Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (2026) - Fr James Baxter, OP

This image of the vineyard is one of the less-common images for the people of Israel, but it pops up in three of our readings this Sunday. In fact, this Sunday is the third week in a row that we’ve had Jesus telling a parable about a vineyard. They have all been taken from roughly the same section of the Gospel of Matthew.

Much like his parables about sheep, fishing and making bread vineyards feature in Jesus’ parables because of the place that wine had in ancient Israel. To borrow from economic terminology, it was a consumer staple. There was no coffee, tea or soft drink to compete with it. Wine loomed large, and viticulture was a familiar industry.

In the first reading from Isaiah, there’s a mixture of sorrow, love and exasperation in the way the Lord speaks about this vineyard: What more could I have done? I watered it, I cared for it – it produced grapes, yes, but they were sour.

The people of Israel were bearing fruit of a kind – they had all sorts of external worship and ritual observance – but, as we hear at the end of the reading, without integrity and justice. It’s important that it’s both integrity and justice. Justice on its own can become a bit externalised and abstract, concerned only about having the right views on whatever the current big issue is. But here it’s justice and integrity. This is integrity in the sense of moral wholeness, where there is nothing missing. Where what I profess in my external religious observance, and what I think, say, and do are consistent, so what we produce in our lives is genuinely fruit rather than sour grapes.

That is the Lord’s desire for his vineyard. On the people of Israel’s part, the responsorial psalm expresses a similar desire. It’s an invitation to the Lord to visit his vine and protect it. The psalm is a great statement of repentance, of the people’s desire to renew their relationship with God.

This psalm was written perhaps four or five hundred years before Christ. Lest we think that the people of Israel changed forever after they prayed this lovely psalm, when we come to the Gospel the same problem is there. Jesus takes up again the theme of the vineyard, and the question is the same – what more could I have done? Wickedness endures, and this parable is a prophecy of the greatest act of wickedness in history – the killing of the son of God.

Humanity still hasn’t gotten any better. Occasionally people will point to some forms of progress which they think demonstrate moral improvement. We no longer have executions as a form of public entertainment, for example, at least not in the Western world. But they do exist elsewhere, and lately have co-existed with a global embrace of euthanasia, which itself is proposed as a form of moral progress.

We should not be surprised if there is no moral progress for the remainder of human history, given the Christian doctrine of original sin. This doctrine teaches that from the first moment of our existence there is a flaw in the network of relationships that we are conceived and born into, which impairs our relationships with ourselves, with God, with creation, and with each other.

Many find the term ‘original sin’ a bit old-fashioned and incomprehensible. They may prefer to speak instead of the “human condition”. But they refer essentially to the same reality: that there is something about humanity that is not right. Something has gone wrong.

On one view this is grim news. But I find that many people find this teaching in fact to be a comfort: that our world and our lives as they are not as they should be, and unless we are talking about our personal sin it is not our fault. It is just the way things are.

But if even the news of the doctrine of original sin can be received as a comfort, it is even more of a comfort that God had not simply left the world as it is. The question – What more could I do? – means that he does all he can. He is ever seeking to renew it through our cooperation. He does not give up on his vineyard.

Fr James Baxter, OP is the Parish Priest of Broadway, Glebe, and Pyrmont, New South Wales.