promise. Jesus indicates that this applies to precisely those he was addressing, the scribes and the Pharisees, who so many times very publicly prayed in the temple and synagogue chanting loud “amens!” to God, but who were not following through on their covenantal commitments. The Pharisees, scribes and elders, who with their lips were saying yes to the Father’s will but with their actions were not, ended up showing where this hypocrisy can lead: they ended up framing Jesus and having him tortured, crucified and killed.
• It’s obvious that the Lord wants all of us today to reflect not only on what we say to God, but especially on how we follow through on our commitments. We’re here this morning because we are people who have said “yes” to God many times over the course of our life. On the day of our baptism, either we or our parents and godparents on our behalf spoke up and made our baptismal promises, committing ourselves to burn with and walk in Christ’s light, to keep our baptismal garments clean, and to live up to our dignity as God’s adopted children. At our Confirmation, we stood up and renewed those baptismal promises to reject Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and to believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body and life everlasting; we also made the commitment at our Confirmation to go to work in the Lord’s vineyard, with tongues, hearts and hands of fire, to proclaim and live the Gospel with ardor. At my ordination and at your first and final professions, we made commitments to conform ourselves to Christ priest, prophet and king or poor, chaste, and obedient. The Lord wants us to ask ourselves today whether we’ve been following through on those commitments and been getting down to work in his vineyard. If we have not been following through, if we’ve been saying “no” to the Lord with our bodies despite the “yes-es” of our lips, then the Lord wants to help us to learn from the example of the first Son, to give us the grace of conversion, to grant us the help he knows we need to remain faithful and courageous, and then to have us head out to do the Father’s will. Jesus was clear with us about the importance of deeds over words when he said during the Sermon on the Mount, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt 7:21).
• In 2011, Pope Benedict went to Germany and said that what Jesus was saying in today’s Gospel points to one of the “fundamental themes of [his] prophetic preaching.” “The message of the parable is clear: it is not words that matter, but deeds, deeds of conversion and faith. Jesus directs this message to the chief priests and elders of the people, that is, to the experts of religion for the people of Israel. At first they say ‘yes’ to God’s will, but their piety becomes routine and God no longer matters to them. For this reason they find the message of John the Baptist and the message of Jesus disturbing. The Lord concludes his parable with harsh words: ‘Truly, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the harlots believed him, and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him’” (Mt 21:32). The Pope then went on to “update” this image into more modern terms: “Translated into the language of our time, this statement might sound something like this: agnostics, who are constantly exercised by the question of God, those who long for a pure heart but suffer on account of our sin, are closer to the Kingdom of God than believers whose life of faith is ‘routine’ and who regard the Church merely as an institution, without letting their hearts be touched by faith. The words of Jesus should make us all pause, in fact they should disturb us.”
• He was saying that for many sons and daughters of God, our “yes” in faith has become routine. We say it so naturally and readily that we have ceased to understand the meaning of what we’re saying and to act on that commitment. Every week we say “Amen!” when the priest says, “The Body of Christ,” but do we really structure our lives in a way consistent with this affirmation? We say, “Thanks be to God!” when the Word of God is proclaimed at Mass, but do we show that gratitude for this incredible gift by making time each day meditate on what God is saying to us and apply it to our life? We affirm, “I believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit” but do we still believe when God asks us to do something challenging, like hard work in his vineyard, or does our faith weaken when God asks of us something we don’t want to do? We confess our faith in the “one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church,” but do we look at the Church as just one other organization to which we belong or rather as the Bride and Body of Christ that he set up for our salvation and for the salvation of our family members, friends, enemies and the whole world?
• It’s clear that God is seeking to move us today to let our hearts be touched by faith, to get beyond words, and make our life an “Amen!,” a “let it be done to me according to your word!,” a “thy will be done!” To learn how to do this we need to grasp that there’s a third son whose example is set before us today in this Gospel scene, someone who both says “yes” and then does what he is asked. It’s the Son who told us the parable: Jesus himself, who is here among us today. As we read in the letter to the Hebrews, upon entering into the world, Jesus said to his Father, “Here I am, Lord, I have come to do your will” (Heb 10:7-9). Jesus never had to change his mind, as the first son did in the parable, because in his mind he was always seeking what the Father wanted. The more we think with the mind of Christ, and live according to that mentality with the help of God’s grace, the more we will please the Father. This is what St. Paul calls us to do in today’s second reading, when he exhorts us, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Christ sought to do the Father’s will so much that he “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.” In response to Jesus’ question in the Gospel, “Which … did the will of his father?,” we’re called to respond that Jesus did the will of the Father! And today Jesus calls us to follow him in doing the Father’s will with him. He calls us to say “yes” to the Father and to act on that “yes.” To convert and follow through. To repent and believe. To think as God thinks, not as human beings do.
