(Was a) Deacon's Blog

He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Recall back a few weeks when I mentioned our gospels are taken from Jesus final week in Jerusalem before His arrest, death, and burial.

The gospels we have read focus on the challenges to Jesus from both the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They tried to trap Jesus with questions about taxes, the resurrection, and today about the greatest commandment.

These discourses will go on in the weeks to come, eventually leading to Jesus’ final teachings on the end times.

Perhaps it is our nature, we like to get to the end, to have the point made, to discover the solution, to uncover the mystery.

Jesus has something far more important for us to do, and that is live today. We are to live our faith each day.

Our first reading from Exodus has a powerful waring – and that warning still resonates today: hate someone – no matter who they are, call someone dirty, no good, worthless, a burden, cheat someone, call upon others, including the government, to oppress someone then “My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.”

That is not God speaking poetically or telling a story, it is a promise, a dreadful promise.

Brothers and sisters, you see that our journey through life is fraught with the kind of sins we write off easily. We use metaphors and euphemisms – oh, it’s just politics, I personally would never hurt anyone – yet we rage internally. We let media and politicians put thoughts in our heads because they tickle us and reinforce our sense of not getting a good deal.

Jesus has the answer to that, the solution. That solution begins in our own souls because we are forgiven when we say and do wrong. We are given yet another opportunity to set things right by loving God and our neighbor. We are not put to the sword.

Jesus’ awesome mercy is shown to us each day. We then are to be equally merciful, loving, and forgiving.

St. Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, points out the way others talk about them because they lived out their faith, they made it real and everyone saw how they became imitators of the Apostles and of Jesus.

Let people speak of us that way. Remember that there is no book, no agenda, and no script we are called to fulfill other than Jesus’. See how they are imitators of the Apostles and of Jesus.

He said to them, “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

When we first listen to this encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees, we sense two things going on.

The first is the trap being set for Jesus. If He says, ‘don’t pay the tax,’ He becomes an enemy of Rome and will be arrested and killed. If He says pay it, He is an ally of the enemy, and the people will hate Him. He escapes that trap in what He says, pay your obligation to each according to what you value.

The second instinct is to focus on the relationship between Church and government, and of course everyone’s general dislike of paying taxes.

This brings us to a central question concerning what we value and the implication of obligations.

The word obligation comes from the Latin noun obligatio, meaning a pledge, or state of being bound. The word was adopted into English around 1300, originally referring to a binding pledge, a promise, or the conditions of a bargain. By around 1600, the meaning expanded to cover moral and legal duties.

That is a pretty negative take. No one wants to be bound or made to do anything. It is why we do not like the idea of taxes, being forced to pay money for things we know little to nothing about or for things we disagree with. We are bound to that by law.

We philosophically justify taxes by saying we get certain rights and protections as part of the equation. We get things like military and police protection, fire service, roads, and other positive benefits in this social bargain. We may even value those things at least to a certain extent.

In Church terms we may think of obligations as well. That includes showing up for worship, being generous, doing certain tasks and serving in ministries.

It is perhaps one of the issues in our Catholic faith. We speak in terms of obligations, requirements, duties, and do not see things as Jesus or St. Paul saw them: remembering you in our prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ.

St Paul, working off what Jesus taught, saw what we do for our Heavenly Father and the Church as acts of love and faith. They want us valuing what we have, what we are a part of, such that all is done from the totality of our being, putting our whole self – heart, soul, and body into it.

Certain things indeed are obligations and requirements. If we see Church as only that, all we are doing is making a bargain. A cheap bargain without love.

For us, what we do for Church must arise from our value – considering it as what is most important for life today and forever.

Then he looked for the crop of grapes, but what it yielded was wild grapes.

I am not sure how many of us here have ever grown a grapevine. I had a good friend who did exactly that.

He and his wife had a pretty garden in their backyard. Now, he was a person of many interests, and one of those interests was wine. He figured he would purchase a grapevine and attempt to grow it.

He purchased a Concord grapevine. They tend to be rather hardy. Welch’s grape juice, for example, is typically made from Concord grapes. Many of those grapes are grown along the shores of Lake Erie. In fact, there are some 304 grower-owners in the Lake Erie and Niagara regions, representing the largest concentration of Welch’s growers anywhere.

Pretty quickly, my friend figured out what hardy means – the vine took off! It produced a ton of grapes from which wine and other goodies were made.

Several years later, my friend was sitting there talking about cutting the vine back. It had literally inundated his deck, the back of his house, and most of the garden space.

Echoing the words of Isaiah, which the Pharisees would have recognized, Jesus speaks of a vineyard and its vines.

Isaiah, conveying God’s words to the people of Israel, uses the vineyard as a metaphor for a rebellious people, a vine that would not produce goodness or righteousness, no matter how much God cared for it.

