Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Massimo Palombella
In today’s Gospel (Mt 21:28-32) Jesus, with the story of the two sons who are invited to go and work in the vineyard, draws attention to the motivations for our actions and to what, in the end, is important in our lives.
The first son does not feel like going to work in the vineyard, but in the end he goes. This apparently insignificant fact sheds an interesting light on our actions, on the choices in our lives. In fact, we often do many things without any desire, without any transport, and perhaps only because we know it is important to do them… But, we will tend not to do them…
Deeper down, if we are honest, we realise that so many choices that we have made in our lives, even important ones, – and perhaps continue to make – have with poor motives. We have gone out of our way for others because we needed to feel fulfilled. We have taken care of people expecting a something back that would satisfy our need to be loved. We have obtained a degree basically to prove our worth… Yet, in all this, the Lord, paradoxically, does not look at motivation, but at facts. On the contrary, the Lord makes himself present in our lives precisely through our poor motivations, through what we easily judge to be incorrect, not ‘mature’, not worthy of us.
In essence, the Lord meets us through our poor, small, sometimes ‘petty’ motivations, and sets us on a path of maturation, of growth, of healthy purification, a path where our motivations slowly change and are renewed. In fact, concretely, we marry for a motivation and we remain married only by maturing, deepening, purifying this motivation. And the same thing applies to every important, ‘existential’ choice in our lives.
It is then interesting and at the same time disarming to realise that the Lord accomplishes great things in our lives through our poor motivations, through our ‘not wanting’, through our weaknesses, through our disarming poverty. And often what we are ashamed of is the place where the Lord is waiting for us to love us as we need it, to take us by the hand and lead us to ‘life in abundance’.
The Offertory antiphon for today’s celebration is taken from Psalm 136 (Ps 136:1-2) with the following text:
“Super flumina Babylonis,
illic sedimus et flevimus dum recordaremur tui, Sion,
in salicibus in medio eius suspendimus organa nostra.”
(Upon the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down and we wept, as we remembered you, O Zion.
To the willows of that land we hung our lyres).
The attached music is by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594), and comes from the Second Book of Motets for 4 voices published in Milan in 1587 (IOAN. PATRALOYSII PAENESTINI, Liber II. Motectorum Quatuor Vocum [Mediolani, Apud Franciscum & haredes Simonis Tini, 1587]). The Cantus part comes from the Venetian edition of 1604 as it was not available in the Milan edition of 1587. The live performance is by the Cappella Musicale del Duomo di Milano at the Chapter Celebration in the Duomo on Sunday 24 September 2023.
A blessed Sunday and heartfelt greetings.
