In the Gospel Reading for today, 5 Oct 2014, the Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary time, Jesus tells a parable about some tenant farmers and their land owner.
The tenants are supposed to steward the land and provide a potion of the fruits of the land to the landowner.
Those ungrateful tenants beat and kill his messengers on two occasions at least, and when he sends his son to them, they kill him as well.
Jesus asks what the landowner will do to those evil tenants. They respond “He will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times.”
Jesus then quotes Psalm 118 to them: The stone rejected by the builders...
Was "the stone rejected by the builders" the refusal of the tenants to deliver the fruit of the land to the landowner? Jesus says give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.
Is this the echo we should hear? Or is it the judgement of his listeners "He will put those wretched men to a wretched death" that is the rejection of the stone?
This question arises because of how this parable is fulfilled in the Passion. Jesus, the heir, is taken outside the city and killed brutally. What is the response of Jesus? What is the response of Our Father? Who among us is without sin? Who among us is not redeemed by the passion, death and resurrection of Christ? Are we not all those wretched tenants?
What is God's reaction or response to us? How dissimilar it is to the one predicted by Jesus' listeners.
They were so wrong they rejected the cornerstone of the the Temple, the place with which all other features are aligned. As Paul wrote "if God is for us who shall condemn?"
Jesus, the living bread come down from Heaven, is the Mercy of God. He is the cornerstone of the Temple (the Church), and of our lives. He says in John's Gospel "God so loved the world that he gave* his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life."
The stone rejected is Jesus, the Word of God. The stone rejected is Jesus, the mercy of God. The stone rejected is Jesus, who brings to fruition in us the work already begun.
In the end we must not reject the stone, but offer to Our Father, who holds our lives in his hands, who called us to life, in whom we live and move and have our being, the fruit of our lives, our labors, our loves. We must give to God what is God's.
For when he is revealed in his glory he will separate all the people of every nation as a shepherd separates the sheep and the goats. There are only two groups and essentially only one choice -- the blessing and the curse -- life and prosperity or death and doom.
Eternal life is to know the only true God and Jesus Christ who is the way the truth and the life. To choose Jesus is to choose life. To choose Jesus is to choose Mercy, and receiving mercy we become filled with mercy.
What we have received as a gift, let us freely give.
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