God's Disappointment (27th Sunday Ordinary A)

As a young priest then, I had been given a rare opportunity to start a parish out of a rural community. The enthusiasm of the parishioners was its greatest asset.  But the material and financial resources needed to begin though gave me anxious and sleepless nights. I wrote to friends asking for help and, you see, the blessings came in pouring! Hence, the parish gradually took off quite decently. This privileged experience of being blessed with supportive friends awakened in me a deep sense of gratitude and faith in the abiding presence of God. Once in the silence of the night, I prayed in tears thanking God for the privilege.

Blessings are meant to stir up in us the sense of gratitude, service and worship. But I am aware too that blessings and privileges can lead us to opposite directions. They can be intoxicating like any other good things in life.  They can lead us to a sense of entitlement instead of gratitude. When this happens we begin to demand rather than serve; we crave for more blessings and privileges no longer as a gift but as a matter of right. We enjoy and love them even more than we enjoy and love the Giver Himself, the God of providence. If we allow this to happen, we end up a real disappointment to God.

Jesus, in today’s gospel (Mt. 21:33-43), narrates another parable to express his disappointment with the religious leaders and elders of the people of Israel.  The Parable of the Tenants is a criticism of their leadership. Symbolized by the tenants, they were the ones entrusted with the care of “the vineyard”-- the chosen people of God.  The privilege of being the guardian of the elect people of God intoxicated them.  They began to act as if they own the vineyard. They refused to give an accounting of their produce to the owner and worse, they rejected and killed the owner’s emissaries and even the Son himself.  The parable shows the fact that the Jewish religious leaders forgot their true mandate—to bring the people of God to authentic worship and fidelity to God’s covenant with them. They were so blinded by their revered religious position that they rejected the prophets’ call for reform. They rejected even Jesus and his proclamation of the Kingdom of God. In short, they were a real disappointment.  The privileges given them ought to be revoked: “Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit” (v. 43).

The privilege of the special election of the people of Israel was supposedly a blessing that ought to bring out a grateful response that leads to faithfulness in God’s will.  But, alas, this did not transpire. They were so engrossed with the privilege and their sense of entitlement that they grew oblivious of the God who elected them and made them special.

Moving beyond the original intent of the parable, I believe we can appropriate its challenge for us today.  Are we not disappointing God with how we manage every form of blessing and privilege he has entrusted to us? Looking around, I’m afraid I have to say that God must be disappointed.

God shares with us his abundance.  Wealth is a gift and a blessing. It ensures that we all live in dignity. But people tend to hoard this blessing only for the elite few. The gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. So that some are living in luxury while others are subjected to subhuman conditions for want of basic necessities in life.  God’s abundance is also manifested in creation. If we look at our natural resources, we have exploited it without qualms. Our unbridled consumerism and wasteful lifestyle are taking their toll on the sustainability of creation. Did we not hear it said that we need four planets like Earth for us to catch up with the on-going feverish demand of our consumption?

God shares with us his power and authority.  These are necessary for the service of the common good. But look how we have been misusing these blessings as the very force that sustains and builds up the culture of corruption in every nook and cranny of the corridors of power. See how we have transformed these very blessings into a Machiavellian principle of oppressing the weak in order to perpetuate self-aggrandizement. 

God gives us the blessing of human sexuality that we may have the capacity for intimate relationship and to be God’s co-creator.  But we have allowed this sacred gift to deteriorate into a lucrative commodity in pornography and prostitution.  We want to enjoy the pleasure it brings but we deliberately avoid the procreative responsibility for which it is naturally meant. And what more, our societies have enshrined into law the basis for contraceptive mentality and culture of “safe sex” in the guise of concern for the plight of the poor!  

We can go on and on with a litany of blessings and privileges God has conferred on us and come to an honest assessment that God is most likely disappointed with us. It’s good to ask this on a personal level:  What are the blessings and privileges that I am enjoying in life? Have these led me to a grateful disposition and hence to a loving service of God’s people and intimate relationship with God?

Let us not push God to the end of his rope.  When God is disappointed with us, we ought to remember that He who confers can take back the blessings and privileges when these no longer serve their rightful purpose.