Homily for the 17th Sunday after Trinity (26th Week of Ordinary Time)
Matthew’s parable of the two sons happens on Tuesday of Holy Week. Earlier in this same chapter, Jesus entered Jerusalem, acclaimed by the crowds. But the week continues with a series of direct confrontations with the temple authorities and Pharisees. Jesus cleanses the temple, turning over the tables of the moneychangers. The priests and scribes, increasingly hostile, confront him with a question of authority: by what authority does he do and say these things? This parable comes immediately after Jesus refuses to answer their question, having thrown the same question back at them and heard them refuse to make any judgment on the ministry of John the Baptist.
It is just this refusal of responsibility that seems to provoke the Lord’s hard words at the end of our passage: “the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” No mincing words here, no question about who he’s talking about. They say they want truth and justice, but in truth they want merely their own safe answers and comfortable boundaries.
In this they echo the complaints that the prophet Ezekiel addresses in our first reading. What the larger context shows is a people stuck on the idea of generational “karma.” They want the children to be punished for the sins of their fathers; they are scandalized by the idea that God will spare a sinner who repents. This may seem strange to us on the surface, but life is so much easier when all your problems are someone else’s fault. The priests and scribes of Jesus’ day are no different. The idea that the kingdom of God might require, and in fact allow, a direct, personal response from each person, regardless of their history, was dangerous, and not just because it upset their authority structures, but because it demanded that they take responsibility for their own repentance rather than hiding behind ethnicity or family or class.
And we have to note how this very temptation to de-personalize the call to repentance is embedded in the history of the parable’s interpretation. Obviously the parable is first directed at the priests and scribes, so one of the more common traditional glosses suggests that the brothers are Israel and the Gentiles. This is a valid reading, consistent with many other passages and parables where the Lord holds up to Israel her failure to recognize her Lord. Yet the allegorical gloss, as a resonance with salvation history, does not free us from the more basic contrast, which is not between two generic people groups, but between the virtuous who turn away and the wicked who repent. Better to be a tax collector who repents than a Pharisee who thinks he is too good for the kingdom. Better to be a hard-hearted Pharisee who repents than a Gentile who gives a shallow “yes” to the call of Christ but then lives like a pagan.
In sum, actions speak louder than words. Though it is more than this generic true principle, because what matters is the particular action of joining the father’s work in the vineyard. The frequency of this metaphor in our Lord’s speaking draws from a similar trend in the prophets. God calls us to work with him in the world, in his Church. This isn’t meaningless labor but labor oriented to the end: the production of wine of the kingdom, a sign of God’s goodness and the eternal delight of the saints in heaven. It is not enough to say the right things, or even believe the right things, but to join the work, and the only entrance point to that work is repentance, the acknowledgment that we have failed before we even began, that our hearts are divided, that we pursue the work for selfish reasons. Yet the Father continues to issue the call.
As one writer comments, “Only God has the patience to wait throughout a lifetime for all our instinctual Nos to become one eternal Yes to his love.”[1] This is not a matter of declaring to ourselves that we will somehow embody the perfect fiat of Mary at the Annunciation, but of recognizing in ourselves both the shallow affirmation of the younger brother and the rudeness and repentance of the elder. Discipleship is a long and imperfect obedience in the same direction. How else but in the divine patience can we ever hope to have the mind of Christ, as St. Paul exhorts us to do in Philippians? And there is hope. What to the Pharisees seems like condemnation seems like hope to the tax collectors and sinners, because they are more readily able to see that they need God’s mercy. Mary’s “yes” proves in a different way that even without sin, communion with God requires an interior emptiness.
In Mary’s Magnificat, Holy Church sings every night: “He hath filled the hungry with good things.” May we always know that we are hungry so that our hearts can receive the gifts of repentance, mercy, and love.
[1] Fr. Simeon aka Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis