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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes
Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-43.
AIM: To help the hearers see how much God has given us, and hence how much he espects from us.
Jesus had a way of seizing people’s attention at once. He spoke about things that vitally interested people. Today he might speak about the Iraq war, affirmative action, the death penalty, abortion, feminism, illegal immigration — all subjects about which most people have strong opinions.
A matter about which people in Jesus’ day felt strongly was the amount of land in Palestine owned by foreigners. Jesus’ fellow Jews resented the windfall profits reaped by wealthy tycoons in far-off Rome from some of the most fertile property in the country, while those to whom the land rightly belonged often had difficulty eking out a bare existence. The story we have just heard about tenant farmers who mistreated the agents of an absentee landowner may have been based on an actual case familiar to Jesus’ hearers.
Three details in the story would immediately have seized the attention of anyone familiar with the Hebrew scriptures: the hedge around the vineyard, the wine press, the watchtower. All three details are mentioned in Isaiah’s tale of his friend’s vineyard which we heard in our first reading. Jesus’s hearers were familiar with that passage from Isaiah. They knew that the vineyard in that passage was a parable of God’s loving care for his people, and of their ungrateful response. Isaiah is quite specific about this. He represents God as saying: “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I had not done? Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes?”
Isaiah used the parable to expose the ingratitude of God’s people for all the care he had lavished on them, and to warn them that a day of reckoning was coming. The warning came from God himself: “Now, I will let you know what I mean to do with my vineyard …
I will make it a ruin.”
In retelling the familiar story, Jesus makes it clear that Isaiah’s day of reckoning is now at hand. The religious leaders of his people are about to reject him. Up to now they have held back because of Jesus’ popularity with the crowds. Now, however, the small ruling clique is becoming bolder. Jesus gives them a final, solemn warning: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”
Is that all long ago and far away? Don’t you believe it! Jesus’ warning is as up-to-date as the morning headlines. It contains lessons for us today: for our country, for us American Catholics, for each of us personally.
First, the warning for our country. Few nations have been so blessed by God as ours. We are rich in natural resources, and rich in the diversity of races, nations, and tongues which have come to these shores seeking a new and better life. For more than two centuries two protecting oceans enabled us to develop a largely unpeopled continent. For most of our country’s history we were able to work out our national destiny little troubled by struggles elsewhere. Even today the United States, despite all our problems, remains the richest and most powerful country on earth — since the fall of communism in 1989 the world’s only superpower. Jesus’ parable warns us that all this wealth and power will be taken from us, and given to others, if we are not willing to share with those less fortunate than ourselves the abundance God has given us.
The parable is also a warning to us American Catholics. The position of influence we enjoy in the Church, because of our numbers and financial resources, will be taken away from us and given to Catholics in Third World countries, if our Catholicism is complacent, conventional, and lukewarm — while theirs is dynamic, daring, enthusiastic.
In 1974, thirty-four years ago now, a Capuchin Franciscan priest from Switzerland, Fr. Walbert Bühlmann, wrote a book which the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner called “the Catholic book of the year.” It was called The Coming of the Third Church. Bühlmann’s “Third Church” was the church of the Third World: Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia. By the end of the twentieth century, Bühlmann said, most of the world’s Catholics would live in the southern hemisphere. The older churches of Europe and North America would no longer rank first. Bühlmann’s prophecy has proved correct. The next Pope could well come from Latin America, from Africa, or from Asia.
For each of us personally Jesus’ parable is a warning that merely conventional, formal religion is not enough. And our religion is conventional if all it means, at bottom, is fulfilling a list of “minimum obligations”: dropping in at Sunday Mass to get our card punched, avoidance of serious sin, but not much beyond that: little generosity, little love or consideration for others, because we’re too busy looking after Number One. How much would a marriage be worth in which the spouses were merely concerned to fulfil their “minimum obligations” to one another? Think about it!
In the great family of God which we call the Catholic Church God lavishes on us treasures beyond counting: all his truth, all his goodness, power, and love (the theologians call it “grace”). He looks for our answering love in return. The treasures God bestows on us are meant to be used, not put away for safe-keeping. They are to be shared, not hoarded. If we fail to pass on to others what God so generously give to us, we shall lose God’s gifts. We can’t keep them, unless we give them away. That is what Jesus’ warning words mean: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”
Someone has said: It doesn’t take much of a person to be a Catholic Christian. But it does take all of him — or her — that there is!
* * *
All He Ever Wanted
By Robert P. Imbelli | OCTOBER 6, 2008
No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace
By John Jay Hughes Tate Publishing. 344p $19.99 (paperback)
In his most affective and affecting epistle, St. Paul wrote to the Philippians: “I give thanks to my God for all my memories of you” (Phil 1:3). Paul’s eucharistic remembering came repeatedly to mind while reading the Rev. John Jay Hughes’s lovely and moving autobiography, No Ordinary Fool. Calling to mind and narrating the events of his life—the sorrow of his mother’s death when he was but six years old, the emotional and spiritual closeness to his Anglican priest father, his own ordination to the priesthood as an Episcopalian and subsequent reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church, his painful alienation from his beloved father, his fruitful scholarly and pastoral ministry—all this and more Hughes celebrates as a testimony to grace.
