Producing the Fruit of the Kingdom, 27th Sunday (A), October 8, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
October 8, 2023
Is 5:1-7, Ps 80, Phil 4:6-9, Mt 21:33-43

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• The powerful words Jesus says in today’s Gospel parable have both a very important historicalmeaning as well as a crucial actual For us to understand its present significance, though, we first need to grasp the immediate context in which Jesus was saying it as well as the theological background that Jesus’ original listeners would have taken for granted.
• Jesus proclaimed these words in the temple area of Jerusalem. He had already entered the gates of the city on Palm Sunday and had cleansed the temple area of the money changers and animal sellers who were exploiting and pilfering the poor who had come to sacrifice to God. He had cursed and dessicated a barren fig tree. That’s when the chief priests and elders of the people came to him to ask him by what authority he was doing what he was doing. Jesus knew that they had come in bad faith and so he told them in response that he would ask them one question, and if they answered his, he would answer theirs. “Where was John’s baptism from, … heavenly or human origin?,” he queried. It wasn’t a trick question or an academic one. John the Baptist’s work, we remember, was a work of conversion. If he were preaching and baptizing by heavenly origin, by divine mandate, then the chief priests and the elders, the scribes and the Pharisees, should have been converting just like the multitudes were. But those who were opposing Jesus, St. Matthew tells us, grasped that if they admitted that John came from God, then everyone would recognize that they were hypocrites for not getting baptized and changing their lives. If they said John’s baptism was from human origin, however, they grasped that the people would turn on them, because the people knew that John wasn’t acting on his own authority. So, with cowardly insincerity, they replied, “We do not know.” So Jesus told them that neither would he answer directly their question about the authority under which he was acting. Instead he gave them two parables: the one we had in last Sunday’s about the two sons, one of whom initially refused to work in the vineyard but then went and the other who said he would but never did, pointing out that the prostitutes and tax collectors were converting at John’s word but that the chief priests and the elders, despite mouthing their amens to God, did not. The second parable is what Jesus gives us today in the Parable of the Vineyard and how the tenant farmers or steward respond to the gift of the vineyard, of the Vine Grower, of the servants — like John the Baptist — and of the Son. It’s a parable that in the immediate context is meant by Jesus to provoke conversion.
• Now to the theological background. With the image of the vineyard, Jesus was summarizing God’s relations with the Jewish people. As God himself said through the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his cherished plant.” In the largest sense, the vineyard is ultimately all of God’s people, all of the children he has created, and we are meant to work and cultivate that vineyard. We know that at the beginning of time, God made everything “good” by God and entrusted the “vineyard” of the whole world to the human person, so that in developing these gifts we might participate in God’s work of creation and thereby also share in our own development. God gave us the command to “fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen 1:28). But God gave the house of Israel more than just joint stewardship over the great natural endowment of the earth, of creatures, and of human beings. He also made them stewards of a greater gift, the Covenant he had established with the human race. Through Isaiah, he tells us how much personal care he took in preparing the vineyard of Israel. He “dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” God himself, in other words, did all of the hard work building the “infrastructure” of the vineyard, clearing it so that it could bear fruit, putting a watchtower in it to guard for animals coming to eat the fruit, establishing a wine press so that fruit can immediately produce joy. He gave the “house of Israel” the relatively light task of maintaining that vineyard and bearing fruit from that Covenant.
• But what happened? God tells us through Isaiah that “he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It had the appearance of growth, the outward show of fruit, but the fruit was worth nothing. “Fruit” is always to be interpreted as acts of love, justice, goodness, and faith. This is not what God found. “He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!,” he tellsus through Isaiah. So the owner of the vineyard — God the Father, as Jesus tells us in the parable — mercifully sent his servants the prophets to them to remind them of the need to produce good fruit from all of the gifts entrusted to them and to teach them by word and example how to do so. But their reaction was to kill the messengers; Jesus tells us, “the tenants seized the servants and one they beat, another they killed and a third they stoned.” So God the Father sent others, “more than the first, but they treated them in the same way.” This is precisely what happened to God’s prophets; almost all of them were killed. Jesus, in fact, would later lament over the holy city, Jerusalem, because it was the site of the execution of so many prophets: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Mt 23:37).
• Jesus tells us that after all of those unjust deaths his Father the landowner sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” The Father anticipated that they would treat the son with the respect with which they would treat him. But rather than respond with gratitude for yet one more chance, they said to themselves, “‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.” When Jesus said those words, he was telling them precisely what was occurring in their hearts at that moment and prophesying what would happen within a fortnight. That sentiment, “Come, let us kill him” would soon reverberate throughout Pontius Pilate’s Courtyard as they would screech, “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!” (Mt 27:22-23).
• What was essentially going on within their hearts was that they did not want to be tenants or stewards of the vineyard, but owners. They saw the son not as a son but as the heir to the material inheritance they greedily wanted. Understood spiritually, they did not want to have a God over them; they wanted to be gods themselves. Like power-hungry princes who kill any other claimants to the throne, they killed anyone who tried to teach them otherwise. The great English writer C.S. Lewis once said that the devil always tried to get us to think we’re owners. He wants us to say, like a whining little baby on its most selfish days, “Mine!”: “It’s my life, it’s my work, it’s my money, it’s my family, it’s my future, it’s my Sunday — Mine! Mine! Mine!”
