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

Once, meditating on God’s goodness, I tried to put myself in his place. I imagined I had created dogs to be perfectly happy as dogs, with everything they wanted, and with the opportunity to learn to talk, think, and love like humans. However, the dogs misused my gifts. What would I do?

I could end the experiment and destroy my creation. I could simply leave the dogs in the mess they had made. I could take away their power of choice and simply force them to accept my way.

In each case, the objection was the same: I loved the dogs and wanted them to love me, freely, without coercion.

Perhaps I could create special dogs who knew better and send them to teach the others. I could even become a dog myself, showing and teaching them the way to the happiness I had designed them for.

However, the other dogs might not understand. They might reject my delegates. They might even reject me. They might turn on me and tear me to pieces.

Nevertheless, this was the solution God chose in his dealings with humans, as we hear in the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer.

In the beginning, God formed us to be like him and to share his happiness, entrusting the whole world to us. However, we disobeyed him and lost his friendship. Nonetheless, he did not abandon us to death, but helped us in new ways to seek and find him.

Time and again he offered us his love and asked for ours. He sent us prophets to teach us his plans for us. In the face of repeated rejection, he continued to love us so much that finally, he sent his Son as a man to be our saviour.

He offered us joy, freedom, and the good news of salvation, the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer says. Eventually, “he gave himself up to death, and, rising from the dead, he destroyed death and restored life.” Then he sent us his own Holy Spirit to “sanctify creation to the full.”

This is the story behind the parables in this Sunday’s liturgy. Well might God ask, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?” In truth, he has done everything he can, short of force, to bring us back to the happiness he created us for, a happiness so great we cannot imagine it: we simply have to trust him.

He leaves us free to reject it. If we do, he accepts our decision. As we hear in the liturgy, he takes away the good things he had planned for us and offers them to others.

He does not punish us like a father taking away a child’s candy because the child is disobedient. That may help persuade us to be obedient, but it is not, in itself, the natural result of disobedience.

Rather, our rejection of God is itself our punishment. When we reject God, we reject all the happiness, the pleasure, and the joy only he can offer us.

If we think Satan can make us happy, we are wrong. Satan has not devised one new pleasure; all he can do is to tempt us to take the pleasures God offers us in ways, or at times, that defeat their purpose in God’s plan, like taking sexual pleasure outside marriage.

The first humans, Adam and Eve, knew God. However, by their fall, they made themselves and all their descendants, in comparison, blind and deaf to God.

God has done all he can, short of force, to break though our blindness and deafness, but we still see only “indistinctly,” St. Paul says. Not until death will we see “face to face.”

Until then, all we can do is trust God and follow St. Paul’s advice: to keep before our minds whatever is true, honourable, just, pure, commendable, excellent, and praiseworthy, avoiding anything contrary.