As a precocious and sensitive child, the loss of his mother at so early an age had and continues to have an indelible impact. He says simply: “From this blow I have never recovered. I belong today to the walking wounded.”
Yet, from this unfathomable sorrow there came a conviction of grace. Let me allow Hughes to recount the decisive occurrence in his own voice:
I can no longer recall the exact day when I discovered God in the
darkness. I can fix it, however, before the age of nine. One day I
realized the parting was not forever. With blinding certainty it came
home to me that I would see my mother again, when God called me
home. From that day to this the unseen spiritual world—the world
of God, of the angels, of the saints, and of our beloved dead — has
been real to me…. Decades later I realized that this insight was the
beginning of my priestly vocation.
Hughes spent six happy years as a priest in the Anglican Communion, mostly in parish ministry. Four aspects of that priestly service continue to characterize his approach to priestly ministry to this day. They have relevance not only for priests, but for all those seeking to respond generously to the Lord’s call.
First, early in his ministry he made a commitment to tithe whatever income he received. To his surprise he found the practice of tithing not a burden, but a source of blessing. He writes: “Since it is based on faith (trusting that our needs will be taken care of if we give away the first portion of our income), it deepens faith. It enables us to use money sacramentally, by making something material a vehicle of the spiritual—gratitude.”
Second, Hughes soon became convinced of the need for a sustained prayer life as the soil of fruitful ministry and, indeed, of all growth in Christ. Moreover, this discipline must be practiced in season and out of season, whatever feelings of consolation or desolation accompany one’s prayer. As he writes wisely: “Neglect of this fundamental truth is the root cause of much of the Church’s present difficulties.”
Third, from teenage years the practice of confession has been crucial to his spiritual life. Indeed, one of the sorrows he experienced in becoming Roman Catholic before the Second Vatican Council was that he did not hear pronounced the consoling words of absolution, which he had heard and rejoiced in as an Episcopalian. Instead, Catholics before the council were instructed to pray the Act of Contrition while the priest mumbled absolution in Latin. The irony, of course, is that the linguistic intelligibility of the sacrament has also witnessed a decline in its celebration—though there are welcome signs of a rediscovery of this great grace.
Finally, a practice that Hughes learned from his Anglican mentors and which he has followed faithfully is never to preach on Sunday without a written text before him. The obvious advantage is that one thereby disciplines oneself to a clear beginning, middle and ending to structuring the interconnections among them. Those who have read Father Hughes’s published homilies know the care and the imagination they exhibit. He tells us that in homilies he shuns “moralism.” He explains that even when preaching the moral law, he presents it “not as the standard we must meet before God would love and bless us, but rather as the description of our grateful response to the blessings and love bestowed upon us by our loving heavenly Father as a free gift.”
Father Hughes writes with passion and conviction, spicing his recollections with telling incidents and wry humor, often enough directing his wit at his own false steps and follies. But it is the author’s Jacob-like wrestling with the call to Catholicism that provides the distinctive drama of the narrative.
In his early 20s he began to wonder whether the Anglican tradition had not in fact splintered itself from the Catholic Church, a questioning that his high-church father dismissed as “Roman fever.” Resolved for a time, the questions re-emerged forcefully after his ordination as an Episcopal priest. The stumbling block was his suspicion of exaggerated papal claims. But as he studied and consulted about them, he found them less an obstacle than he had feared.
The decision, in 1960, to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church was motivated by no emotional appeal or aesthetic attraction to the preconciliar church, but solely by his persuasion of the truth of its claim. In his view this entailed no repudiation of his past nor of the abundant graces he had received. As he wrote his father at the time, “It was not so much that I had come to find Anglicanism wrong, as incomplete.” But all efforts at explanation were spurned; the elder Hughes barred his son from the family home; and, though correspondence continued between them, they never saw each other again.
Hughes’s subsequent studies in Innsbruck (where he attended the lectures of Karl Rahner, S.J.) and in Münster (where he heard and greatly appreciated Joseph Ratzinger) were followed by his conditional ordination as a Catholic priest. His account of his many years of priestly ministry in the postconciliar church as teacher, theologian and pastor will elicit respect, gratitude and frequent moments of recognition as readers recall their own experiences and enter (as I did) into silent, yet spirited conversation with the author.
One will find much to relish and to learn from in this marvelous testimony to grace. Eucharistic remembering provides the cantus firmus that inspires and sustains Hughes’s honest and joyful witness. His book evokes, in an almost sacramental way, what St. Paul saw to be the fruit of grace: “an overflow of thanksgiving to the glory of God.”
Rev. Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches systematic theology at Boston College.