27th Sunday A

Jeff Bagnall • 6 October 2023

In the first reading we have a very good illustration of a successful approach to delivering bad news when you are a prophet and that is your job.   The book of Isaiah has been heavily edited, and our reading from chapter 5 is very likely the first public appearance of the prophet.   If you want the crowd to listen to you, you don’t want to be known as a prophet of doom.   So Isaiah draws a crowd by saying he is going to sing a song, like a street busker setting up his spot.   It’s a song, he says, about his friend; it’s told as though it is about a man setting up a new vineyard, but it is really about unrequited love.   He did everything one should for the vineyard to be successful, but it just produced (literally) stinking grapes.   The friend then questions the crowd: “is there anything more I could have done?”   And he tells them he is going to completely wreck the area and make it a wasteland.   Then, when the crowd has grown and is listening intently, like a punch-line the prophet announces: “this song is about the Lord and you Israel!”   The image of the vineyard became quite popular in the sayings of prophets and even among the people themselves; one of their hymns is the psalm that follows the reading for today.

The second reading is part of a final summing up of Paul’s wishes for the Christian community at Philippi.   He himself is in a difficult situation in prison with an uncertain future;   also there are some difficulties in the Christian community he is writing to; in the few verses before our reading Paul asks the church leaders there to help two females to make peace between themselves.   He wants them to be at peace and tells them how to move towards it; “the peace of God” is a phrase that surprisingly only occurs here in the whole of the Bible (the name for such a single occurrence is hapax legomenon ).   There has also been a problem in Philippi with some Christians disdaining non-Jewish and pagan (secular) values for living.   Paul, of course, as a Roman citizen, has had a good Roman as well as a Jewish education; and his attitude to non-Jews shows in the list of the six attitudes he recommends, all of which are those of contemporary philosophy (mostly Stoic).   Many of the values that others hold, we would do well to aim for ourselves!   Put this into practice and you will have peace; it is indeed the very peace that God Himself has, and that is why it is beyond human understanding and our unaided ability.

A parable is a story with a strong and telling overall meaning; there are many stories from Jesus in the Gospels that draw on the experiences of the listeners, but some of them are allegories rather than parables; an allegory is a story in which the people (or other elements) refer to people or things in the real world and often to the listeners themselves.   The well-known Jewish story of the vineyard has additional bits added to it in Matthew’s gospel which we read today.   The owner hands over the care of the crop and the business to tenants, but they are negligent and reject those servants sent by the master to see how they are progressing.   It is an allegory about the rulers and priests responsible for the good of the people; the servants are the prophets sent by God and finally His own Son.   It is difficult for us to hear this allegory, because the temptation is to relate the wicked tenants to our leaders, especially the ones in our worldwide church.   Accusing others in this way might make us feel we are in the right, and then the story just inflates our pride and encourages our condemnation of others.   Yet we too have responsibilities from God, and there are people who try to keep us on track whom we disregard.   The allegory must be about us else it does no good at all for us to read or hear it when it should be challenging us to improve ourselves, that’s what today’s sermon should do.

see Jeffs Jottings – Development of Christianity

Jeff Bagnall was a lecturer for many years at Craiglockhart College teaching RE to many future Catholic Primary teachers.

by Jeff Bagnall 18 September 2025
The first reading is from a section of the book of Amos ( 6:4-10 ); it is introduced with the opening words of the chapter: “alas for those who are at ease in Zion.” Strong words against the city dwellers come from Amos, the country fellow – words and woes against the northern kingdom of Israel. We hear the third and last woe against the excessive luxury in which they are living although their prosperity is declining visibly; they seem to live for the moment and care little of the future, even their own. They are, unusually, referred to as a group under the eponymous name of Joseph; this could be because of the account of Joseph’s interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream (Exodus 41) of seven years of plenty followed by seven of crop failure, and his wise management under the Pharaoh of storing up supplies for the future. The exile that will come will be the disaster that follows this decadence. In the second reading ( 1 Timothy 6:11-16 ) Timothy is addressed as a ‘man of God.’ Unlike the people of the first reading and in contrast to those addressed in this letter just before this section, Timothy is chosen and enabled by God to be a minister in the Christian community. Paul’s athletic imagery appears here also, saying “compete well,” that is, ‘run the race’ or ‘fight the good fight.’ The Christian at baptism made confession that “Jesus is Lord”, and Jesus made a similar confession before Pilate according to John’s gospel (18:37); Timothy was baptised but was also a leader in some way, and that meant not to be a covert Christian but to speak the truth even before accusers, as Jesus did before Pilate; the writer could be referring to either of these situations. The requirement to keep the commandments or ordinances is most likely not to the ten commandments of the Jewish religion but to the requirements of being a Christian or, more likely, the specific orders for acting as a minister. He must act as a servant of the King who will eventually appear, and he must be selfless in his work towards the kingdom of God. In today’s gospel reading from Luke ( 16:19-31 ) we have the parable often call that of Dives and Lazarus; but ‘dives’ is just the Latin word for rich man. In many ways the story is straightforward once we accept the different understanding of the afterlife that it portrays. However, whereas the rich man is anonymous, the beggar at his gate is named Lazarus. Luke is writing about 40 years after the resurrection of Jesus but still there are people who aren’t believers; and John’s gospel, uniquely, has the story of the raising of Lazarus which Luke’s readers may have known; but Luke’s point is not about accepting the truth of the resurrection, of Jesus or of Lazarus, because believing is more a way of living than accepting facts – of loving God and your neighbour as yourself, which the rich man in the parable didn’t do.
by Jeff Bagnall 11 September 2025
The Sunday readings only use the prophet Amos three times; this and next Sunday are two of those. Amos was a country man used to living a simple life: a herdsman tending sycamore trees. Somehow he came to be a prophet of God in the city of Bethel, though he wouldn’t claim the title of prophet and was different from most of them. Such a man coming from the country to the big and prosperous city just had to speak what he thought in order to deliver a ‘scolding’ from the Lord, for the hiking of prices, lowering of measures and fixing of scales (Amos 8:4-7). His natural reactions to the corruption that he saw is described as visions from God, and they are nearly always expressed with an impressive literary style: matching couplets and triplets. Yet it is the language of wrath and condemnation, though elsewhere Amos does tell of a remnant few who will be spared and at the end of the book there is a very positive prophecy though this ‘epilogue’ may have been added later to end on an upbeat note of hopefulness.
Show More