• Jesus tells his Jewish listeners at the end of today’s parable that the vineyard — the kingdom of God — “will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” That’s what Jesus did in the founding his Church. He passed along the stewardship of creation and especially God’s covenant with the human race to the Church he had founded. In so doing, he showed that he trusts us enough to confide to us his own mission for the salvation of the world. Like the landowner in the parable, he also shows how patient he is with us; he has constantly sent us saints to show us how best to take advantage of this incredible gift. But, like with the Jews before us, God is calling us to bear fruit in acts of self-giving love, justice, generosity, and faith. He wants us to bear the fruit of the kingdom. Bearing fruit requires work, as anyone who has ever tended vines know. They require a lot of patient pruning to cut off branches that waste the sap so that good branches can grow and produce plump, juicy grapes. Isaiah in the first reading and Jesus in the Gospel describe how the majority of Jews didn’t want to do that patient, constant work of the vineyard and so rather than produce good fruit the people just produced wild, sour, good-for-nothing small grapes, because all of the essential energy was being wasted rather than focused on the fruit God intends. God wants us today to ask ourselves what type of fruit have we been bearing from the gift of our life, of grace, of the Covenant, of the Sacarments and all the other blessings with which God has endowed us. For the last several weeks in the readings he has wanted us to examine whether we have in fact been rolling up our sleeves to work hard in his vineyard, no matter if we were called early in the morning or just recently. If the harvest master were to come right now, what produce would we be able to present to him? “Wild grapes” or bushels of acts of Christ-like love?
• There are two steps to bearing the type of fruit God desires. St. Paul describes them in today’s second reading. He tells the Philippians and us first to think about what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing to God, commendable and praiseworthy. Then he tells us to do these things, just as we have learned and received and witnessed St. Paul do before us. Right thoughts and right deeds. Thinking and doing requires, as he says, first prayer. He tells us not to have anxiety, but in everything, by prayer and petition, to make our requests known to God. Then it requires the fruit of that prayer, which is to “keep on doing what [we] have learned and received and heart and seen” in Christ and in figures like St. Paul and the saints who proclaim the Gospel by action.
• We have two contexts that we can use today as we enter into the gift of the Liturgy of the Word and ponder our own conversion and fruitfulness. The first is to the Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church that is meeting in the Vatican throughout the month of October to try to catalyze the renewal of the Church in communion, participation and mission. It is meant to be an opportunity for us to focus on our inheritance and to look at the fruit we’re bearing in terms of faith, hope and charity. In many parts of the world, the Church is producing mostly wild grapes and we have to be honest about it. The Church needs revitalization. At the same time, we can’t mistake wild grapes for good ones. There are some elements in the Church, like we’ve seen sadly in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, that are trying to use synodal processes to produce the wild grapes of the world rather than the fruit of faith. Instead of accepting Scripture and Tradition as faithful stewards, some think that they’re owners of the deposit of faith and can change it to support whatever they deem the Church should advance, like making the Church a democracy, treating sexual sins as quasi-sacraments that deserve the Church’s blessing, rejecting Jesus’ and the Church’s practice of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, and other important aspects of faith and morals. We pray that the Synod, which means the journey together of the Church, will strengthen us all with gratitude to receive fully the Son, his message and his work, and build our life on him as our cornerstone, and not reject or manipulate his teachings as if that somehow is what the Holy Spirit would ever permit.
• The second context is a special anniversary. 25 years ago today, with 30 classmates from the North American College, I was ordained a transitional deacon by Cardinal Edmund Szoka at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. The role of the deacon is to imitate Christ the Deacon, the Greek work for servant, who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. The deacon is meant to help the whole Church bear fruit in charity. That’s why every bishop and every priest is first ordained a deacon, so that they may recognize every action is meant to be ordered toward bearing this fruit as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. I ask you to pray for my classmates and me that we will be faithful stewards and, united with Christ, produce fruit that lasts into eternity.
• Today God wants to strengthen us to help him in a harvest of holiness. The altar is where Jesus wants to collect the fruit of the kingdom. This is where we obtain the inheritance of the Son, not by killing him as those in the parable thought, but by receiving him with love and joining him in self-giving. It’s no surprise that Jesus, in summarizing all of salvation history, did so in the form of the image of a vineyard. He knew from all eternity that he would one day take the “fruit of the vine” and turn it into his own blood, which was the price of our salvation. In the raw material for the Eucharist, Jesus showed how he wanted to involve our efforts. He chose to use not grain and grapes, but bread and wine, which not only the “fruit of the earth” and “of the vine” but “the work of human hands.” It is here that we bring our patient, hard work and where God prunes us. In that vineyard that is the world, the Father is the vine grower, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches (Jn 15:1-7). If we remain in Him and He in us, then Jesus promises that we will bear fruit in acts of love that will last forever. The Eucharist is the means by which we remain in Christ and he in us. As we prepare to receive Him now, we thank the Father for sending us His Son confident that we will not only “respect” him, but love and embrace him, and with Him, produce a harvest that will know no end!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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