Friday of the Second Week of Lent 2025
St. Matthew’s Gospel is moving toward its climax, which is called Holy Week. Frequently we see Jesus crossing swords verbally with his adversaries. Jesus was an out-of-towner, considered a religious zealot and “hick” by the secular and religious authorities in Jerusalem. Jesus is acting solely out of the charity that overflows His Sacred Heart, as always, but what He declares, even in parables, has a sharp edge that is perfectly prophetic. He is helping His listeners to permit, even encourage, God’s grace to circumcise their hearts. He wants them to become more like Himself, more like the good God who loves the world so much that He would give everything for our salvation.
Jesus today deliberately invokes the memory of the prophet Isaiah. In his fifth chapter, the OT prophet tells the story of the vineyard, carefully planted by the vine manager who is clearly Adonai—God. He takes care of the vines and comes looking at the harvest for the sweet grapes to make the best wine, but it has only sour grapes good for compost or cheap vinegar. God had made more than one covenant with His chosen people, but the whole people of Isaiah’s day, with rare exceptions, had disobeyed every one of His commandments, worshiping false gods, even offering those demons their children in sacrifice. He looked to His vineyard, His people, for justice, but He saw only bloodshed. His beloved Israel had turned away in the whole from right worship and right behavior.
In the time of Jesus, the people of Israel, the Jews, had given up the old pagan idols of silver and gold, but their leaders had become corrupt, the priests and Levites and Pharisees were managing the Law and the Temple for their own economic benefit. Gold coin had become their new god. They had, moreover, abandoned their mission of attracting the nations to right living and right worship, even filling the Court of the Nations in the Temple with merchant stalls and money-changers.
Thus Jesus reworks the old parable of the vineyard to fit the new barbarism. He directs the moral at the human vineyard managers, the religious and secular men who treat the Law and Temple as their personal fiefdom. Now the religious elite are mere tenant farmers for the grapes, and the absentee landlord sends representatives to sample and take most of the harvest. But His employees are disrespected big time. They are beaten and even killed, just like the OT prophets. Finally, the landlord-God-sends someone the tenants must respect, and here we see Jesus taking off His mask. He is not just a prophet, He is the Son of God. But the stupid tenants think if they kill Him, they will inherit the whole acreage. Jesus tells the story, and then asks His miscreant listeners what the landlord’s next step will be? “They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.’" The Pharisees and Sadducees and the other Jewish leaders must pass sentence on themselves.
Jesus then opens His mental Scriptures to the psalm we number as 118. This psalm was used from the earliest days of the Church to paint a picture of the kingdom of God and the new temple. He says, "Have you never read in the scriptures: `The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes'? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it."
Our Gospel today is then edited to skip over verse 44, perhaps to make the whole teaching easier to understand. I don’t buy that. Here’s what it says, “And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.”
Jesus was a stumbling block for all the Jewish leaders. St. John’s Gospel records (probably from the memory of a member of the Sanhedrin like Nicodemus) that the high priest lobbied for the death of this troublemaker. After all, if His movement spread, their authority from the Romans would probably be taken away, and they’d have to move out of their big villas. Less power means less money. But in the Father’s plan, Jesus would be arrested, testify to His identity as Messiah and Lord, and then go down to death by being raised up on a cross. He would die the death of a slave; one cannot go any lower in the first century. But God gets the last word in the Resurrection of Christ, His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and His gift of the Holy Spirit. Then instead of one Christ attracting attention and preaching God’s word and showing God’s compassion with miraculous signs, there would be dozens, then thousands, and ultimately millions of Christ-like people, filled with the Spirit and sharing the Gospel. Right worship and right living would multiply.
In light of the eventual passion, death and raising up of Jesus, consider the story of Joseph, favored son of Israel. His brothers were so jealous of the favor their father showed to him that they plotted to kill him and make up a story to tell their dad. Instead, they sold him as a slave to foreigners for a sum of silver, and Joseph went down to Egypt. There, God executed one of His famous reversals of fortune and Joseph ended up as the grand vizier of the whole of Egyptian territory, and although he had the chance for revenge on his brothers, he showed them favor when they and their families were about to starve. If that doesn’t remind you of God the Father giving us His only-begotten Son, you need to go home and as your homework, read all the Jacob and Joseph stories in Genesis, to help you get ready for Holy Week and Easter.