Isaiah warns about the failure to produce the fruits of righteousness; Jesus now warns about the leaders’ refusal to acknowledge God’s rightful authority over the vineyard and its harvest. Those refusing God had allowed their faith to die through their obstinacy and unbelief, assuming God’s authority for themselves.

Traveling with Jesus as He taught in Jerusalem, just before His arrest and execution, we quickly recognize that those with closed ears and narrow vision would soon kill the Son Himself.

These words, delivered to us today, repeat the warning given to Israel all those centuries ago. They offer us a moment to examine ourselves.

What do we believe about Who Jesus is? How powerful is He? What is our faith in Him worth? Can I surrender control and place myself in His hands?

St. Paul asks us to set aside anxiety, to reflect on the better things and cultivate what is good.

As we sit in our inner garden of faith and tend to the vine that grows there, let us offer ourselves to Jesus—all that is good, along with our worries and anxieties. Let us place everything in His hands, trusting that He will take what we offer, nurture what is growing, prune what is unfruitful, and bring forth an abundance of good fruit.

“When John came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him; but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not later change your minds and believe him.”

What is going on here? Why this sense of urgency?

For several weeks we considered our response to Jesus’ teaching. We discussed our response to God’s love in light of how we love. We saw God’s generosity at work. Can I be that generous?

Considering all this thinking and considering suddenly Jesus’ teaching becomes urgent.

Our scriptures for this week and the weeks ahead are taken from Jesus’ last discourses before He would be arrested and killed. He has arrived in Jerusalem. The people are cheering Him on. He sees the corruption and disregard for His Father’s way all around Him, especially among the leaders.

He teaches in the Temple with urgency. He is basically saying: Hear Me and live. Ignore me and be condemned. There is no time.

He makes this point exceptionally clear in today’s teaching.

Jesus lays out a parable about two sons, the son who says yes, but does not follow through and the son who says no and later does follow through.

The Chief Priests and Elders inherited the yes of God’s leaders, but they have not followed through. The tax collectors (working for the Romans and considered the worst of betrayers) and the prostitutes (unclean) listened to the call to repentance the Baptist offered, and they followed through.

Who are the redeemed and saved, the ones who listened.

Worse than not listening, if that wasn’t bad enough, was the blindness to what they saw before them. How can they possibly ignore what God is doing right in their presence, how can they possibly write it off?

Jesus makes their offense clear: “Yet even when you saw that, you did not later change your minds and believe him.”

The urgency is here for us. We see, hear, and truly experience Jesus’ miracles big and small. We see His power to overcome adversity and save. We see people set upon by life finding a way back from the brink. It happens all the time. Jesus asks us the same question: What is your conclusion?

Here is the conclusion the Chief priests and Elders arrived at: Who, them!?! They are not worthy, they are dirty!

Jesus’ conclusion, they heard the call to repentance. They heard the call to set aside stereotypes and fear, and they received life.

Will we allow it? Will we look forward to a future with Jesus, relying on His forgiveness and renewal? Will we believe?

“Are you envious because I am generous?” 

Literally in Greek this sentence from Jesus’ parable is rendered, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”

Jesus warned of the dangers of having an evil eye, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness.” (Matthew 6:22-23)

Our eyes are a window into our souls. When we look deeply into someone’s eyes we either see love, acceptance, joy – light or we see avoidance. In the worst of cases, for instance with psychopaths you would find a disassociated gaze, a look that seems empty of emotion, awareness, warmth, or moral presence, even soulless indifference.

What people see in our eyes is beyond what they see externally. It is difficult to pretend with our eyes. There’s a lot we can feign with our voice, our body and gestures, our expressions. But the eyes? That’s harder. Maybe impossible. We look down, look away. There’s a reason when eye contact is avoided.

That avoidance is an attempt to hide, a person saying, ‘don’t look here.’ Openness in our eyes is inviting or at least wishes others would see who you are, all you offer.

When we get the chance to look into the eyes of God what will we see of His heart, His very being? According to Jesus’ parable we will see generosity. Sheer generosity.

For some, that look will be welcome, for others it will be horror. For the worthy, love will make them overpowerfully whole. For the evil it is only disgrace, shame, and a recognition that they are empty.

The first hired did not like what they saw in the eyes of the Landowner. His sheer generosity, unexplainable, unfathomable, generosity, giving for no reason at all did not match the way they thought things should work. Isn’t giving conditional? They could not get their heads around that. They gave him the evil eye.

While we want to believe in generosity, what it is and what it represents, we can’t. We are awkward or even suspicious of real generosity. We feel unworthy of it. We don’t even know how to respond to generosity. “Really? Me? Why? For no reason? Are you sure? What did I do?”

The fact is that for God there is no doing that merits His generosity. The key is that generosity is not something to be understood or calculated. Real generosity is not measurable, accountable, or calculable.

That is the point of the parable, God is about unreckonable grace.

Can we be the same way? Do I have the capacity for God’s kind of generosity? Can I? Likely not, at least right now, but I must constantly pray for it and work at it.