Word to the Wise
Monday, June 1, 2009 - St. Justin, Martyr
[Tobit 1:3, 2:1a-8 and Mark 12:1-12]A man planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press, and built a tower. Then he leased it to tenant farmers and left on a journey.....
Jesus' audience would have had no difficulty in recognizing the situation in this parable! Most of them would have been subsistence farmers who had their land by means of a kind of sharecropping. The owner would have gotten the larger part, to be sure! Resentment would be a mild word to describe their feelings! On another level, however, many in the audience would have been familiar with the vineyard image as a symbol of the Chosen People (Isaiah 5:1). In that image, the vineyard fails to respond to the loving care of the farmer. In Jesus' image, it is the tenant farmers who refuse to be accountable. Further, they resort to violence in an effort to seize the vineyard for themselves. While this image could have made the tenant farmers in the audience uncomfortable because it could describe how they FELT, even if they did not act on the feelings, they are not the target! The religious leadership is (chief priests, the scribes, and the elders). Their reaction was violent. They were seeking to arrest him, but they feared the crowd, for they realized that he had addressed the parable to them. The parable could make anyone uncomfortable. We are all stewards of God's People and God's creation. We do not own either! We are chalenged to look to those areas in our lives where we have taken on the attitude of the tenant farmers in the parable. How much of our "this is MINE" attitude interferes with the accountability we owe to the Lord for all that has been placed in our care? AMEN
config
view
logs
4096.0 KB
103 ms
4
