HOMILY: TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR A

HOMILY: TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR A

By: Fr Cyril Unachukwu CCE

Life is by nature geared towards fruitfulness and productiveness. Much more the Christian Life, with all of the special graces and blessings which God bestows in us from that moment when we said yes to Him at Baptism, becoming His true sons and daughters in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. To be truly Christian is to allow these graces and blessings we possess to bear fruits that will last, to the greater glory of God and for the edification of the human family. When the time comes for us to present the fruits we have borne to God, may we never be found empty of fruits; Amen.

Each and every one of us, individually and collectively, we constitute the Vineyard of the Lord. How good is the Lord towards each of us! How much care He places on us! How much resources He lavishes on us to make us bear good fruits and to produce and fill the earth with the fragrance of goodness that springs from Him as the _Summum Bonum_ (the Highest Good). Every well meaning human person and indeed every true Christian desires to change the world for good; to be a source of blessing to others. This noble desire and wish is made possible only through the type of fruits we bear. God, on His part, has given us everything we need to bear good fruits. The Readings of today’s Liturgy made this very clear to us. In the First Reading (Is 5:1-7), which was Isaiah’s prophetic poem against the unfaithfulness of Israel, God, with the imagery of a vineyard, repudiated Israel for her fruitlessness and unproductiveness as a result of her infidelity to God; “what could I have done for my vineyard that I have not done? I expected it to yield grapes. Why did it yield sour grapes instead?” Truly, God has given us everything we need to be fruitful. He has planted each of us in the best of positions and on the most fertile of soils to grow and blossom. Wherever God has planted you, you have all it takes to flourish and to bear fruit from that point. In fact, every day is an opportunity to make useful and meaningful these resources which God generously lavishes on us; to make God happy and contented with us, seeing that we are not just growing; but that we are also blossoming with fruits.

It disheartens God to see us grow fruitless and refuse to produce. We grow fruitless and unproductive, not because we haven’t the resources and the things necessary to produce and bear fruits; but because we disconnect ourselves from these resources and from these graces from above. Sometimes, we do not stop at that, but rather we become hostile and antagonistic to God our Father even to the extent of instigating destruction towards Him and His emissaries just like the tenants of the Gospel Reading of today (Mt 21:33-43); “but the tenants seized His servants, thrashed one, killed another and stoned a third.” Some questions that call to mind from the brutal attitude of the tenants are; why did these tenants become hostile, all of a sudden, to the landowner who was very generous towards them? Why were they afraid to initiate a dialogue instead of causing destruction? They became hostile out of fear, because they had no fruits to present to him as the outcome of their productiveness. They avoided dialogue and opted for destruction because they could not explain their inability to produce fruits. We become afraid of God when we have no fruits to present to Him for all of the resources He bountifully placed at our disposal. We begin to reject God, like these tenants, and to boycott all of His attempts to get to us when we discover we are empty of fruits. On the contrary, fruitfulness makes us most similar to God and friends of God. Fruitfulness makes us fulfilled with ourselves and makes God happy with us. In order to grow steadily fruitful, Saint Paul reminds us in the Second Reading (Phil 4:6-9), “fill your minds with everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that we love and honour, and everything that can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise.” This type of mindset creates the enabling environment for the resources God has placed in us to blossom and to bring forth fruits; to the greater glory of God and for the positive growth and good of the whole human family.

Lord, You are superabundantly fruitful in all Your ways and in all that You do. You created us in Your image and likeness, so that after the example and style of Your eternally fruitful Life, we may spread the fragrance of Your presence by the fruits we bear. Help us to always be receptive and to make flourish the seeds of fruitfulness you have deposited in us. Gratitude and Praise to you Lord on this beautiful day of the Memory of my birth. I pray that You continue to give me the grace to be focused, faithful and fruitful. May Your mercy soak me through and through. May You bless abundantly all those with whom and through whom You have decorated my path and may the departed amongst them rest in perfect peace; Amen. Happy Sunday;

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