Word to the Wise
Monday, March 7, 2011 - Monday in the 9th Week in Ordinary Time
[Tob 1:3; 2:1a-8 and Mark 12:1-12]Jesus began to speak to the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders in parables. "A man planted a vineyard......" They were seeking to arrest him, but they feared the crowd, for they realized that he had addressed the parable to them. So they left him and went away.
There has been a flurry of publicity surrounding the release of Pope Benedict XVI's second volume on the life of Jesus because he very rightly and publicly reminds all Christians that the Jews do not bear some kind of collective responsibility for the execution of Jesus. The pope refers to the "temple aristocracy" for whom Jesus was a great threat. By inciting the Roman authorities, who consistently put down in brutal fashion any perceived rebellion against Caesar, the plotters achieved their goal. However, before that happened, Jesus managed to get in a few hard punches and today's parable is one of them. (The "cleansing of the temple" was another!). The temple aristocracy stood convicted of squandering and ruining the trust and heritage that had been give to them and manipulating it for their own purposes.
I have often quoted the famous dictum of Lord Acton: "Power corrupts. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." The guardians of the temple had reached the point where they were corrupt. In this they are no different from any religious or secular power that has existed from time immemorial. However, there is another dictum, this time from a Latin source, "Corruptio optimi pessimus!" [The corruption of the best is the worst.] When corruption reaches sacred matters and persons, it is the worst of corruption. A casual reading of church history in the time of the Renaissance would leave no doubt about the possibility of corruption in the church all the way up to the papacy! The result was the Protestant Reformation and then the Council of Trent. But corruption can occur all the way down to any local religious authority. The use of the sacred for personal gain, especially when done under the cover of doctrinal righteousness, is a terrible sin. The temple aristocracy would have been aware of Isaiah's famous Song of the Vineyard [Isaiah 5} and Ezekiel's thundering condemnation of the temple aristocracy [Ezekiel 34]. Can we claim any ignorance? The parable of the vineyard is meant as much for us as it was for them. AMEN
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