What is the lesson here? (Ryan Di Corpo)

   The Swiss theologian Ulrich Luz writes that our understanding of this Sunday’s Gospel—which features the Parable of the Two Sons—is influenced by which son we consider its focus. 

   

    In Matthew 21, Jesus is scrutinized by the chief priests and elders, who question his teaching. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they ask him (v. 23). When they cannot come up with an answer, Jesus tells them the story of two sons: the first, who initially refuses to work in his father’s vineyard but then relents, and a second, who promises to work but does not follow through. 

    The chief priests and elders say that only the first son obeyed his father. Jesus then utters the famous reply: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (v. 31). 

    What is the lesson here? Is Jesus, through the example of the first son, calling us to turn towards him and away from sin? Or is he rather, by way of the second son, chastising people who say one thing and then do another? “Depending on one’s decision,” writes Luz, “our parable is either an exhortation to repentance or a warning against disobedience.” 

    When interrogated by Jewish authorities, Christ is teaching in the temple—which is technically controlled by his questioners. Jesus’s divine authority, given to him by the Father, clashes with the temporal authority of his biblical opponents. Furthermore, the chief priests and elders are specifically skeptical of preaching by John the Baptist, whose power they also view critically.

    Luz writes that Jesus forces the Jewish leaders to select the more righteous son, implying that there is a right and wrong answer. The first son initially refuses to obey his father, but has a change of heart, while the temple leaders both reject John the Baptist and then also fail to correct their error. 

    Therefore, Luz notes, Jesus designates his interrogators as “worse than both sons of the parable,” despite their lofty standing in Jerusalem. Greater than the chief priests and elders, then, are the pariahs of Jesus’s time—people on the margins who accepted the words of John the Baptist and embraced Christ. The faithful “go ahead” (προάγω) of those who wield power on earth. 

--Ryan Di Corpo 

Image source: https://sfodan.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/%E2%80%9Clet-us-walk-and-talk-together%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93matthew-2128-32%E2%80%A0/
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Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 27, 2026: Is it my way that is unfair?

Is it my way that is unfair?
How far will we go to understand God’s way? 

    It’s so hard to let go of our own ways of being and try to see how God functions, how God’s love works! The prophet Ezekiel struggled to help the people of Israel in exile to understand that, even in this far and distant country, God was with them, though they had misunderstood God’s teachings: You say the Lord’s way is not fair! The people have come to believe that the sins of the parents are visited on their children. Instead, Ezekiel encourages them to take personal responsibility for their own actions, and for their relationship with the Lord. Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair? Each individual has but to turn from the wickedness they might commit and do what is just and right, and they will have life. For, as Psalm 25 reminds us, the Lord is always merciful: Remember that your compassion, O Lord, and your love are from of old. The psalmist seeks to walk in God’s ways, and be guided in God’s truth, to see past his own limitations and to understand how God works. 

    In Matthew's gospel, Jesus faces a similar struggle with the Jewish leadership of his own time, who refuse to recognize Jesus and what he has to offer, which is the possibility of entering the kingdom of God. But to do so, they need to change, to take responsibility for their own past limitations and to let go of the authority they so ardently cling to. This is the father’s will for which Jesus offers the parable of the two sons asked to go out and work in their father’s vineyard. The one who does his father’s will is the one entering the kingdom of God before the chief priests and elders of the people. The chief priests and elders have to step past their own limitations and recognize the redemption Jesus offers them; after all, he says tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.” In other words, you too can enter, as long as you believe. 

    This is what it means to be a community of faith, to embody that kingdom, as Paul tells the Philippians: be of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing. Through baptism, the Philippians have been bound into a community faith, a people who are one in Christ. This is precisely what Jesus is encouraging the Jewish leadership to join. He knows they are far from God because fear has driven them to hold close to human law. Jesus is inviting them – and us – to draw close to God, by humbly regarding others as more important than yourselves, as Paul notes Christ himself did: emptying himself, humbling himself, obedient to the point of death. We can only do so if we step past the limitations we impose on God and on love, and open to knowing and manifesting God’s ways. The journey is ours; will we choose to take it? 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

An effervescent act of generosity (Bishop Robert Barron)

    God pours out the whole of creation in an effervescent act of generosity, and then, even more surprisingly, he draws his human creatures, through Christ, into the intimacy of friendship with him. Christianity is a religion of grace that exults in this divine generosity. Think in this context of the parable of the workers hired at different times of the day or the story of the prodigal son. 

