Friday of the Second Week of Lent - Dr. John Bergsma

Letters from Home, a podcast from the St. Paul Center. Hi there, this is Dr. John Bergz, from the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and the Franciscan University of St. Winville coming to you on this Friday of the second week of Lent and very good to be with you and we're a little ways into Lent here. And as we follow through these readings, what Holy Mother Church is doing for us in the first reading is giving us examples from Israel's history of prophets who were persecuted and who typified or anticipated the life, the sufferings, the persecutions of Jesus who is the definitive prophet. And today in our first reading we have Genesis 37 which is focusing on the figure of Joseph. And Joseph of course is a patriarch in one sense because he gave rise to not just one but two tribes, the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, both come from Joseph because Ephraim and Manasseh were his twin sons. So Joseph is considered a patriarch and a very important one at that but Joseph was also a prophet. Remember how he's the great dreamer of dreams, right? Prince of Egypt and Joseph of the Technicolor Dreamcoat and all of that. He is the brother who receives communication from God through dreams and has prophetic insight into the future. And so our passage from today, I'll take it from Genesis 37, is about how Joseph, this youngest son of Jacob, also known as Israel at the time, youngest at least until Benjamin was born. Joseph is the favorite of his father and he goes out to, you know, not spy on but to get a read on what his older brothers are doing and bring Braddock or report to his father. And of course his older brother is resent. The younger brother checking up on them and they also resent his dreams which sound ostentatious and self-serving about becoming leader of the whole family one day and so they decide to kill him and they throw him down a sister. Ruben makes an attempt to save his life which doesn't really pee and out but then Judah comes up with the idea of selling Joseph to a wandering group of traders which they do and so he sold as a slave and he ends up being taken down to Egypt. So look at the parallelism here, Judah, Joseph's half brother, is a Judas type. He's one of 12 companions who sells one of their number for pieces of silver into slavery and so this is a type of the betrayal that Jesus is going to experience at the hand of Judas who of course is named after the patriarch Judah. And Joseph is this prophet and later his prophetic powers are going to come into play as he rises to become vizier or prime minister of Egypt and he winds up saving really not just Egypt but the whole world because this famine comes over the whole known world several years later at a time when Joseph is prime minister of Egypt second only to Pharaoh. And Joseph knows that that famine is coming because of prophetic insight and because of his dreams and so he stores up grain in Egypt and with the famine strikes it's not just the Egyptians but the entire world comes to Joseph for grain and so he keeps the world alive through the gift of finest wheat we could say. And this is another Christ typeology that's going on in the life of Joseph. Joseph descends into the pit of a dungeon and then is raised up and elevated and seated at the right hand of God because Pharaoh was considered God and then Joseph administers the world basically at the right hand of the divine Pharaoh kind of an image of the ascension of the enthromit of our Lord and then saves the whole world through this gift of bread which obviously is eucharistic and so Joseph is one of the more important types of Christ in the Old Testament but will be notices for most of his life he experiences persecution rather than any benefit from his prophetic gifts. You know this of course is going to be true of our Lord as well. We move to the gospel today and our Lord is in Matthew 21 here telling the parable of the landowner and the vineyard and how this owner of the vineyard sent servants to the workmen of the vineyard to receive his allotted pay or his portion of the produce of the vineyard and he sells sends servant after servant some are beaten some are killed some are stoned finally he sends his son and they kill the son and cast him out of the vineyard. And this relates directly to our first reading because Joseph was one of the prophets that God sent to his people along with others Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Elijah, many others all of the prophets of Israel's history were these messengers sent by God to the vineyard and the vineyard itself is the people of Israel and that connects with the song of songs you may recall how in the song of songs the bride of the song of the song excuse me is described as if she is a garden or a vineyard and that's because the bride of the song of songs really is the nation of Israel embodied as a woman in that beautiful piece of poetry but we also see this in Isaiah 5 where the allegory of Israel as a vineyard is used as well and so these workers of the vineyard are the leadership of Israel they are the royalty and the priests etc and God sends the messengers who are his prophets and they mistreat his prophets and finally the the greatest of the prophets is his own son and that one they kill and of course our Lord is speaking of himself and then he quotes have you never read the scriptures the stone that the builders rejected has become the quarterstone quarterstone of what well of the temple because Christ is the quarterstone of it of a new temple a new temple built of living stones that's going to replace the stone temple in Jerusalem where Jesus taught during his earthly ministry and that stone temple is going to be destroyed in the year 70 and it's going to be replaced by a temple of human beings each of whom is himself a temple or herself a temple because as St Paul says do you not know that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit and each of us is a living stone in the new temple of God which is the church and so Jesus is speaking of these mysteries in the chief priest of the Pharisees here the parables they recognize that he's telling the parables against them but they don't recognize the goodness and the vision of the future in the invitation to salvation that Jesus is offering them let's not miss it ourselves let us enter into the vineyard it worked the vineyard faithfully with the master and give the master his fruit from the vineyard and that vineyard is our own lives and that fruit is is the virtues and growth and holiness let's work on that during lit let's weed out our vineyard weed out all the weeds of video and even mortal sids pull them all out and let the vineyard really grow and let the master receive his fruit from it well this has been Dr. John Burke's went from the state Paul Center for Biblical Theology of the Fritz has good university student will wishing you a happy and holy Friday of the second week of Lent