What More Was There to Do?

Somewhere along the way, most of us started talking about our faith the way we talk about a house we’ve paid off. My parish, my prayer routine, my seat in the third pew, my children raised Catholic. The words aren’t wrong. But they slide easily into a quieter conviction that the thing belongs to us, that God gave it and then stepped back, and that the fruit it produces is ours to keep. Today’s readings tell the same story twice, nearly eight centuries apart. They are about people who forgot they were tenants. In Isaiah, God plants a vineyard with his own hands, clears the stones, builds a tower, and comes looking for grapes. He finds wild ones and asks a question that ought to stop us cold: “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” In the Gospel, Jesus tells the chief priests about tenants who beat the owner’s servants and then kill his son, because they want the inheritance for themselves.

The tenants’ logic is worth hearing, because it sounds familiar. If the heir is gone, the vineyard is ours. Get the owner out of the picture, and no one comes asking for fruit.

Today is the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the Lord’s Day takes the place of the memorial of Saint Francis of Assisi this year. He’s the right companion for this Gospel, because he once stood in a public square and handed his inheritance back. So here’s the question these readings put to you and me: whose vineyard do we think we’re working?

The Readings

First Reading: Isaiah 5:1-7

Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He digged it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and briers and thorns shall grow up; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting; and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry!

Gospel: Matthew 21:33-43

“Hear another parable. There was a householder who planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country. When the season of fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants, to get his fruit; and the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first; and they did the same to them. Afterward he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ And they took him and cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him. When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.”

Scriptural Analysis

The Navarre commentators call Isaiah’s “song of the vineyard” a masterpiece of Hebrew poetry. It opens as a love song. The prophet sings as God’s friend, and the vineyard belongs to his beloved. Then, in verses 3 to 6, the lover himself takes over, and the song turns into a lawsuit. Navarre notices the technique: Isaiah keeps his hearers in suspense about what he’s getting at, the way Nathan did when he told David about the rich man and the poor man’s lamb (2 Samuel 12:1-15), and only at the end does he spring the trap. They add a line worth carrying into the Gospel: “In the figure of heartbroken farmer, we can see our Lord Jesus Christ and his sorrow at finding that his people yield such a poor crop of righteousness.”¹

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on Isaiah, walks through the farmer’s work one detail at a time. The “very fertile hill” is, in the Hebrew idiom, a horn that is a “son of oil,” ben-shamen (ben-shah-MEN), land so rich it could supply oil for a multitude, raised up where the sun can reach it. The hedge signifies “the guardianship of angels and good men.” The stones he cleared are the nations driven out before Israel (Psalm 80:8). The tower shows royal dignity, or the Temple; the winepress is the altar of holocausts, “because of the outpouring of blood.” Then comes the harvest. Thomas explains that the Latin for wild grapes, labruscae (lah-BROO-skay), was taken from labia (LAH-bee-ah), lips, because they grow on the lips of the roads, along the fences, and their sourness stands for “the bitterness of their vices.”²

Verse 4 is God asking the court for a verdict on himself: “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” Thomas hears Micah underneath it: “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” (Micah 6:3). The Church still puts those words in Christ’s mouth every Good Friday. Thomas also points to Nathan and David again, a judgment drawn out of the guilty man as though it concerned someone else.³ And then, in verse 7, the parable drops its mask: “the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel.” Navarre notes that the song is full of plays on words impossible to render in translation. The last line carries the sharpest of them. God looked for mishpat (mish-PAHT), justice, and found mispach (mis-PAKH), bloodshed; for tsedaqah (tseh-dah-KAH), righteousness, and heard tse’aqah (tseh-ah-KAH), a cry. The words rhyme, and the realities are opposites. Navarre traces the vine through the rest of Scripture, from Hosea and Jeremiah to Psalm 80 and finally to “our Lord’s parable of the wicked tenants,” which they call “a kind of compendium of salvation history.”⁴ The Catechism, drawing on the Second Vatican Council, reads the vineyard forward to us: “That land, like a choice vineyard, has been planted by the heavenly cultivator. Yet the true vine is Christ who gives life and fruitfulness to the branches, that is, to us, who through the Church remain in Christ, without whom we can do nothing.”⁵

Now the Gospel. Jesus is standing in the Temple courts the day after he drove out the money changers, and the chief priests and elders have just demanded to know by what authority he acts (Matthew 21:23). Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri point out that his opening sentence uses the same words the Greek Septuagint uses in Isaiah 5:2: planted, hedge, winepress, tower. Every listener knows whose vineyard this is. Daniel Harrington fills in the farm. The hedge kept animals out, the winepress crushed the grapes, and the tower served as both a watchpost and a shelter for the workers.⁶

Then Jesus adds something Isaiah never mentioned: tenants. Mitch and Sri explain that the tenants are the chief priests, charged with caring for God’s people, and that tenant farmers in that world owed the landlord an agreed share of the crop. Origen, in the Catena Aurea of Saint Thomas, saw the shift at once. In Isaiah, “the threats of the householder are against the vineyard,” while in the Gospel the blame falls on the husbandmen. Thomas, in his commentary on Matthew, draws the conclusion that matters for how we read this: “here he inveighs against the farmers,” because the malice came “from the leaders.” Harrington agrees that the target is Israel’s leadership.⁷

The servants are the prophets. Mitch and Sri list the ones Israel’s leaders persecuted (2 Chronicles 24:21; Jeremiah 20:2; 26:21-23), and Jesus will soon say it outright: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!” (Matthew 23:37). Saint Jerome, in the Catena, gives them names. They beat them, as Jeremiah; they killed them, as Isaiah; they stoned them, as Naboth and Zechariah.⁸ Then the owner sends his son: “They will respect my son.” Jerome points out that the householder is God, who knows everything already, and explains the phrasing: “God is thus spoken of as being uncertain, in order that free will may be reserved for man.”⁹ The owner keeps sending, and he keeps leaving room for a yes.