    But we know that the gift is not for us alone; rather, the generosity of God is meant to awaken a like generosity in us. If amazing grace has saved a wretch like me, I have to become a vehicle of grace to every lost soul around me. 

--Bishop Robert Barron 

Image source 1: https://lmcchurches.org/2023/08/always-more/
Image source 2: https://livingbyfaithblog.com/2012/01/06/a-surprising-outpouring-of-gods-love/
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It was there that I searched for You (St. Augustine)

     O Eternal truth, true love and beloved eternity. You are my God. To you do I sigh day and night. When I first came to know you, you drew me to yourself so that I might see that there were things for me to see, but that I myself was not yet ready to see them. Meanwhile you overcame the weakness of my vision, sending forth most strongly the beams of your light, and I trembled at once with love and dread. I learned that I was in a region unlike yours and far distant from you, and I thought I heard your voice from on high: “I am the food of grown men; grow then, and you will feed on me. Nor will you change me into yourself like bodily food, but you will be changed into me.” I sought a way to gain the strength which I needed to enjoy you. But I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who is above all, God blessed for ever. He was calling me and saying: I am the way of truth, I am the life. He was offering the food which I lacked the strength to take, the food he had mingled with our flesh. For the Word became flesh, that your wisdom, by which you created all things, might provide milk for us children. 

     Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. 

--St. Augustine

Image source: https://godshotspot.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/spotlight-battleofgods.jpg
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God's gift to give (Fr. James Martin)

 

    A few years ago, I heard the interpretation that those who were hired last had been standing out in the sun all day, waiting their turn, and so the landowner is rewarding them. But that still reflects the idea that the landowner, a stand-in for God, must be “fair.” For Jesus, it’s just as important for the landowner to be merciful. Seen in this light, it’s a parable about generosity to the “last.” As Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., writes in the Sacra Pagina commentaries, the answer to the question of why latecomers receive the same pay is: “The kingdom is God’s gift to give and we must not begrudge God his generosity.” 

     “There is a balance between God’s justice and God’s mercy,” writes Father Harrington. “Those who were hired first receive a just reward…. The fact that the latecomers received the same reward can be credited to God’s mercy.” Thus, Harrington suggests that the usual title of this parable, which focuses on the workers, is misplaced. It is more appropriately called the “Parable of the Good Employer," because it is about goodness and mercy. 

--Fr. James Martin,
Facebook, September 23, 2024

Image source: Lucas Cranach, Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (15th c.), https://lucascranach.org/en/DE_ESKStMW_NONE-ESKStMW012/
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God is not a response to our mail order form (Bishop Rowan Williams)

   God is God. God is not a thing among other things. God is not an item in the world, and God is not a response to our mail order form. He doesn’t simply slot into what we think is intelligible or manageable. God is the infinite, unmanageable, unconditioned context of all that we are and we do, and so it’s not entirely surprising if we can’t boil that down into something we can manage. That’s why, of course, in Hebrew Scripture, when the people of Israel gather at Mount Sinai, the mountain is covered with cloud and fire, and God says to Moses: Keep your distance. I’m sorry. This is how I am. You’re not going to boil me down to something that’s manageable. 

    There’s always an innate depth, inaccessibility, unmanageability about this, and at times that comes home to us with enormous force when we would like there to be a simple answer — part of the burden of what Old and New Testaments alike say: Be careful of idolatry. You’re always prone to making a God you can manage. 

    That’s what idolatry boils down to. You can make that manageable God in any number of forms. You can make it in religious forms. You could make it in economic and social forms. Just be very conscious that, as the Lord says to Moses, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Don’t go putting in his place something which is a pseudo-God.

--Anglican Bishop Rowan Williams

Image source: https://bible.art/p/vsZsKRNJpwiRsJghlde3/god-spoke-to-the-israelite-s-from-the
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Seek the God who is seeking us (Sr. Joan Chittister)

There is only one vocation in life
and that is to seek the God
who is seeking us. 

--Sr. Joan Chittister

Image source 1: https://catholicreview.org/seven-surprising-places-to-find-god-this-summer/
Image source 2: https://studyprayserve.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/here-i-am-man.jpg