Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you.
Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people, hear another parable.
There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a winepress in it and built a tower.
Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey.
When vintage time drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to obtain his produce.
But the tenants seized the servants and one they beat, another they killed, and a third they stoned again. He sent other servants more numerous than the first ones, but they treated them in the same way.
Finally he sent his son to them, thinking they will respect my son.
But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another, this is the heir. Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.
They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
What will the owner of the vineyard do to those servants when he comes?
They answered him, he will put those wretched men to a wretched death and leave his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times.
Jesus said to them, did you never read in the Scriptures?
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone by the Lord. Has this been done?
And it is wonderful in our eyes.
Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.
The Gospel of the Lord.
I think every family has certain memories or stories that get shared. Often when groups gather together, they always come back to those same stories and they become part of our legend, part of who we are.
So much so that we can almost imagine we were there. Even though in this case I wasn't even born yet. But it still feels like a story. I can tell it was my parents long trip they took for their honeymoon. They drove across the country and they stopped at all the big places. They stopped at the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, they went to Las Vegas and then they went to the Los Angeles area because they were going to stay with my dad's godparents.
Now his godparents were pretty well to do and they lived in Glendale outside of Pasadena area where the rose bullset.
And this uncle was the biggest builder in that area.
He built 90% of the homes in Glendale and Pasadena after World War II. For all the all the new GIs that came back that were starting Families that began the baby boom. So you can imagine how busy he was doing that stuff.
Well, they stayed at his house, and in fact, he built his own home.
And he literally built it with just one other guy helping him because all the guys that worked for him were out setting these tracks of homes they were putting up.
Well, my folks were there maybe a day or so, and I think my dad had gone golfing or something like that. And he came home and a golf ball was in his pocket. And he dropped it down on the floor for a minute, put putting stuff away. And he noticed that it shot across the floor and ran into the one wall pretty hard.
So he said, hmm, I wonder what's going on here. So he went and got the ball back, and he walked back to the other side of the room, and he sat it down and watched it go shook across the floor.
Then when he had a chance, he went into another room and did the same experiment. And the ball shot across the floor.
He said, wow, this house is not very level.
Well, he didn't have enough guts the first few days, but after a while, he said to his godfather, his uncle, hey, I happen to notice your house is a little bit out of plum.
And his aunt was basically, shut up. Don't say anything. Please don't do this.
And my dad wouldn't let it go. I don't know where I got it from.
But he finally just pushed my uncle or my great uncle enough that he told him what happened.
He built the entire house with a level that he hadn't noticed, had a chunk of dried concrete on one side of it, so everything slanted in one particular direction.
If you don't start off from the very first corner you lay and get that perfect, everything else kind of goes off kilter.
Well, here in the Gospel, we have Jesus talking about the cornerstone, and he lays his life out there as that stone that the builders rejected, the ones that they didn't think were perfect.
When cornerstones got rejected, they got rejected because they weren't square.
And the religious authorities, the people who thought they had everything figured out, didn't see Jesus as being perfectly square. They didn't think he was a good foundation to put their faith in because their hearts were so hardened.
And he says, well, that stone that the builders rejected is really the cornerstone.
In other words, it's the point that all other life is based and that as long as he is our cornerstone, our lives are drastically changed for the better.
But when we reject that cornerstone, our lives become more chaotic, our suffering becomes greater. Not because there's more suffering but because we can't bear it as well because his presence isn't there to strengthen and lift us up, everything turns to garbage.
However, when we allow him to be our cornerstone, when we try to be in tune with his will and his love for us, when we spend maybe a little bit more time in prayer looking for and being in tune to that presence, all of a sudden we find that those things that can be such a struggle that can become unbearable oftentimes become bearable. And in fact even in some of those moments we can discover that there is a grace there that can help us in ways we hadn't expected.
As long as he is the cornerstone, when he refers to himself like he does here in the scriptures, the cornerstone, he's giving us a hint into how best we can live out our lives day to day.
It's up to us if we decide we want to accept those hints.