The tenants see the son and hear only one word: heir. “Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.” Harrington points out how foolish that is under the law of the day. The father is still alive, so killing the son wins them nothing. Matthew’s order of events is telling, too. They “cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him,” and Harrington and Thomas both see Calvary in it, since Jesus “suffered outside the gate” (Hebrews 13:12). Rabanus Maurus, in the Catena, says what the inheritance really is: the holy Church, “wonderfully purchased by His own death.”¹⁰

Then Jesus asks the chief priests what the owner will do, and they answer without blinking: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death.” Thomas sees the same move Isaiah made: “The Lord asks in this subtle way so they will pass judgment on themselves, just as Nathan did to David.”¹¹ Three times now, in Navarre, in Thomas on Isaiah, and in Thomas on Matthew, the same old story surfaces. The parable lets you condemn the man before you realize he’s you.

Then Jesus quotes Psalm 118: “The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.” Mitch and Sri explain why that line would have landed like a blow. Herod’s renovation of the Temple had begun around 20 BC and wasn’t finished until AD 63, so Jesus is standing on a construction site, telling the men overseeing it that he is the stone they’re throwing away. They’re the builders. And since the rejected stone becomes the cornerstone, the murdered Son will be vindicated, and he’ll be the cornerstone of a new temple, the Church he promised to build (Matthew 16:18). Harrington adds a pun hidden in the Hebrew: the son, ben (BEN), becomes the stone, eben (EH-ven).¹² Saint Hilary, in the Catena, says Christ is the head of the corner “because He is the union of both sides between the Law and the Gentiles.” The Catechism builds its teaching on the Church as the building of God on this very text: “On this foundation the Church is built by the apostles, and from it the Church receives solidity and unity,” and “as living stones we here on earth are built into it.”¹³

Finally the verdict: “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.” Mitch and Sri read the new nation as a new people of God (1 Peter 2:9), the Church. Thomas notes that the owner looks for fruit in its season, the way a man’s fruit comes at maturity, after boyhood is past. And Rabanus turns the parable on every baptized reader: “a vineyard has been let out to each of us to dress, when the mystery of baptism was given us, to be cultivated by action.” The servants who come asking for fruit are the Law, the Psalms and the Prophets, read to us at every Mass.¹⁴ Put Isaiah and Matthew side by side, and the question God asked in verse 4 finally gets its answer. What more was there to do? He sent his Son. There was nothing more to give.

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is to give the vineyard back to its owner, and to keep giving him its fruit. The tenants in the parable got used to running the place, and every servant who showed up asking for the owner’s share felt like an intrusion. That’s how it starts for us too. A parish ministry becomes my ministry. A gift of teaching becomes my reputation. A marriage, a family, a business, even a prayer life becomes a thing I manage, and God’s claims on it start to feel like interruptions.

Ask the owner’s question honestly this week. What fruit is he looking for from the patch he gave you? Isaiah names it: justice and righteousness. The Hebrew wordplay carries a warning, because the opposite of tsedaqah sounds almost the same. A life can look like righteousness from the road and sound, up close, like a cry. Listen for that cry near you: the coworker you’ve been quietly freezing out, the spouse who has stopped bringing things up, the poor man you drive past on the way to Mass. That’s where the fruit is owed.

Then respect the Son. Today is Sunday, and the owner’s Son is the one we receive at the altar. Rabanus says the servants come to us “when Law, Psalm, and Prophecy are read.” So listen to today’s readings as a visit from the owner, and bring him something. One honest confession, one act of justice you’ve been putting off, one hour given back to him from a week you treat as yours.

Saint Francis of Assisi lived this Gospel from the other side. Franciscan Media tells how, when his father demanded restitution for the “gifts” Francis had given to the poor, Francis gave up all his possessions and piled even his clothes before him, “so that he would be totally free to say, ‘Our Father in heaven.’” He heard Christ speak from the cross at San Damiano: “Francis, go out and build up my house, for it is nearly falling down.” He’d have been content, Franciscan Media says, to spend his life putting brick on brick in abandoned chapels. The house Christ meant was his whole Church.¹⁵ The tenants killed the heir to get the inheritance. Francis gave up his inheritance to belong to the Heir. And the house he rebuilt stands on the stone the builders rejected.

Give him the fruit. Hand back the vineyard, respect the Son, and let him build you into his house.

---

Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Isaiah, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 61.
2. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute; Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), chap. 5, lect. 1, nos. 156-158.
3. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, chap. 5, lect. 1, nos. 159-160.
4. ↑ Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 62.
5. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 755.
6. ↑ Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 277; Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 302.
7. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 277; Origen, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), on Matt 21:33-46; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), C. 21, L. 2, no. 1734; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 301, 304.
8. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 277; Saint Jerome, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 21:33-46.
9. ↑ Saint Jerome, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 21:33-46; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 21, L. 2, no. 1742.
10. ↑ Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 302; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 21, L. 2, no. 1745; Rabanus Maurus, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 21:33-46.
11. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 21, L. 2, no. 1746.
12. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 278-279; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 303.
13. ↑ Saint Hilary of Poitiers, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 21:33-46; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 756.
14. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 279; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 21, L. 2, no. 1737; Rabanus Maurus, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 21:33-46.
15. ↑ “Saint Francis of Assisi,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed October 2, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.

Books Cited

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (Four Courts Press / Scepter Publishers, 2005)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2021)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, four-volume edition (Baronius Press)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Aquinas Institute, 2013)