Word to the Wise
Monday, June 5, 2023 - 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, 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. At the proper time he sent a servant to the tenants to obtain from them some of the produce of the vineyard......[Mark]
JUNE 5 ST. BONIFACE, bishop and martyr
The story of the vineyard would have been familiar to the audience. [The editors of the translation have "supplied" the sentence in brackets to keep the context clear.] The image is from Isaiah 5:1-7, in which God destroys a fruitless vineyard (just as Jesus had cursed the barren fig tree in the chapter just before this passage in the Gospel According to Mark.) The implication is clear. Jesus attacks the then leadership of the Jews [chief priests, scribes and elders] for their failures in leadership and integrity and especially for their rejection of the son of the owner who is sent to collect the produce after other servants were rejected and maltreated.
The fault of the tenant farmers was to be found in their assumption that they were in charge of the vineyard and the owner had no rights to the crop!!! In the book of the Prophet Ezekiel, the image is one of shepherds who fail to do their duty and take care of the sheep. [Ezek 34:1-31] The underlying problem then and in our own time is one of POWER. Lord Acton's famous dictum: "Power corrupts...." comes to mind. The tenant farmers thought they had the power to deny the owner his rightful share of the crop. Jesus confronts the religious power of his time with their illusion of ultimate power. Power - no matter who wields it, whether pope, bishop, pastor, deacon, choir director, usher, etc - is meant to enable and enrich the faith of the Body of Christ. When powerful people are threatened, they can become dangerous. The last lines of today's gospel passage indicates the reaction of the chief priests, scribes and elders: They were seeking to arrest him, but they feared the crowd, for they realized that he had addressed the parable to them.
Ultimately, Judaism would survive after the whole "temple-system" was destroyed by the Romans. But the shape of that vineyard was forever changed. Catholicism, at least in the Latin Rite, has been changed profoundly in observance since the Second Vatican Council, but all of our leaders should know that their power is a stewardship and they are accountable to the owner who created the "vineyard of the Lord of Hosts," the Body of Christ!! AMEN