27th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 5:1-7
Second Reading: Phil 4:6-9
Gospel Reading: Mt 21:33-43

In this Sunday’s First Reading, the vineyard represents Israel and its owner God the Father. The owner does everything he can for His vineyard, expecting it to yield cultivated grapes, but it yields only wild grapes.

In the parable of the Gospel Reading, Jesus gives more detail. The owner leases his vineyard to tenants. When the time comes, he sends his slaves and finally his Son to collect the produce, but the tenants simply kill them.

In both allegories, the owner is God the Father and the vineyard is Israel, his chosen people. In the parable, the owner’s slaves are the prophets and the owner’s son is Jesus. The tenants are Israel’s religious leaders, as they themselves realized.

After his parable, Jesus addressed the chief priests and the elders directly: “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’?”

Jesus was referring to Psalm 118, which is a hymn of thanksgiving sung to God by Israel. In that Psalm, “the nations” encompass Israel on every side, but “in the name of the Lord” she crushes them. In this way Israel, a tiny people of no account in the plans of empire-builders, becomes the stone which these builders reject, but which God makes the cornerstone of his plan to save the whole world.

St. Peter later used the same phrase about Jesus. “This Jesus is ‘the stone rejected by you the builders which has become the cornerstone,’” he said to Israel’s leaders. “You too are living stones, built as an edifice of spirit. For Scripture has it: ‘See, I am laying a cornerstone in Zion, an approved stone, and precious. He who puts his faith in it shall not be shaken.’”

St. Paul says that we “form a building which rises on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. Through him the whole structure is fitted together and takes shape.”

Just as a building derives its lines and its stability from its cornerstone, so for us, as we are built into “an edifice of spirit,” Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In fact, St. Peter said, “There is no salvation in anyone else, for there is no other name in the whole world given to men by which we are to be saved.”

As the Church said in Dominus Iesus, “All men and women who are saved share, though differently, in the same mystery of salvation in Jesus Christ through His Spirit.”

We must firmly believe, therefore, that in Jesus Christ we have the full revelation of divine truth. In Christ the whole fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form. He alone knows God the Father; only he can reveal the Father to us. He is God’s Word: there can be no other, newer, or fuller revelation.

Now Jesus Christ founded a Church. Using the imagery of a building, he built it on the rock of Peter.

Christianity, therefore, is not just one religion among many. Our faith in Christ-and-His-Church is “acceptance of God’s revealed truth,” says Dominus Iesus. In contrast, belief in non-Christian religions is acceptance of the “sum of experience and thought” which represents “the human treasury of wisdom and religious aspiration.” It is “still in search of the absolute truth,” for it has not yet assented to the God Who reveals Himself.

The Catholic Church is the stone which the builders of today’s world have rejected. Nevertheless, she is still the cornerstone with which we must align ourselves if we wish to be saved from the world.

Indeed, says the Catechism, we could not be saved if, “knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ,” we refused “either to enter it or to remain in it.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights. The whole course is available in written form and, one session per week, in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person: on Sundays at 2:00 pm in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 St John Paul II Way, Vancouver (33rd and Willow); and on Mondays at 10:00 am in St. Anthony’s Church hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The title of next week’s talk is “The Light of Faith.” No pre-registration is necessary.

 

 

(Featured image: BC Catholic file photo)