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These past three Sundays, the Gospel spoke of vineyards. We heard the parables of the Workers in the Vineyard, the two sons called by their father to work in the vineyard and the Evil Tenants in the Vineyard.
What does the vineyard symbolize?
What work are we as missionary disciples called to embrace there?
Like much of Scripture, the meanings are multi-layered.
The vineyard could mean the Kingdom of God, the House of Israel, the world, the Church, and the human heart.
Clearly, it is the sacred domain of God where we are called to contribute our lives, energies, and talents towards the building up of the reign of God.
The fundamental sin of the evil tenants is the fact that they seemed to forget that the vineyard did not belong to them; they falsely claim ownership of a magnificent property which is not theirs and do violence to those who assert the rights of the landowner, including his son.
This message is a fundamental truth which we ignore or violate at our peril.
God created everything
God created all that is; He made us as the crown of His creation, imbuing us with an immortal soul, calling us to eternal relationship, forgiving our sins, and saving us in Christ Jesus.
Our health, talents, possessions, time, energy, and relationships are all graces freely offered to us by God who is simply motivated by love and the deepest desire to share eternity with each of us.
This truth explains why I often speak of gratitude and see thanksgiving as the fundamental base of the spiritual life.
Beginning with Adam and Eve in Eden, sin is a grasping to possess, control, take, and consume what is essentially not ours to claim.
If everything is a gift from God, then how can we selfishly seize it only for our own personal benefit?
Contrast the hands of our first parents, reaching out to claw and grasp the forbidden fruit in contrast to the hands of Jesus nailed to the cross, grasping at nothing, accepting everything, handing over His very life in an act of radical freedom.
Spiritual crisis
The heart of the spiritual crisis which has engulfed the West for many decades now is the collective failure to remember that we belong to God and that all we have is a sheer gift from the benevolent compassion of His Heart.
Many philosophers would name this compulsion to grasp, possess, and control everything, “willful desire,” the fallacy that true freedom is the capability to do whatever one wants, that nothing is restricted or off-limits, that my fulfillment as a person comes in this unlimited package of endless choice.
Sin, immorality, and evil are simply archaic holdovers from a medieval period when the Church dictated moral norms.
Freedom arrives in the radical overthrow of such rules.
If the vineyard belongs to me, if my life is simply my own possession, if nothing is a gift and belief in God is a myth, then I am master of my own destiny.
My human nature becomes plastic and infinitely malleable.
I can express myself in any way I choose. I can try on different gender identities and act out sexually as my desire leads me.
My wealth, possessions, time, and talent are primarily for my personal enjoyment and pleasure.
I may choose to be generous to others, but I don’t have to be.
Commitments of any kind are repugnant because they limit my freedom and weigh me down.
Life is an enticing horizon of infinite choices, all guided by my willful desire.
Life: a gift from God
An authentic human existence, rooted in the truth of God, rightfully understands life as a gift from the Creator, and by that fact, there is a “givenness” to everything, including my own humanity.
By respecting the nature of things as God created them to be, by accepting the moral limits which God has placed in my heart and in the life of the Church, I come to understand true freedom as the ability to become the person that God has called me to be, to choose the good and make a radical gift of myself in love, even as God has given Himself to me in Jesus Christ.
The moral life indeed has firm limits, but they are the metal barriers in place to keep a car from going off a precipice as it ascends a high mountain.
How liberating to embrace our dependence, poverty, and need for God, to acknowledge everything as an unmerited gift from His holy hands, to live in love and humility, passing on as a gift what we ourselves have received.
Such a life rapidly fills with joy, peace, friends, meaning, hope, and fulfillment.
A living faith can even embrace sufferings, defeats, and death itself as opportunities for self-transcendence, to let God be God, to let Jesus rescue and save me.
If I still think I own the vineyard and cannot make that leap of surrender, then I must jealously guard all that I falsely claim to possess.
In such a sinful stance, other people become competitors, rivals, obstacles to my pleasure and fulfillment.
Even God becomes an enemy who threatens my puny and false sense of self and freedom. I become my own God in such a distorted vision.
Conversion frees us to sacrifice our lives and gifts for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven and the full liberation and salvation of my neighbor, to build a civilization of life and love. This labor of self-gift is the nature of the work in the vineyard.
Yes, it is a back-breaking, exhausting and often thankless task, but think of how sweet the wine will taste at the end!