{"id":4475,"date":"2023-10-08T21:05:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-08T20:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/?p=4475"},"modified":"2023-10-17T20:00:21","modified_gmt":"2023-10-17T19:00:21","slug":"commentary-on-27th-sunday-of-the-year-a-8-10-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/commentary-on-27th-sunday-of-the-year-a-8-10-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Commentary on 27th Sunday of the year (A), 8.10.2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Donagh O\u2019Shea OP, www.goodnews.ie <\/a><\/h3>\n

Mt 21:33-43<\/b><\/p>\n

“Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.\u00a0 When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.\u00a0 But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.\u00a0 Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way.\u00a0 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’\u00a0 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.”\u00a0 So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.\u00a0 Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”\u00a0 They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”\u00a0 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?\u00a0 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.<\/em><\/p>\n

To the Jews of old the vine was a symbol of their own race, their very identity.\u00a0 God took them from the land of slavery and transplanted them in new soil: \u201cYou brought a vine out of Egypt; to plant it you drove out the nations\u201d (Psalm 79, responsorial psalm of today\u2019s Mass).<\/p>\n

In countries where the vine does not grow, some of the detail is lost on us. The vine is a most vigorous plant and needs severe pruning.\u00a0 It displays a great abundance of leaves, but only some of the branches are fruit-bearing.\u00a0 The ones that produce only leaves have to be cut back drastically, otherwise they rob life-giving sap from the others.\u00a0 The wood of the vine is perfectly useless, not even making good firewood.\u00a0 So it was usually just put in a heap and burnt.\u00a0 We get the point of what Jesus once said: \u201cAnyone who does not remain in me is like a branch that has been thrown away \u2013 they wither; these branches are collected and thrown on the fire\u201d (John 15:6).\u00a0 The aspects of our life that are not fruit-bearing are for pruning, so that we might bear fruit.\u00a0 Leaves are the plant thinking of itself, fruit is the plant thinking beyond itself: thinking of the next generation.\u00a0 We are to think beyond our own interests. The sap in us is the life of Christ.\u00a0 It is for fruit-bearing; we are not to turn it into stuff that is not even fit to make a fire.<\/p>\n

The hedge (in today\u2019s Gospel) was for keeping out animals and thieves; the tower was a place from which to watch for them.\u00a0 There was no doubt about where the boundaries lay.\u00a0 In Tuscany, Italy, where St Catherine of Siena was born, I saw miles and miles of vineyards, but they were not divided: all were one vast plantation of vines.\u00a0 The neighbours know, apparently, where one ends and another begins.\u00a0 St Catherine in the 14th century used this as an image of how we should be with others: we are ourselves, yes, we have our own space, but we are not divided from others.\u00a0 This seems a perfect arrangement, a perfect image of harmony.\u00a0 But today\u2019s Gospel story is from a world that divided property jealously: that is why the story is about violence and murder.\u00a0 Whenever I bar people from my life I am subscribing to the formula for violence; it is a kind of ethnic cleansing on a small scale.\u00a0 In the parable the tenants ended by killed the son.<\/p>\n

Yes, there is a sense in which I am my neighbour.\u00a0 If I exclude someone from my life I am excluding myself from full humanity.\u00a0 But the image of vine has an even more startling thing to show us: \u201cI am the vine, you are the branches,\u201d Jesus said (John 15:5).\u00a0 But the vine is <\/em>the branches!\u00a0 Unlike other trees where you can distinguish clearly between trunk and branches, the vine is just all branches!\u00a0 \u201cI am the vine and you are the branches\u201d: the vine is the branches!\u00a0 Jesus is more than just a neighbour who makes no distinction between what is his and what is yours.\u00a0 In a real sense he is you, and he is also your neighbour.\u00a0 To banish your neighbour from your life is to banish him.\u00a0 To lop off a branch is to lop off Christ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Donagh O\u2019Shea OP, www.goodnews.ie Mt 21:33-43 “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.\u00a0 When the harvest time had come, he sent his<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4476,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4475"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7970,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4475\/revisions\/7970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}