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?

Every Grace Made Abundant for Us

In today’s first reading, 2 Cor 9: 6-11, we are reminded that “God is able to make every grace abundant” for us, “so that in all things, always having all” we need, we “may have an abundance for every good work.”  Wow! What if we lived off that belief every day. What a difference that would make. Doubts would be diminished. We would “attack” the day with vim and vigor. We would believe in God’s power overpowering our doubts, our weaknesses, our lethargy, our cynicism, our pessimism or whatever else holds us back from accomplishing the good that we are called to be instrumental in bringing about in our families, our communities, our employment situation, our parishes.  And what if we truly believed that every one of our needs will be met every day, this day!  How differently we would approach a given situation. The fretting and anxiety would also be diminished because of this belief. Yes, God provides, beyond any doubt and over and above any limitation that we believe will thwart our abilities to come through, even in a difficult environment. 

St. Paul goes on to say to us: “The one who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed and increase the harvest of your righteousness.” And furthermore, he says: “You are being enriched in every way for all generosity, which through us produces thanksgiving to God.”

Tonight it behooves us to reflect on how God supplied “the seed”, multiplied that seed and increased “the harvest” of our righteousness, that is our virtue, our uprightness, our honesty,  our justice.  It also behooves us to reflect on how God enriched us today because of our generosity.  Or have we fallen short today because we were not generous, not honest, not upright in some way. If so, then our evening  prayer needs to include an “I’m sorry, God; I let you down today. Help me turn that around tomorrow when you give me another chance to right the wrongs I committed by my lack of generosity and my unbelief."