The Parable of the Vinedressers

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“He went on to speak to them in parables. ‘A man planted a vineyard. He fenced it around, dug out a trough for the winepress, and built a tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went abroad.

‘When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them his share of the produce of the vineyard. But they seized the man, thrashed him, and sent him away empty-handed. Next he sent another servant to them; him they beat about the head and treated shamefully. And he sent another, and him they killed; then a number of others, and they thrashed some and killed the rest.

‘Yet he had still someone left: his beloved son. He sent him to them last of all, thinking, “They will respect my son.” But those tenants said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” So they seized him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard’” (Mark 12:1-8).

In this parable of the vinedressers, Our Lord sums up the whole history of salvation.

He compares Israel to a choice vineyard which God surrounds with a hedge and furnishes with a winepress. He builds a watchtower in which He places a guard to protect the vineyard from thieves and wild animals.

God did not fail to provide all the means possible for caring for the vineyard of His heart—His people—as had already been prophesied (Isa. 5:1-7).

The vinedressers in the parable are the leaders of the people of Israel; the owner is God, and the vineyard is Israel, the people of God.

The owner sends His servants time and again to collect His due of fruit from the vineyard, but each time they are badly treated. This was the mission of the prophets.

Finally, He sent His Son, the Beloved, thinking that they would respect Him.

We are shown here the difference between Jesus—the Son—and the prophets, who were servants.

The parable refers to Christ's transcendental and unique Sonship, and clearly expresses the divinity of Christ.

The vinedressers took Him, killed Him, and cast Him out of the vineyard, an explicit reference to the crucifixion, which took place outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Our Lord, who discreetly mentions Himself in the parable, must have spoken with great sorrow as He sees how He is to be rejected by those very people to whom He has come to bring salvation. They do not want Him.

Our Lord ends with the words of one of the Psalms: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner” (Ps. 118:22).

The leaders of Israel understood the clearly Messianic meaning of the parable and realized that it was directed against them. So they tried to arrest Him, but once again they feared the people.

St. Peter was to remember Our Lord's words when He came before the Sanhedrin, and the prophecy contained in the parable had already been fulfilled.

“Be it known to you all,” we are told in the Acts, “and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified ... This is the stone that was rejected by you builders, but which has become the head of the corner” (Acts 4:10-11).

Our Lord makes Himself the keystone which is the foundation and support of the whole building. This stone is essential to the Church and to each person: without it, the whole building would collapse.

The cornerstone affects the whole construction, our whole life—business affairs, interests, loves, time. Nothing is beyond the scope of what faith demands in the life of a Christian.

We are not disciples of Christ for a number of predetermined hours (for example, when we pray, or when we take part in some religious service) or just on special days.

The profound unity of life that being a Christian demands causes absolutely everything in our lives to be affected by the fact that we are followers of Christ. At the same time, this does not prevent things retaining their own nature.

Following Christ influences the very core of our personality.

When someone is in love, this fact influences their whole view of things and events, however trivial they might appear. Each person is influenced by it as they walk along the street, when they are at work, in their attitude towards social relationships—and not only when they are in the company of the person that they love.

Being a Christian is the most important characteristic of our existence, and it has to have incomparably more influence on our lives than even human love has on the most ardent of lovers.

Christ is the center of our lives and of our whole being. One writer says, “Let us imagine an architect who wants to construct the vault of an apse. He has to trace the whole circumference beginning with the key point—the center.

“Guiding himself by this infallible norm, he then has to calculate the exact circumference and the design of the whole building. … In this way, a single point becomes the fundamental key to an imposing building” (John Cassian, Conferences).

In a similar way, God is the point of reference of our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. We should want to build our very existence in relation to Him.

It is Christ who gives meaning to the way His followers think and live.

Our faith in Him gives us light by which to recognize the true reality of things and of events.

And so, it would not make sense if we were to set aside the supervening and determining fact that we are Christians whenever we have to judge a work of art or a political program, whenever we have to carry out some business deal or plan our holidays.

