Photo at top is from Pixabay.com
By Father Garry Koch
Gospel reflection for Sept. 27, 2026, 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Last weekend we heard the parable from Jesus where he compared the Kingdom of Heaven to the vineyard owner who hired workers at differing times of the day, from dawn until 5 p.m., and then paid all of them the usual daily wage. This parable was confusing to the crowds but became clear as we see the boundless mercy of God in the promise of eternal life. In that parable, the desire to work was present, but the call to work came from the owner himself.
This week there is an important shift in the focus of the parable.
Jesus tells the parable of a man with two sons in which he asks each of them to go into the vineyard to work for the day. The first son says “no” and then thinking the better of it, he goes to the vineyard, while the second son says “yes” and then does not go. Jesus then asks the question, which son did the will of the father, and the crowd easily responded that the first son did.
While this parable out of its context sounds easy and non-controversial, when we place it into its setting within the Gospel, this parable added to a further division between Jesus and the Pharisees and Sadducees.
Jesus told this parable in Jerusalem within the confines of the Temple area, after he had just entered the city riding a colt and having then upended the tables of the money changers. So, Jesus had already drawn much attention to himself – enthralling the crowds and enraging the officials – and then this parable just throws even more salt into the wound.
It was not just the parable itself, but also the explanation of the parable, that caused a deepening of the rift between Jesus and the authorities.
He identified the presumably righteous members of Jewish aristocracy with the second son. They said “yes” God tirelessly, yet made up excuses as to why the laws did not apply to them while imposing them on others. Jesus then went on to compare the prostitutes and sinners to the first son. They initially rejected the call to holiness and righteousness, but then experienced their conversion and became ardent disciples, while the Pharisees and Sadducees merely paid lip service to the Law.
At this point Jesus had the crowd in his corner; he said out loud what they all knew but were afraid to say. The Pharisees and Sadducees, on the other hand, were insulted and angry. Deep in their hearts they knew he was right, of course, but they could not take an itinerant rabble rouser preacher turn the crowd against them.
The challenge for us becomes clear. The struggle of discipleship is coherent consistency. We are called to both say “yes” and then to act on that “yes” through our actions. We carry the personal responsibility to respond to the call of God in our lives. Each and every day we make the choice to say and do “yes,” to say and do “no” or to say the one and then do the other.
But, it is also a life experience – one that we make and then continue to reinforce with our lives. We then either respond easily to the call or we are so numb we do not even hear the call.
Some studies indicate that the decision to continue to practice the faith, or the decision to abandon the faith, is made around the age of 13. This is a bit shocking, as we expect it to be older, but it is certainly a challenging age, and how we respond to the questions and concerns of those early teenagers has an impact throughout their lives. If we, like the second son in the parable, are merely paying lip service to our faith, that hypocrisy will be deafening to those who look to us to model the faith. It is the life we live more than the words we use that are the testimony to the world of our discipleship.
Yet, we all live in hope. We continue our prayers for those in need of conversion, that they might turn their rejection into an acceptance. But we must be alert as well not to allow living a “yes” to be taken for granted, but that we will remain faithful disciples throughout our lives.
We are all sinners in need of on-going conversion.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.