03 June 2024 – Monday of Week 9

03 June 2024 – Monday of Week 9

Memorial (Feast, Dublin): St Kevin, settled in Glendalough where a monastic settlement grew after his death in 618.

1st Reading: 2 Peter 1:2-7

God has given us all we need to live well, sharing in divine life

May grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature. For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.

Responsorial: Psalm 91

R./: In you, my God, I place my trust

You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High,
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
Say to the Lord, My refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust. (R./)

Because he clings to me, I will deliver him;
I will set him on high because he acknowledges my name.
He shall call upon me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in distress. (R./)

I will deliver him and glorify him;
with length of days I will gratify him
and will show him my salvation. (R./)

Gospel: Mark 12:1-12

The wicked tenants kill the vineyard-owner’s son, but justice is restored

Jesus began to speak to the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watchtower; then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from them his share of the produce of the vineyard. But they seized him, and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. And again he sent another slave to them; this one they beat over the head and insulted. Then he sent another, and that one they killed. And so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyrd to others. Have you not read this scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?”

When they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away.

Rejection and acceptance

The parable in today’s gospel is a tragic one, about rejection, violence and murder. But like great theatrical tragedies, this can have cathartic effect.

A vineyard owner sent his servants to collect his share of the fruits of the vineyard; all of them were rejected out of hand. He then sent his son who was not only rejected but killed. At the end of the story, the stone rejected by the builders goes on to become the keystone, the most important stone that holds the roof together. The parable is a veiled reference to what had happened to the prophets in the past and what would soon happen to Jesus himself. His mission would lead to him being rejected and put to death, but God would raise him from the dead and make him the keystone of a wholly new situation for mankind.

Rejection is a painful human experience, experienced by many. Jesus invites us to join our times of sadness and rejection to his passion. He is the living sign that the rejected stone can become the keystone. God can work in a life-giving way in and through all any hardships we struggle with in life. What we might judge to be misfortunes can turn out to be moments of grace. He will support us to the end with all we need.

2 Peter was one of the last books of the New Testament to be composed. The author takes up a question that Simon Peter never had to face: will the hoped-for second coming of Jesus be delayed indefinitely?

After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in A.D. 70 the surviving Christians were scattered. When, some decades later, Jesus still had not returned as victorious Messiah, some of them felt lost in a quagmire of doubt. The apostle Peter had already been martyred in A.D. 65 or 66. The inspired author of this epistle contrived to set his writing as though it were written by Peter himself, and drew on traditions about the life of Jesus, now seven decades past, in order to link the past to the future, linking God’s manifest presence then to God’s hidden presence now.

The gospel anticipates this problem of how to cope with the interval. The owner of the vineyard seems to have vanished into thin air, so the tenant farmers are tempted to live recklessly, even killing the owner’s son and seize his property. When Jesus first spoke this parable, he referred to the puzzling Psalm-verse that “The stone rejected by the builders became the keystone of the structure.” This means that God will always be faithful and will turn his servant into the keystone of the new life. Christians later reinterpreted it to mean God’s transfer of favour to the church as it spread into the gentile world after the fall of Jerusalem.