Although [the faithful follower of Christ] respects the autonomy of each discipline, the laws proper to each field of action and the broad freedom allowed to him in everything that is a matter of opinion, he does not consider any matter at all in only one of its aspects—whether that aspect be, for example, economic, say, or artistic, or cinematographic.

He does not simply accept that particular undertakings or projects are good without taking a broader view of them.

If due subordination to God is not respected in these undertakings, in those programs, or in that work of art, only one definitive overall assessment is possible—a negative one—however good their partial values may appear to be.

When it comes to doing a piece of business or accepting a particular job, a good Christian should not only look at what is financially to his advantage, but he must examine other aspects too.

Is it licit as regards the norms of morality? Does it cause good or harm to others?

He tries to evaluate the benefits such a business proposition or job will contribute to society.

If it is morally wrong or, at best, does not give good example, any other characteristic it may have—for example, providing a good income—do not turn it into a morally sound and therefore good transaction.

However advantageous a business opportunity may appear, if it's not morally right it is a very bad undertaking and one that may not be entered into by any follower of Christ.

Error is often presented decked out in the noble garments of art, science, or freedom.

But faith has to be, and indeed is, stronger than error.

It is the powerful light that enables us to see, lurking behind what appears to be good, the evil that lies hidden beneath the surface of an otherwise good literary work, of a beauty that conceals ugliness.

It is Christ who must be the cornerstone of every building.

We can ask Our Lord for His grace so that we might live in a way totally compatible and utterly coherent with our Christian faith.

In this way, we will never think of our faith as a limiting factor: ‘I can’t do this, I can’t go there.’

Rather it will be a light that enables us to recognize the reality of things and events, without ever forgetting that the devil will try to make an ally of human ignorance—which cannot see the complete reality contained in this literary work or in that doctrine—and of the pride and concupiscence that all of us drag along behind us.

Christ is the crucible that assays the gold that there is in human things.

Anything that does not stand up to the testing clarity of His teaching is a lie and deceptive, even though it may be adorned with the appearance of some attractive good or perfection.

If we make use of the criterion that this unity of life gives us—that of being and at all times knowing ourselves to be faithful disciples of Our Lord—we will be able to gather together many of the good things that men, who have been guided by right human criteria, have done and thought, and place them at the feet of Christ.

Without the light of faith, we would, as often as not, fail to detect and see through the rottenness by which we were at first deceived, since many such works do indeed possess some streak of goodness or of beauty.

If we want to have well-formed standards by which to discriminate and judge, while using the means to acquire them, we need to have a right will, which wants above all else to do the Will of God.

This explains why very ordinary simple people, plain folk of scant learning and perhaps with few natural talents, but possessed of a deep Christian faith, can have excellent criteria which enable them to form wise assessments of the various things that happen; whereas others, perhaps more highly cultured or even with far greater intellectual capacity, sometimes show a lamentable absence of sound judgment and make serious mistakes in the most elementary matters.

Unity of life, a habitually Christian way of life, enables us to judge with certainty, and to discover the true human value of things. Thus, we will sanctify all noble human realities and take them to Christ.

We can ask ourselves: In every situation, do I live in a way that is consistent with my faith and with my Christian vocation? When I make a decision, however large or small, do I keep in mind above all else what it is God wants of me?

We can try to see in which specific points God is asking us to behave in a more decisively Christian way.

A Christian who has built his life upon the cornerstone, who is Christ, has his own personality, has his own way of seeing the world and its happenings.

He has his own scale of values in relation to the world. He has a scale of values very different to that of a pagan, who does not live by faith and who has a purely worldly conception of things.

One writer says a weak and lukewarm Christian faith which exerts very little influence on ordinary life “can provoke in some people that kind of inferiority complex which manifests itself in an immoderate desire to ‘humanize’ Christianity, to ‘popularize’ the Church, to make it somehow seem to conform to the value-judgments prevalent in the world at a given time” (José Orlandis, What is it to be a Catholic?)

