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A different interpretation of today’s Gospel would have the landowner be a rich, absentee land baron who gobbled up the property of poor people and then hired them and paid them far less than what the market called for. One of the reasons the peasants would have lost their land was due to the exorbitant taxes levied by the Roman Empire. While Jesus was not advocating violence, He told this Sunday’s parable as a way of identifying with the indentured people who saw in Him someone who accepted them as they were and reaffirmed them as God’s beloved. The violence in the story was a symbol warning the Empire and super rich that their brutally possessive and entitled ways would be their downfall. We might ponder how this message speaks to what is going on today.

Our Psalm this Sunday has us asking God to do certain things for us. It is always interesting how some of our prayers seem to presume that God needs us to remind Him how to be God. For instance, our Psalm Response is, “Remember your mercies, O Lord.” The first two stanzas of this Sunday’s Psalm continue on this theme. We ask that God make known to us God’s paths. We ask that God guide us in God’s truth. We ask God to remember that God’s compassion and love are ages old. In the third and final stanza, we get to praying that the Lord is good and upright because He shows sinners the way and guides the humble to justice. As we pray these words, let us turn the tables a bit and remind ourselves of who God is and how God is interested only in guiding us to live fully in gratitude for all the gifts that God freely shares with us. May we find ourselves sharing them as freely as God blesses us with them.

My main theology professor would occasionally draw a vertical line on the board and write the word “God” on one side of the line and the words “Not God” on the other. For a considerable length of time, I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say. It was probably my sense of grandiosity that blinded me from the profound truth made clear in this weekend’s first reading and Gospel. God’s ways and thoughts are not the way I act and think. Through the years I have grown in humility, meaning that I have been much more accepting of the truth about myself, God and all other people. While God might have given me the talents I have, I am in the end equal to everyone else in the eyes of God. I don’t need to feel cheated when someone else seems to have advantages or benefits that I don’t. And, I am more likely now to realize, with gratitude, that there are things I am good at that others might find more difficult and challenging.

Our second reading for this Sunday includes these words “if we live, we live for the Lord…we are the Lord’s.” These words are hopefully reassuring as we continue our unique walk through COVID-19, a broken economy, strife in the streets, as well as concerns about the upcoming national election. Through it all, we renew our faith and feel consoled that our lives are a gift to ourselves and hopefully gifts to many others. We do our best to relate with one another as God’s most holy and sacred beings. We have great intrinsic value that we pray we will give expression to. Doing so will hopefully connect us with each other as we find every way possible to join together. Our goal, in collaboration with God, is to pray that our example will encourage others who are not so sure or not sure at all of their precious identity to come to know themselves more assuredly as God’s cherished delight.

In this weekend’s second reading, St. Paul reminds us to love one another. He asks us to ponder that a person who is loved does not do evil to another. As we continue to slog our way through the challenges we face day after day, we pray that we regularly and consistently look into the depths of our being where the love of God has dwelled since our conception. As we allow our God who comforts to smile on us, we pray that we can be a light of hope and healing for our world that is broken and in pain. We embrace as fully as possible our mission to be people who choose to look for and affirm every positive we can point to, if for no other reason than we have been created by our all-loving God. We develop every way possible to honor the dignity we enjoy as a sister or brother of our Divine Savior. We choose to lift up in thanksgiving even the smallest act of kindness so that God can bless us anew and empower us to keep ourselves anchored in the richness of God’s grace.