Today’s readings: Isaiah 5, 1-7; Philippians 4, 6-9; Matthew 21, 33-43.

There is expectation for the forthcoming letter by Pope Francis where he is offering a sketch of a post-COVID world. As he has often repeated these recent months, “the pandemic is a crisis, and we don’t come out of a crisis the same way: we come out better or we come out worse”. He points to the “healing process” needed in the face of the “wider social pathologies” that have now emerged.

There is a striking balance between this and today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah. In the words of Isaiah, when the Lord’s vineyard, which he loves so much, goes astray and yields sour grapes instead of grapes, he goes surgical. “I will take away its hedge for it to be grazed on, and knock down its wall for it to be trampled on. I will lay it waste, unpruned, undug; overgrown by the briar and the thorn.”

God’s cure is radical and knows no compromise. The healing process needed calls for evangelical discernment on our part to understand what is happening in God’s vineyard, which is the world out there, and what is happening to God’s Church sent out in the vineyard to be a sign and instrument of God’s love for humanity.

God so loved the world He created that He wants it healed. As today’s gospel parable reminds us, if the Church fails to bring this healing, then the task will be given to others. This parable from Matthew is a variation on the same theme that Matthew is hammering on through his gospel, always addressing the ecclesiastical powers-that-be.

Like those Matthew is addressing, we in the West are the seasoned owners of the Christian faith, and on various counts, judging from present-day world and Church scenarios, we are failing to safeguard the freshness and the forcefulness of the Gospel. In plain words, and without acknowledging it, we may still be ‘rejecting the stone’ that is the keystone of the entire building. Maybe we are building on rubble instead of the keystone who is Jesus Christ.

The world, which is supposed to be our common home, is full of homeless people; the vineyard, fertile and planted with choice vines, is becoming a wasteland. And we still pretend to close our eyes as if nothing is happening and prefer the securities of traditionalism. As at ‘vintage time’, the Lord is still sending warning signs and prophets, and systematically we still silence them.

The problem with the chief priests and elders at the time of Jesus was that they believed they knew it all and nothing new could be revealed to them by God. That seems to be our problem as well. The Church needs to go back to its sources because there is so much in what we do that is not in sync with the Gospel mandate. It is hard to admit that, like the tenants of the vineyard in today’s gospel, we still “seize (the Son) and throw him out of the vineyard and kill him”.

Our liturgies are not always guiding people to connect with God; our mission is not making disciples; the vineyard, as a consequence, is still yielding sour grapes instead of grapes. In the words of Isaiah, “He expected justice, but found bloodshed, integrity, but only a cry of distress”. We cannot live in a bubble, creating our comforting spirituality and being not the least troubled by the bloodshed and distress that turns God’s vineyard in a wasteland.

It is becoming urgent for us believers to take stock of all this. Otherwise we would be missing the whole point for which we as Church exist in the first place. The ‘evangelical discernment’ Pope Francis calls for is not pure sociological analysis but has to go deeper than that to identify the treatment needed for a holistic healing of the world and Church alike.