That is why, as well as being immersed in our secular activities, as Christians we need to be immersed in God through prayer, through the sacraments, through the sanctification of our daily work.

We need to be faithful disciples of Christ in the middle of the world, in our ordinary everyday life, with all the constant effort and hard decisions that entails.

Very often it might mean refusing to do something wrong, disagreeing with the superior, taking the pathway of conscientious objection, sticking to our values, never ever willing to do something that is wrong.

In this way we will be able to put into practice the advice that St. Paul gave to the first Christians in Rome when he alerted them to the risks of accommodating themselves to the pagan customs of the day: "Do not be conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2).

As students go through secondary school or through third-level education, this principle is something they need to imbibe because along the way, they may come up against all sorts of different challenges—challenges that demand that they take a different pathway to that which everybody else is taking, that unwillingness to participate in things that are wrong, even though they might be legal or they might be accepted behavior: “But for me I don't do those things.”

That refusal to conform can lead us to row against the current, to run the risk of being misunderstood by many of our contemporaries.

But Christ was very misunderstood. Christ got a very bad press.

We should not be worried about getting a bad press from this world, or too worried about what people may think or what people may say.

We are here to leave a legacy, to blaze a trail, to stand up for what is right, to live by our values.

A Christian has always to remember that they are the leaven (cf. Matt. 13:33) hidden in the lump of dough that has to be fermented by them.

God is the light that shines on all created reality and reveals the truth hidden within it. He is the lighthouse whose beacon-beam directs navigators on whichever sea they steer their course.

The Second Vatican Council says, “The Church...believes that the key, the center, and the purpose of the whole of man's history is to be found in its Lord and Master” (cf. Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, Point 10, December 7, 1965).

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the country in the world that had the lowest maternal mortality rate—which is the mortality rate for women in pregnancy from any cause—was Ireland.

At that time abortion was illegal, which was a bit of an embarrassment to UNICEF because the country with the lowest maternal mortality rate in the world had no abortion—more or less proving that abortion is never necessary to save the lives of women.

One of the professors who brought about that situation in the country, and put Christian principles into practice and scientific principles in his professional work, told me that when they were training in England in the 1940s and 1950s, when there was a difficult case—a hypertensive mother, an asthmatic mother, a diabetic mother—the treatment was to abort the baby.

He said, “As Catholics we couldn't participate in those things. When we came back to Ireland—Catholic country with Catholic laws— those things were illegal. We had to turn around and learn how to treat the asthmatic mother, and the diabetic mother, and bring her through pregnancy and through labor—which was all the more complicated—and deliver a healthy mother and a healthy baby at the end.”

He said that approach, coupled with the high birth rate there was in the country at the time, led to enormous advances in obstetrical medicine, in neonatal medicine, in the management of labor.

That particular hospital became a world center, blazed a trail. His punchline was, “Sometimes we can have a bit of an inferiority complex in this world because we say ‘No’ to abortion, ‘No’ to contraception, ‘No’ to euthanasia.

“But,” he said, “we have the truth. And when we apply the truth, in research, in science, in other areas of our professional life, then we come up with a real development.”

These were very powerful words from an eminent professor of obstetrics.

Our Lord continues to be the cornerstone of every person's life. Any building constructed without Christ is built in vain.

We can consider whether the faith we profess is coming to bear more and more influence on our existence, on the way we view the world and mankind, and on the way we behave.

We want to conduct ourselves so that through our actions, all people may really come to know Christ, to follow His doctrine, and to love Him.

Our Lady was praised: “‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast that nourished you.’ Our Lord said: ‘Rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it’” (Luke 11:27-28).

Ultimately, He was raising Our Lady, lifting her up, because she was the one who most heard the Word of God and kept it.

Mary, may you help us to listen with the ear of our heart to the Word of God and to put it into practice in all of our professional affairs.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JM