• One of the great teachers in how to have in us the mind of Christ Jesus is Our Lady and every October, dedicated to her under the title of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, is an opportunity to enter into Mary’s school of saying yes and faithfully following through on that yes. Like the blessed Fruit of her womb, the Blessed Mother always sought to say “fiat” to God and to let her whole life develop in fidelity to God’s will. Throughout this month, we’re invited by the Church to ponder in the joyful, luminous, sorrowful and glorious moments of their lives both Jesus’ and Mary’s perpetual yeses to God. Praying the Rosary well helps us to echo Jesus’ and Mary’s fidelity in putting God’s word and will into practice. As St. John Paul II powerfully commented in his 2002 exhortation on the Rosary, “How could one possibly contemplate the mystery of the Child of Bethlehem, in the joyful mysteries, without experiencing the desire to welcome, defend and promote life, and to shoulder the burdens of suffering children all over the world? How could one possibly follow in the footsteps of Christ the Revealer, in the mysteries of light, without resolving to bear witness to his ‘Beatitudes’ in daily life? How could one contemplate Christ carrying the Cross and Christ Crucified, without feeling the need to act as a ‘Simon of Cyrene’ for our brothers and sisters weighed down by grief or crushed by despair? Finally, how could one possibly gaze upon the glory of the Risen Christ or of Mary Queen of Heaven, without yearning to make this world more beautiful, more just, more closely conformed to God’s plan? … Far from offering an escape from the problems of the world, the Rosary obliges us to see them with responsible and generous eyes, and obtains for us the strength to face them with the certainty of God’s help and the firm intention of bearing witness in every situation to love,” to the truth, and ultimately to God. In helping us to focus on Mary and Jesus, the Rosary strengthens us to imitate them in our faithful yes to God. It’s a school of the new and eternal covenant. This month is an opportunity for us to have in us the same cheerful and loving trust, the same total obedient surrender as was in Christ Jesus and in his Mother Mary.
• There’s a particular intention we can be praying for throughout this month. It’s that the Church as a whole will have the mind that is in Christ Jesus, that’s in Mary. From October 4-29, the Synod on Synodality will be taking place in the Vatican. It’s supposed to be an opportunity for the whole Church to listen to and discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to the Church and to journey together — that’s what syn-‘odos means in Greek — in acting on what God indicates, but there are some in the Church, like we’ve sadly seen in the German synodal way, who look toward the Synod as an opportunity to try to change what the Church believes God has revealed about the nature and structure of the Church, the Sacrament of Holy Orders, sexual morality, and human identity, not to mention important disciplines in the Church like priestly celibacy. There are some, in other words, who are fighting for the Catholic Church to become more and more like the Anglican Church in terms of ecclesiology, moral theology and practical daily living. In response to that challenge, this month is a time for the whole Church to huddle around the Blessed Virgin Mary like the early Church did in the Upper Room and to pray that all of us who publicly say our “yes” to God each Sunday may follow through on that “yes,” having in us the mind that was in Christ Jesus, the obedient heart that was within Mary, and not the mind and heart that characterizes the spirit of the world.
• This is something we learn to do as we ponder the fifth Luminous mystery and put it into action at the altar. The Eucharist, which we are so mind-blowingly privileged to receive, helps us to conform our whole life to God’s will. Jesus had prayed in Gethsemane that the Father would take the chalice from him, but then added three times, “But not my will, but thine be done!” (Lk 22:42). That chalice was the cup of his suffering, filled with his own blood. When Jesus told us during the Last Supper to “do this in memory of me,” he was not merely telling us to convene as we do today to celebrate this greatest event of all. Jesus was telling us to make our lives truly Eucharistic and, following his example, become obedient even to our own death, saying to God and to others, “This is my body, this is my blood, this is everything I am and have, this is my will, given for you.” May this third Son, this faithful Son whom we will receive in minutes, help us not merely to say, “Amen!,” but to follow through on the mission he out of love has entrusted to each of us and all of us, so that, not merely by our lips but by our life, we might help each other to become living commentaries of the words “Thy will be done!,” as we respond to God’s words, “Son, Daughter, go and work in the vineyard today.” God bless you.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Have in you the same attitude
that is also in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

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