Homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

What More Could He Have Done?

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Picture a hillside at dawn. A man walks up the slope carrying a shovel and a bag of cuttings. He has chosen the best ground, fertile and facing the sun. For weeks he has dug the soil, hauled away the stones, built a wall to keep out wild animals, and raised a watchtower. Now he kneels and plants the finest vines he can find. Then he waits, season after season, for the grapes.

That is the picture Isaiah paints in our first reading. He calls it a love song: "Let me now sing of my friend, my friend's song concerning his vineyard." Before it is a story about judgment, it is a story about love. Every detail shows a God who holds nothing back. Then the song takes a painful turn. When harvest comes, the vineyard yields only wild grapes, sour and useless. And God asks a question that should stop us in our tracks: "What more could be done for my vineyard that I did not do?"

Isaiah tells us plainly who the vineyard is: "The vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel." Then comes a play on words that is lost in translation. God looked for mishpat, justice, and found mispach, bloodshed. He looked for tsedaqah, righteousness, and heard tse'aqah, an outcry. The fruit looked almost right from a distance. It sounded almost right. But up close it was the opposite of what God desired.

In today's Gospel, Jesus takes up this same song and adds a new verse. A landowner plants a vineyard, builds the wall, the press, and the tower, and leases it to tenants. At harvest time he sends servants to collect his share. The tenants beat one, kill another, stone a third. Finally he sends his son, thinking, "They will respect my son." But the tenants say, "This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance." They throw him out of the vineyard and kill him.

Jesus is speaking to the chief priests and elders in Jerusalem, only days before his own Passion. The servants are the prophets. The son is Jesus himself. He is telling his listeners, with heartbreaking clarity, what they are about to do to him, and he tells them outside the city walls, just as the son was cast out of the vineyard.

Notice where the tenants went wrong. Their problem was not laziness. They probably worked hard. Their problem was that they forgot whose vineyard it was. They began to think of it as theirs. The owner's messengers became intruders. The owner's son became a rival. And once they decided the vineyard belonged to them, violence followed.

Dear friends, this parable is not only about the leaders of Jesus' day. The Church has always read it as a word addressed to us. The Catechism, speaking of the Church, says that she "has been planted by the heavenly cultivator," and then adds, "Yet the true vine is Christ, who gives life and fruitfulness to the branches." We are the vineyard now. Our parish, our families, our own souls: all of it has been planted, protected, and tended by God.

So the question comes to each of us. Whose vineyard is my life? We can slip into the tenants' mistake without ever noticing. My time is mine. My money is mine. My body, my career, my plans are mine. Then when God sends his messengers, a word from Scripture, a nudge of conscience, a person in need, the teaching of the Church, we treat them as interruptions. We push them away. Not with stones, perhaps, but with busyness, with excuses, with a quiet "not now."

Pope Benedict XVI, preaching on this very Gospel, observed that the tenants' dream was to become owners themselves, and that this is the temptation of every age: to push God out so that we can be masters of our own lives. He also reminded us that this parable is not the last word of despair. God does not abandon his vineyard.

And here is the good news hidden in this hard Gospel. Jesus ends not with the death of the son but with a psalm: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes." The Son thrown out of the vineyard does not stay dead. God takes the very rejection of his Son and makes it the foundation of something new. The cross becomes the cornerstone. Our sin, however great, is not stronger than God's love.

Saint Irenaeus, one of the earliest Fathers of the Church, saw in this parable the patience of God, who kept sending messenger after messenger across the centuries, and finally sent his own Son, so that the vineyard might at last bear fruit. God's persistence is the real headline. He never stops coming for the harvest because he never stops hoping in us.

So what fruit is God looking for? Saint Paul answers in our second reading. He writes to the Philippians from prison, and yet his letter is full of joy: "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." That is the good fruit: lives shaped by truth, justice, purity, and kindness.

But notice how Paul says this fruit grows. Not by anxious striving. He begins, "Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus."

That word "guard" is a military word. It means a sentry keeping watch. Remember the watchtower in the vineyard? God himself stands guard over the hearts of those who pray. When we stop acting like owners and start living as grateful tenants, handing our worries back to the One to whom everything belongs, something changes. The anxiety that comes from trying to control everything gives way to peace. And out of that peace, good fruit begins to grow.

Brothers and sisters, many of us carry heavy burdens this morning: worry about our children, our health, our finances, the state of our world. Paul does not tell us to pretend those things away. He tells us to bring them to God with thanksgiving, as people who know the vineyard is his and that he cares for it more than we ever could.

Here is a simple next step for this week. Each morning, before you check your phone, offer your day back to God with a short prayer: "Lord, this day is yours. This family is yours. This work is yours. Help me bear fruit for you." Then, when anxiety rises during the day, name one thing to thank God for and hand the worry back to him. Try it for seven days. See whether his peace begins to stand guard over your heart.

And now we turn to the altar, where this whole parable reaches its fulfillment. The vineyard's finest fruit is brought forward: wine, "fruit of the vine and work of human hands." Through the power of the Holy Spirit, it becomes the Blood of the Son, the very Son who was cast out and killed, now risen and given to us. The Father's answer to the tenants' violence is not revenge but the gift of his Son, again and again, on this altar.

What more could God have done for his vineyard? He has given us everything, even his own Son. Let us receive him today with grateful hearts, and go forth to bear the fruit he has waited for so patiently and loved so deeply. Amen.