Fr. John O’Callaghan: Today’s gospel is a parable about God’s people and their leaders, before and after the coming of Christ. The Old Testament reading depicts a vineyard that is rundown and unproductive. The scene Isaiah evokes is what you might see at this time of year in France– bare hills of ugly stumps and stalks where not long ago grew vines abundant with red or green grapes. The dead stumps are crooked, narrow and easily broken, only good to be thrown on the fire. And Isaiah is saying that this is what God’s people has become, unfruitful and moribund. It is quite an evocative image.
The gospel picks up that image but focuses on those responsible for overlooking the vineyard so that it produces good fruit. These tenants, we know, stand for the chief priests and Jewish elders. They are the ones who have not given proper leadership to God’s people; it is they who will ultimately hand Jesus over for crucifixion. We are told “They wanted to arrest Jesus [right then] but were afraid of the crowds who looked on him as a prophet.” But they did get Jesus arrested and killed later on! Our parable condemns those leaders for negligent, corrupt and indeed murderous behaviour, saying that “the Kingdom of God will be taken from [them] and given to a people who will produce its fruit’.
So our gospel is about regime change, changing the leadership from those chief priests & scribes to Christ and his teaching; that means changing a list of endless rules and regulations, for something that gets to the heart of human life, so that we might be a true ‘people of God’, a gleaming vineyard producing abundant good fruit.
Signs of such leadership were very much in evidence over the last week, and in France! Pope Leo set down a few markers: at the United Nations Headquarters for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) he identified the very foundation of ‘human rights’; it is biblical and I quote: ‘the future depends (first and foremost) on the need to respect and promote the inalienable dignity inherent in every man and woman created in God’s image’. Leo went on to apply this to end-of-life care. France has just passed a bill, as you may know, permitting patients to end their lives by injecting themselves with lethal drugs, or having a doctor or nurse do it for them. Instead let Christians help people to live well to a natural end! in the great tradition of Irish hospice care.
When speaking of Artificial Intelligence Pope Leo joined with many of today’s AI innovators calling for measures to ‘ensure’ that new technologies remain at the service of the human person, supporting education, and relationships rather than becoming instruments of domination and injustice’. Let us take this principle seriously: keep thinking for yourself and edit any AI generated work before you hand it up. If we don’t control technology, it will control us. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu!
In the ‘Stade de France’ Pope Leo acknowledged the 80,000 ‘ardent young people, packed to capacity, and committed to countless (Christian) initiatives’. Encouraging them, the ‘saints of France’, and I quote, “to take up with responsibility the task of promoting peace – in your hearts, in your relationships, in your families, schools and universities, in your cities and countries and throughout all of Europe.”
In sum Leo XIV’s teaching was expressing the so-called ‘social doctrine of the church’ as expressed in the many encyclicals published since that of Pope Leo XIII in 1891. Leo’s own ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ is worth a read.
So it is now over to us: our mission is in the world and for the whole human family. We have examples set before us – none better than Saint Francis of Assisi, whose feast day it is today. He, and the Order he founded, have shown that the touchstone by which we can assess our commitment is the care we take of the least privileged. May we follow his example, both locally and globally, as the true people of God, and thus bear abundant fruit!