Getting Ready to Pray                     

At the end of parties or dinners there is an almost liturgical feature. It is the sending out ceremony, which can take lots of time. The guests do not just get up, grab their coats, say “thank you” and close the door.

Instead, there is a “lingering” and the saying of kind words and finally there are promises to get together soon and/or that calls back and forth will happen. There can be kisses, hugs, handshakes as well, and all this takes time.

The object of a gathering is a closeness or intimacy among friends which encourages the participants in the living of their lives. There is an afterwards to a party or dinner, a nourishment of the body, but even more of the spirit to enact living relationally, rather than in isolation.

The Eucharistic celebration ends with a “sending” statement by the presider or deacon, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The community accepts that mission by its response of thanks to God for that invitation. At many parishes there is a communal lingering for this, in social halls, vestibules, and in places actually called, “Gathering Spaces.”

People have been given their traveling instructions and return their collective agreement with enthusiasm. They say thanks, not that the Eucharistic liturgy is ended, but that the relationships will continue in the “afterness” of the Sacred Meal.

Some Thoughts 

In today’s First Reading we hear a poem from the beginning of Isaiah’s prophetic ministry to Israel. The basic image is a vine planted in a field with great care. The nation Israel is often seen by various prophets as a choice vine. The prophet’s friend is the God who has called Isaiah and who had given Israel a fertile land and planted them there, with great saving love.

The planter is pictured as expecting great crops of tasty fruit, but God finds sour grapes not good for wine-making. God uses the words of the prophet to tell the House of Israel that, because of their lack of justice and living of the laws, they will be trampled and not defended any longer by God. The image is clear. Then God steps from behind the image and announces what is going to happen. The land will be invaded while Israel will go into exile.

The Gospel is more an allegory than a parable. The story Jesus tells is also about an owner planting a vineyard. All the features and characters in the story are accounted for in real life. Jesus is speaking directly to and about the “chief priests and elders of the people.” They would be quite familiar with the image of Israel as a planted vine or vineyard. They are the “tenants” and the “hedge” is the Law of Moses. The “winepress” is the very land given to Israel after the Exodus and forty years in the desert. The “tower” is the sacred place of God’s presence in the temple within Jerusalem. Worship of God in the temple was their celebration of being protected by God.

Keeping the Law, caring for the land, and liturgical purification and worship rites were the good fruits. Prophets, “servants” were sent to announce to the people their failings as well as instructions about right living. Matthew relies on his listeners knowledge of the history of prophets in Israel. They had been stoned, imprisoned and killed. At last the owner sends his own son whom the leaders throw outside the vineyard and kill him as well.

Matthew is reminding his listeners that all this is the Lord’s doing and it has been and will be “wonderful in our eyes.” There is no ambiguity in this story. The priests and elders hear that they are considered as rejected leaders of God’s people. It is important to be aware that Jesus, here in Matthew’s Gospel, is not picturing God as rejecting Israel and the Jews: Jesus and the disciples are Israelites themselves.

What we are to hear is the deep love that God, the owner, has for the people, and that this love is given so that there will be fruitfulness within the vineyard of God.

When we experience our imperfections, we assume that God, for eternity, will be collecting us in the weed pile. We can be smothered by the locusts of materialistic greed which devour simplicity and gratitude. It is difficult to offer our faces to the warmth of the sun when we are burdened with the discouraging pulls of the earthly gravitational discouragement.

The beauty of the flower and the tastiness of the fruit are rooted in the dirt, which the dirt-owner has embraced so that there would be beauty and life.

The Lord is good to those who hope in him,
to those who are searching for his love.
Lamentations 3:25