You know what they say: when the cat’s away, the mice will play. The teacher leaves the room, and the students start throwing erasers at each other. The dog owner leaves for the evening to go out for dinner and returns to find that the house is littered with toilet paper. The unattended child is left in his highchair for one minute, and when the parent returns, he has crawled into the kitchen and is opening all the cleaning supplies.
Scripture is full of such behavior. Moses leaves the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai to go up and speak with God and receive the Ten Commandments, and when he comes back down, the Israelites have made a golden calf. In one of Jesus’s parables, a man who goes off on a journey, leaving his property with his slaves. When he comes back, two of the slaves have made more money from the talents entrusted to their care, but one slave has buried his talent, instead of investing it, because he was afraid of his master. Preserving the talent was safer than the risk of investing it. And finally, when Jesus has died and been raised from the dead, the disciples retreat into an upper room and lock the doors, scared out of their minds. When the cat’s away, the mice will play, or at the very least, they will have no idea how to act.
And this is exactly what happens when a householder plants a vineyard and then leaves it in the care of some tenants. This vineyard isn’t a chunk of useless land that the tenants must work hard to cultivate so that it will bear fruit. The householder has already done everything possible to ensure that the vineyard will produce abundant good fruit. He has made sure that it’s protected from wild animals and has furnished it with a wine press to turn the harvested grapes into good wine. Every detail is set in place to facilitate an incredible harvest.
Having done all this, the householder entrusts the care of his vineyard to tenants, leaves the scene, and then the mice begin to play. We don’t know much about what transpired after the householder leaves, but I’m guessing that nothing happened. The mice slept rather than played. Or maybe they were lazy and acted horribly. I’m guessing that both might be the case because of Jesus’s challenging words to the chief priests and Pharisees to whom he tells this parable. Something has not happened in the landowner’s absence. Perhaps the vineyard was left to rot. Maybe the tenants were too overwhelmed by the task they were assigned. Whatever the case, not only are the tenants unproductive, but they also behave abominably. They harm the servants sent by the householder to gather the harvest, and finally, they kill the householder’s son, the one sent to be respected and revered.
Jesus tells this parable to convict the Jewish leadership, but it is most certainly not about God taking away the kingdom from the Jewish people. God’s kingdom is available to all. This convicting parable highlights the judgment present to anyone who fails to be a good steward of what God has entrusted to their care and who willingly rejects God’s gifts. It’s a difficult lesson for all who want to play, or sleep, while the cat is away.
It might as well be a parable of judgment told to the modern Church. We inhabit a period of waiting like that of the tenants. We live in the time between Jesus’s first coming to us and his eventual second coming. We’ve been entrusted with a tremendous responsibility, and so often, we treat it as another menial task. Or we sleep or refrain from working.
In John’s Gospel, on the eve of his death, Jesus tells his disciples that after the Holy Spirit has been sent to empower them for ministry, they will do greater things than he has done. It’s an astounding claim of which the modern Church usually seems ignorant. And so, like Jesus’s disciples after his death and resurrection, we retreat into our closed quarters, most often out of fear and anxiety. Or while the cat is away, we resort to gimmicks and cheap tricks to lure people back into the pews instead of being faithful with our prayers. Or we pitifully accept a doomed narrative of decline. Or we wring our hands and cry out that we don’t have enough to do what God has asked us to do. There’s not enough money or people or resources. The vineyard is riddled with too many insurmountable problems: with leaking roofs, aging buildings, and too much deferred maintenance.
Or even worse, when the cat is away, we grow impatient and distrustful, like the band of people led by Moses out of Egypt, who wasted no time in making a golden calf so soon after being delivered from slavery. Our anxiety forces us to turn inward on ourselves and to look only to our own efforts to make ends meet. We begin to think that what we’ve been entrusted with is ours to keep, and then we try to defend it at all costs. We become drunk with greed so that anyone who desires what we have, or anyone who asks for a share in the harvest entrusted to our care is a threat. And the cycle spirals out of control.
When the cat is away, and we’re left with our own narrow, self-centered worlds, the illness that strikes is another cause for a grievance against God. The financial pickle is one more reason to hunker down in fear. The possessions we have are just more things to hoard. As I said, when the cat’s away, the mice will play.
But maybe the problem is that we imagine ourselves as vulnerable little mice running from the predator cat. It seems that the tenants who abuse the householder’s servants and kill his son fail to trust and respect the householder. And their tragic attitude toward life is revealed in the judgment they offer against themselves when Jesus asks them the million-dollar question: “When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
All the tenants can imagine is that the householder will put them to a miserable death. Is this the reason why the tenants behave so badly while the householder is away? Do they believe that the householder cares nothing for their well-being? Can they only imagine a world without mercy and compassion? Do they fail to envision a world of abundance? Are they completely unable to trust that they could be good stewards of the vineyard? Are they so anxious that they can’t imagine that returning the fruits of the vineyard to the householder might not mean that they get nothing in return?
And do we also imagine God as a punishing householder who entrusts his vineyard to our care? Do we see ourselves as little mice, constantly running from a God who simply wants to capture and torture us if we mess up, and if so, is this why we misbehave when God seems to withdraw from us? And while we’re at it, why would we imagine that God leaves us to begin with? The only reason would be that have failed to trust. We have failed to hope. And without hope, we become like a child without a parent.
And so, to reclaim our trust and hope we need to return to the beginning of this parable, where we get a glimpse into God’s true nature. God is rather like that householder who doesn’t leave a stinking mess for people to clean up but who provides everything that is needed for a copious harvest of good fruit. In Christ, God has given us the confident assurance that no evil powers and no false lies from the evil one can undermine our holy work. God has strewn the landscape of our lives and our churches with abundant resources: with physical space, with beautiful people, with talents and gifts, and with money that sometimes needs to be coaxed into use.
God, indeed, has given us everything we need to fulfill the mission to which he has called us. And if we can’t see that, it’s because we could benefit from more trust and hope. When God seems absent, it’s only the accusing voices of our insecure minds and hearts that try to convince us otherwise. It’s a lie that we must always play it safe to come out okay. It’s a lie that we must cut our way to prosperity. Even when the vineyard seems like nothing more than a tangle of brambles, God has nevertheless prepared rich soil ready to be loved and tended into a fruitful harvest.
God doesn’t abandon us. Jesus doesn’t go to the Father to leave us with the dirty work. Jesus goes to the Father so that the Holy Spirit may come to us and propel us into works greater even than his. It’s an astounding thought that we can only cherish in trust and hope. And, yes, one day the householder will return to gather his harvest. Can we look forward to that day with joy rather than fear? The vineyard has been prepared for our work, and there is much work to do. God has given us everything we need. It’s time to work. And on that day when the householder returns in love, may we be ready to accept with joy our Lord’s praise when he looks at us and says, “Servant, well done!”
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 8, 2023