Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish

FR MICHAEL BIBLICAL IMAGERY

(Fr Michael Boakye Yeboah: Vice Rector of St Gregory Seminary, Kumasi-Ghana)

TENANTS

            When I served as a “fidei donum” priest in the Archdiocese of Lagos, Nigeria, I remember a story someone told me. A landlady decided to travel to England and it was her intention to stay there for a while and earn some cash. Before she left, she rented her house in Lagos to some tenants. They were supposed to pay their rents into her bank account on a yearly basis. Not only did those tenants not pay their rents, but they even plotted to dispossess their landlady of her house and take it over as their own. Someone leaked the plot to the landlady, and she made a timely return to Nigeria to rescue her property from those tenants.

            That is like the parable in our gospel passage today. Every detail of today’s parable was a familiar fact. The Jewish nation as the vineyard of God was a familiar prophetic picture. ‘For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel (Isaiah 5:7). Permit me to explain the details in the parable. The hedge was a thickest thorn hedge, designed to keep out both the wild boars which might ravage the vineyard, and the thieves who might steal the grapes. Every vineyard had its wine press. The wine press consisted of two troughs either hollowed out of the rock, or built of bricks; the one was a little higher than the other, and was connected with the lower one by a channel. The grapes were pressed in the higher trough, and the juice ran off into the lower trough. The tower served a double purpose. It served as a watch-tower, from which to watch for thieves when the grapes were ripening; and it served as a lodging for those who were working in the vineyard.

            The actions of the owner of the vineyard were all quite normal. In the time of Jesus, Palestine was a troubled place with little luxury; it was, therefore, very familiar with absentee landlords, who let out their estates and were interested only in collecting the rental at the right time. The rent might be paid in any of three ways. It might be a money rent; it might be a fixed amount of the fruit, no matter what the crop might be; and it might be an agreed percentage of the crop.

            Even the action of the cultivation was not unusual. The country was seething with economic unrest; the working people were discontented and rebellious; and the action of the cultivators in seeking to eliminate the son was not by any means impossible.

            As we have said, it would be easy for those who heard this parable to make the necessary identifications. Let us set these identifications down. The vineyard is the nation of Israel, and its owner is God. The cultivators are the religious leaders of Israel, who, as it were, had charge from God for the welfare of the nation. The messengers who were sent successively are the prophets sent by God and so often rejected and killed. The son who came last is none other than Jesus himself. Here, in a vivid story, Jesus set out at one and the same time the history and the doom of Israel.

            We became the beneficiaries when God drove out the old tenants and called us into his vineyard. He goes on to say that God will seal a new covenant with a new people, whereby he would be their God, and they would be his people. Significantly, the new people would recognize and accept the Son of God as the Messiah that the prophets foretold. They would even be called by the name of that Messiah, Christians. That is to say, they would belong to him, because he would have ransomed them at the incomparable price of his own blood.

            If it happened once, it can happen again. The new people of God must now not be complacent, believing that they will always remain the people of God, no matter what. No, they will remain the people of God only if they keep to the terms of their new covenant with God. They will remain the people of God only if they remain true to their identity as Christians and live lives that reflect that identity. St Paul gives us an insight into the kind of life that Christians are expected to live in the second reading. They should fill their minds with “everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is good and pure, everything that we love and honour, and everything that can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise.” That is how they will remain tenants in God’s vineyard, and not run any risk of having it taken away from them. May God help us with his grace so that we will be good tenants.