Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Isaiah 5:1-7.

Scripture scholars tell us that this Sunday’s reading is from the earliest part of Isaiah’s prophetic ministry. It dates from about 742 to 735 B.C., before the destruction of the northern kingdom. It is a poetic parable that may have been first sung at a festival celebrating the grape harvest.

The parable is in three parts, the last of which constitutes a surprise ending.

First of all the prophet announced that he is going to sing a song about his friend’s vineyard. It was a good vineyard, and the prophet’s friend took extraordinary care of it. He did everything imaginable to see that it produced good fruit. "But what it yielded was wild grapes," a totally useless harvest.

In the second part of the poem, the speaker is no longer the prophet but his friend, the owner of the vineyard. The friend calls on his hearers to join with him in deploring the disappointing outcome of all his work. The owner tells his hearers what he plans to do. He will take away the wall and the hedge that protect it from animals. He will not cultivate it any longer, but allow it to be taken over by wild growth. There will be no rain.

Now comes the third part of the poem, the surprise ending. So far Isaiah has not disclosed the identity of the characters in the parable. He has led the hearers ("inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah") to condemn the vineyard’s fruitlessness and ingratitude. Now comes the surprise: the master of the vineyard is the Lord and the vineyard is the people of Judah. They are guilty of producing the wrong kind of fruit. God expected faithful fulfillment of His will from the people, and instead they yielded social injustice. He expected righteous care for the poor and the yield was the cry of the oppressed. By the time the parable is finished, the prophet’s lesson is clear: "It’s about you that I am talking! God has given you everything, and you have yielded nothing. You are a harvest of unfaithfulness."

It is obvious that this reading was chosen for this Sunday in view of the parable of the wicked tenants that the Gospel reading gives us (Matthew 21:33-43). In fact, it seems quite clear that Jesus Himself was basing His parable on Isaiah’s, and Jesus’ hearers would have recognized the Isaian prototype as soon as Jesus began to tell His parable.

But there is a surprise here, too. Jesus changes Isaiah’s parable so that it is no longer about the people at large, but about tenants brought in to tend the vineyard. These tenants (or sharecroppers) end up taking over for their own benefit what properly belonged to the owner of the vineyard. Here was a new kind of unfaithfulness, not of the people at large but of the religious leaders who misused the vineyard that is God’s people.

The purpose of both parables is to underline unfaithfulness (of the people as a whole in Isaiah and of the people’s leaders in Jesus’ story) by contrasting it with the loving care of God and God’s rightful expectation of an appropriate yield.

It is not hard to apply the general lesson of these parables (God’s demand for faithfulness) to ourselves today. God has certainly taken pains to insure the fruitfulness of each of us. In baptism we are grafted onto the life of God, so that we live with God’s energy. In the Eucharist we are further cultivated and enriched by the Lord. The other sacraments deal with various aspects of our lives, each sacrament expressing a particular aspect of the Lord’s care for us. Then there is God’s word in Scripture, which gives us light and direction. Our brothers and sisters in the Lord also serve to improve the quality of our lives in the Lord, affording us example and encouragement. God has every right to ask us, "What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done?"

And how faithful have we been, how responsive to God’s care for us - individually and as a community? Certainly none of us can say that we have responded fully to God’s initiative and that we have brought forth everything that God could have expected from us. There is still pettiness in our hearts, still injustice in our world, still lukewarm activity in the church. We tend to look out much more attentively for our own immediate well-being than for the productivity of God’s planting. We are all sinners.

What Isaiah said to the people of Jerusalem in the eighth century B.C., God’s word says to us today: "It’s about you that I am talking!"

For reflection and discussion

How conscious am I of God’s care for me?

Am I a fruitful vine in God’s vineyard?