Friday of the Second Week in Lent 2026
Two questions seem to obsess the writers of the Book of Genesis. The first question, “How did our people get to be slaves in Egypt?” The second, “How did our people escape slavery by the Egyptians?” To the first, the answer was “Joseph the patriarch was really, really smart.” To the second, the answer was “Pharaoh was really, really stupid.” The stories of Genesis and Exodus flowed from that self-understanding. Joseph was daddy’s favorite son, but his brothers, Reuben and Judah and the rest, were really mean and jealous, so they sold Joseph to Arab traders, who then sold him to an Egyptian nobleman. The tales of Joseph and his kindred then filtered through the ballads of the family and eventually got coded for the family history. What always came through, however, is that their God was in control of the whole process, and engineered each encounter so as to make Joseph “lord of Pharaoh’s house and ruler of all his stuff.”
Jesus knew all the tales of the Jewish people, and He also knew the prophecies of Isaiah and the other prophets. St. Matthew records a story from the last week before Jesus went to His salvific death. He told a parable that could not have been misunderstood. This landowner, who in the prophetic literature was always a signal for the lord God, had a vineyard he invested lots of capital into. He was an absentee, so each year around harvest he sent servants to obtain his share of the crop. But the tenants were crooked; they seized the emissaries and abused them, and ultimately even seized and injured and killed the landowner’s son, thinking they would forge some documents and take ownership themselves. Jesus then asked His listeners what would happen next. They answered the obvious: “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.”
Just in case His hearers might miss the obvious, Jesus then quoted psalm 118, and predicted that the stone rejected by the builders had become the cornerstone of a new structure. That was to become the Church Jesus intended to build out of the living stones of His disciples. We’ll sing refrains from that wonderful Halel psalm from the Paschal celebration all the way to the end of the Church year. “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His faithfulness endures forever.”
