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September 21, 2020
Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM
The Gospels, like teachers, often propose a contrast – wise and foolish virgins, publican and Pharisee, weeds and wheat, hidden and revealed, light and dark, truth and falsehood, spirit and flesh, sinful and forgiven, blind and seeing, lame and walking, mute and speaking, confused and understanding, first and last.
Paul is overwhelmed and inspired by the contrast between divine glory and the humility of Jesus, between the greatness of God and Jesus’ slave-like self-abasement. Jesus embraces all of human experience, including death in its most painful and shameful form, death by torture. Instead of grasping at power to command, Jesus surrenders to the destiny that every human being gives up control over life and dies. He is obedient, self-effacing. Jesus does not seek to escape the imperfect, vulnerable human condition with its wretched and forlorn depths of suffering. How well the sisterhood of women knows this emptying, powerlessness, humiliation, grinding down, and violence. For Paul, death turns to life, shame to recognition, namelessness to heroism, destruction to transformation.
The Gospel lesson of two sons, which appears only in Matthew, seems trivial by contrast. What’s the significance of dad telling both sons to go out to work on the family farm today? Isn’t that what any dad would tell any teen who knows he’s part of the family business? It’s a non-question, the contrast is so obvious.
This raises the ethical question: Aren’t there degrees of importance to what God asks and to what I then count myself “obedient”? And what does it matter if a son gets distracted and says, “Yeah, yeah,” but puts off doing it right away because he told his mom he’d help her tend the sheep and goats today? In other words, on the way to doing the right thing, I might be doing other good things. What if moms made it a matter of eternal salvation if their teens either cleaned up or didn’t clean up their rooms when she frustratedly directed, “Pick up your room, NOW!”
In other words, what’s so bad if there’s a delay in perfect compliance? What kind of God is demanding our strict obedience to the rightest of right paths on a daily timetable, and with what change of heart? What relationship exists and is growing over time between the child and the parent? Fear, love, confidence, growing appreciation and loving identity? St. Augustine, who wrote a lot more theology than any Gospel writer, confesses that he prayed earlier in his life, “O God, give me chastity, but not yet.”
I think this is the point of Jesus. Don’t be so quick to condemn prostitutes and tax collectors, the children who seemed to have said no – or ourselves for failures to live up to what we imagine is a cash-register God tracking each yes or no. Don’t pass judgment on the externally sinful, and think you are the only ones who are obedient and doing what God wants. Delay does not mean disobedience. Change of heart unfolds.
Some of those morally deviant people you condemn changed their lives for the better when they heard John the Baptist preaching. You heard him too, but you kept your distance. Was he too eccentric for your tastes? Too threatening for your sense of tradition – with his rejection of the Jerusalem religious institution? He’d walked out on the respectable company of priests and elders, so did he offend you? He ate grasshoppers instead of priest’s bread and meat. He embarrassed people, wearing goat skins instead of a linen tunic. Did you worry what would happen to your political fortunes if you let anyone know you were inspired by his message, that you felt closer to God when you listened to him?
This can’t be the end of the story of who turns out to be the obedient child, who enters the kingdom of heaven. The parable is surely not the last time God says, “My child, go out to work in the vineyard today. What is mine is yours.”
Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM, is a Sister of Mercy, a Ph.D. theologian, and an attorney in private practice, mostly in family law. She lives in San Jose.