27th Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr A

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr A

08 October 2017

Homily

Today we continue to hear the image of a vineyard. This was a common metaphor for the People of Israel throughout Scripture. So, when Jesus uses it against the leadership which is rejecting him and his message, it would have stung.

To really appreciate the power of the image, we need to remember the importance of wine at the time in the Mediterranean world. Wine was not only something to be drunk with dinner. It was not only a sign of joy. People drank wine because it was safer than the water! The wine of the time was not – usually – as strong as today’s, so people had it with breakfast. A common breakfast was bread and a cup of wine.

Today, we need to be careful not to use passages such as this in an anti-Semitic way. Matthew’s community were very aware – and angry – of the rejection by their community of Jesus’ message, and indeed of themselves! You can read a passage such as this in a way that proclaims Christianity as replacing Judaism, which is certainly not what we teach now! It has been understood that way in the past, but the Church definitely rejects that interpretation now.

We need to appreciate in a wider context. In both Isaiah and Matthew we hear of all the work that has been put into the vineyard, into us – by God. In both cases the audience would understand far better than we can, the sheer amount of work described in the passages we hear. They would also grasp far more than ourselves the disappointment and perhaps anger resulting from the failure.

We are the vineyard. God has poured an immense amount of love into us. What kind of fruit do we bear?

What kind of wine are we? Are we a Grange Hermitage or are we a “Chateau cardboard”?

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