Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Foundations solidify. They create safety, security, and well-being. Knowing we live on solid stones protects us from feeling faint, even sick and horrific. Without cornerstones, scripturally understood as the Prophets and the Law of the Lord, life becomes imbalanced. Spinning, swirling, and twisted, our foundations fluctuate because everything becomes relative. Absolutes are denied. Laws mutate. Public opinion or worse, the opinion of the elite, rule. As society evolves, so do behaviors. Once considered illegal, immoral, and life threatening, now becomes legal, acceptable, and empowering. We protect these changes, even ideologies, never examining why the cornerstones were in place in the first place. We forget the foundations of our laws, beliefs, and behaviors.
Change happens, but change cannot deny or destroy the corner stones upon which all of humanity is grounded. These cornerstones are keystones. They lock in place what is objective, real, and true. They also open gateways to what needs to develop and prune that which needs to be corrected. With keystones, change builds, improves, and matures, built upon a firm foundation.
Changes that deny the cornerstones exploit, cheapen, and belittle humanity. Subjectivism, personal or public opinion, rules. Elitism takes over and those who oppose and struggle to develop and effect holistic changes are crushed. They lack the means to influence those established in power. Sadly, the elite rule without consequence, eventually causing the destruction and downfall of humanity. History repeats itself because we did not build upon firm foundations. We did not build upon Christ the Rock.
Without the cornerstones of a civilized society, law, virtue, morality, education, and most important, religious liberty and family autonomy crash. We become disillusioned and disorientated. We bury the cornerstones that protect us. Fearing our lives are on the brink of disaster, we cower. We stay stuck. Subjectivism rules, so does secularism. Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, the foundation stones of a free and Godly society are redefined. Those in power decide who lives and dies. They determine who has liberty and who is imprisoned. They define what happiness looks like. Subjectivism and secularism enslave us. We accept their definitions forgetting that true freedom and liberty are from God. True liberty comes from divine law, not human engineering.
Enslaved, we have no recourse to true justice. Integrity, morality, family values, and a revealed faith are oppressed and no longer have power to influence public opinion. Without these, human freedom and flourishing is threatened. Apocalyptic fears arise. The pending doom builds as the waves of immorality, lawlessness, and social engineering grow. Fearful, we doubt and lose sight of the cornerstones that built our society, giving us genuine prosperity and authentic dignity for all.
The Three Parables of Jesus: The Parable of the Two Sons, the Wicked Tenants, and the Marriage Feast addressed to the chief priests and elders (bishops and cardinals) in the Temple Area expose this hypocrisy. Each parable addresses the secular subjugation of society to the elite who rule without any objective moral standards. They, as does our society, fulfill the prophecy:
We have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter; therefore thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone” (Is 28:15–16).
Jesus, the Cornerstone, exposes their faithlessness. They changed the Mosaic Law. They reduced morality, goodness of heart, to ritual and external purity. They engineered society to accept Roman affluence, making Jerusalem a wealthy and prosperous city while denying the God of their Fathers and the Covenant He made with them. They ignored the faith handed down by Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his only son: the foreshadowing of Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross. They instituted a new culture which did not adhere to the Traditions of the Covenant and the Law (Ten Commandments), but to human traditions that protected their self-empowerment. Denying the cornerstones of their covenant with God, Who gave them the foundation stones: the Ten Commandments and the Prophets, to interpret properly God’s Law and his Covenant, Jesus warns them as did Isaiah.
I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste (Is 5:5–6).
The chief priest and elders trusted in their own power. They ruled the Temple, not God and his law. They worshipped God in their own way, not God’s way. They perverted the ways of God and so Isaiah, Jeremiah and the other prophets warned them. So too does the Psalm. Without God as their cornerstone, the Law and the Prophets in the Old Testament and Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium in the New, the faithful believe in vain (Ps 127:1).
God’s ways want mercy, not sacrifice (Hos 6:6). God wants obedience, not ritualism [To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams (I Sam 15:22)]. God commands us to love the Law of the Lord, not because the law is a rule, but a Person, Jesus Christ, Who is the New Law Giver. His way, the way of truth, set us free.
The Law of the Lord ought to be written on our hearts, penetrating us with truth, justice, and mercy. Psalm 119 reveals this insight: “Oh, how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me” (Ps 119:97–98). Instead, those who deny God’s law and ways stand firm on their own foundation stone: self-empowerment. They, as the chief priest and elders, do not obey God’s Law, but their own. They reject Moses and the Prophets. They deny Jesus and his New Law, which promises a yoke that makes life easy and burdens light (Matt 11:29). They, with the Pharisees, never question if their worship of God was authentic and true. They, foolish, deny any correction or improvement as they believe in their self-righteousness. To combat this self-deification, St. John the Baptist comes crying out: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit that befits repentance” (Matt 3:7). St. John only repeats what was said ages ago when Moses prophesied, “Their wine is the poison of serpents, and the cruel venom of asps” (Dt 32:33).
The rock the Israelites built their lives on was not the Rock of Christ, but another. St. Paul, however, declares that the rock that went with them in the deserts was not just any rock, but Christ from Whom the Israelites drew their water, their lives, liberty, and law (I Cor 10:4). Jesus reveals Himself as the Rock upon Whom Peter is to build the Church. Jesus, also fulfills the prophets. He is Moses, the New Law giver Who wrote a New Law not on stone tablets, but on the hearts of believers. He fulfills what Ezekiel foretold.
I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will take the stony heart out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them (Eze 11:19–20).
In the parable, Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of the Chief Priests and Elders, stating: “The tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another” (Mt 21:35). This reminds them that Isaiah was cut in two after being stuffed into a log. Jeremiah was stoned to death in Egypt after predicting the coming destruction of Jerusalem.
Despite their hypocrisy, actual cruelty and brutality, God does the unthinkable. “He sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’” (Mt 21:37). If they did not respect the prophets, why would God think they would respect his Son?
God’s ways are not our ways. He reads our hearts, not our acts. He knows deep within our soul, love lives. After treating his prophets with such brutality, God sends his Son hoping against hope that the elite with hardened hearts would convert. They did not. But we do.
Understanding the twist within the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, God breaks our hearts open to his mercy. He, as did Abraham, willingly offers his Son to prove the depths of his love despite the hatred of our sin. As Isaac, Jesus willingly offers Himself as a sacrifice for salvation. All this foreshadowed Jesus. His obedience corrects our disobedience. His mercy penetrates our hard-heartedness. His love transforms our hate. His truth sets us straight. His death gives us life. Self-righteousness cannot do this. Nor can subjectivism and secularism. Only God’s righteousness does.
Jesus, God’s Righteousness, becomes the keystone Who unlocks the chains that enslave our hearts. He becomes the cornerstone that protects our lives from crumbling, falling into pieces. No longer do we walk our way, but now we walk his way. We walk in Spirit, the Holy Spirit, Who teaches us all things because Jesus is the cornerstone of our lives. “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes” (Matt 21:42).