The Vineyard God Entrusted to Us

In today’s Gospel, Mark 12: 1-12, Jesus speaks to us in a parable of the vineyard that a man planted and then leased to tenants to cultivate and ultimately to harvest,  as the owner left on a journey. At harvest time the owner sent servants to collect the produce.  Each of the servants was beaten and sent away empty-handed. One was even killed. So the owner sent his son, thinking that the tenants would certainly respect his son. Him, too, they seized and put to death.

You and I are both the vineyard and the tenants .  Each of us is expected to till the soil of our souls, our minds, our hearts so that rich, ripe, delicious fruit is brought to maturity within us. We are responsible that the gifts of the Holy Spirit—counsel, understanding, knowledge, wisdom, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord—seeds planted within us at our baptism and confirmation—bear abundant fruit in our lives: joy, justice, charity, forgiveness, honesty, humility, generosity, compassion, prudence, temperance, and so on.  The “seeds” need to be “watered” by prayer, spiritual reading, study of the Scriptures, involvement in Church services and reception of the sacraments.  Our vineyard will also be cultivated when we are open to those sent into our lives to question us when we go astray. Cultivating or weeding our vineyard involves being corrected us when we are moving in a direction away from the Lord, making choices that weaken our resolve, erode our faith, and thwart our progress toward holiness and wholeness.  Will we “beat” those servants, “kill” them by our aggression and/or rejection of the truth that we need to face? If our vineyard is going to yield a rich harvest, we need to live a disciplined life and at times be disciplined by others.  We need to learn from what we suffer, from the mistakes we make. At times, we need  to submit to being “pruned” of dead “branches,” diseased, rotting fruit so as to continue growing in holiness, deepening our faith and trust in our Owner, God Himself.  The Owner will return to take us into heaven, the rewards of our labors. 

Will we have been good tenants of the vineyard entrusted to us: that of our own being (body, mind, and spirit) and vineyards that involves others and the world in which we live?