The readings talk about dashed hopes. The first reading opens by talking of the owner’s love for his vineyard.  In spite of all his hard work, the vineyard on a fertile hillside did not produce good fruit. The grapes were rotten, entirely useless.  No doubt he was hugely disappointed as he decided that there was nothing more he could do, and he gave up the effort.

The Gospel tells not just of failure but of betrayal. The tenants were determined not to give the harvest to the landowner, and they went to the extreme of attacking and killing his messengers.  Finally they even murdered his son in the hope taking over the property for themselves.  The owner brings the murderers to justice and makes a new start with the vineyard.

Jesus drives the message home.  The parable is saying that God has sent his own Son, ‘the stone rejected by the builders’, and now God’s Son was going to be rejected and cruelly killed.  There will have to be a fresh start. A new set of tenants will produce the crop and this new initiative of God will be ‘wonderful to see’.

In all of that disillusionment and failure, there are echoes of the news that has filled our papers and our airwaves in recent months and especially this week. The economy, in Ireland and around the world, is not yielding the fruit we hoped for, that we had come to take for granted.  There are job losses, banks being rescued, and increasingly bleak economic forecasts. Not so long ago people were saying that the country was awash with money.  Now we feel more like the man with the vineyard: we expected rich fruit we are finding rotten grapes. We are all affected by worries about whether the kind of affluence and economic growth we have seen in recent years is over for a long time to come, maybe for good. 

And of course the worries that have emerged about the economy are only one aspect of the pressure and distress that weighs on us. There are worries about climate change and fuel shortages and global inequalities and terrorism.  We worry about the kind of world we will leave to the children of today and to their children.

There is also the more personal, pain that we feel in all sorts of different ways in our individual lives.  There are people, even in a big city parish, even surrounded by hundreds of others in a big church, who are acutely lonely, people who are heavily burdened with sorrow, people who feel their life is empty, people who are troubled about their health or their relationships, people who are fearful about anxieties and crises and about dangers they can foresee in the lives of their children or families.

In the context of all that gloom, what St Paul says at the beginning of the second reading sounds rather over-optimistic: “There is no need to worry” he says, “have no anxiety about anything.” One might be tempted to say, ‘It’s all very well for him’. But, remember the kind of things St Paul faced in his own life.  He was flogged five times; he was imprisoned: three times he was beaten with rods, once he was stoned, three times he was shipwrecked, and he faced all sorts of other risks and betrayals (2 Cor 11:24ff). So when he tells us that there is no need to worry, he does so as someone whose life provided many good reasons for anxiety!  He tells us why we can have hope -- because the peace of God will guard our hearts and thoughts. But he this is peace is not something ordinary or simple to be weighed in the balance against the things that disturb us; it “is so much greater than we can understand”. 

The peace of God does not assure us that everything is going to turn out as we would like.  Jesus tells us two things – firstly, we are not alone in our pain.  “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Is 53:4).  Secondly evil and suffering and death do not have the last word.

We are not alone. That was one of the very first things Pope Benedict said on the day of the inauguration of his papal ministry in St. Peter’s Square:  “Those who believe are never alone.” The Sunday Eucharist is a gathering of people around Jesus, crucified and risen. It begins by an acknowledgement that this gathered community is a community in need of healing and help. In the Penitential Rite, we acknowledge that we are sinners, we are fallible; we are weak; we are vulnerable. We believe that we are not alone but we are utterly dependent on the merciful, healing always reliable love of God. We recognise that all of us, without exception, depend on that love.  We recognise that we are meant to be signs and agents of that love of God for one another – to love one another as Jesus loves us. We confess to almighty God and also to our brothers and sisters and we ask one another’s prayers.

This is a time when many things lead people to feel overwhelmed and alone. When we call ourselves a parish, a Christian community, we put a challenge before ourselves. One of the first tributes paid to Christians by the pagan world around them was the exclamation: “See how these Christians love one another”. The Christian is never alone because Christ is with us, but also because we are members of a community in which we love one another. We followers of Jesus Christ are meant to do everything possible to ensure that no member of our community feels alone.

But that doesn’t just happen. Could a lonely person come to Mass and leave feeling even lonelier than they came?  Could young immigrants come and find that nobody greeted them or even smiled at them? Could a person who is overcome by grief or worry leave without any sense that they had met a community, or even an individual, who really cared about them?  As often as you failed to respond to the needs of the least of these, Jesus told us, you failed to care for me.

Today is the annual Day for Life.  This year’s theme is mental health.  It is a theme that has relevance to every community, every family.  We are told that one quarter of the population experiences a mental health problem in the course of their lives.  It is very important when that happens, that people know that they are not alone, and that they have no need to feel embarrassed or ashamed.

In a large congregation like this, it is certain that there are people among us who are going through a very tough time.  There are people who are suffering from depression and who have never understood that what causes them to feel so tired and weighed down is an illness that can be dealt with. There are people who are grieving, or anxious or sick. There are people who are worried about their jobs or their pensions or the value of their houses. The first thing they need to know is that they are not alone. In a world which has become so busy and so absorbed, we need to ask ourselves – even about our parish communities – ‘do we have the sensitivity that might let us see when somebody is under stress?’; ‘does a person who is suffering from depression find understanding or impatience, people with a listening ear or people too absorbed in their own concerns to notice?’; ‘do people who need support and help really feel that in a Christian community there should be no embarrassment about needing for support and friendship?  After all we all acknowledge our weakness and vulnerability to each other at the beginning of every Mass. None of us can regard any of these questions as somebody else’s business. We are all, as Pope Benedict put it, meant to “bear witness to the tender mercy of God” especially towards people who are depressed or suffering from mental illness of any kind.
 
We began this reflection with two men who were disappointed, shattered, even brokenhearted. One had lost a vineyard that he had worked very hard for; the other had seen his messengers beaten and killed and his own son murdered.  And St Paul had undergone beating and shipwreck and imprisonment and every kind of danger.  And yet the message is one of hope, why? Because the peace of God is greater than we can understand.  Evil and suffering and death do not have the last word.

When we try to support one another the most important thing we have to share is the hope that comes from knowing that, whatever happens, however much pain we feel, we are in the hands of God whose love is more powerful than anything we fear or than any pain we endure. We help one another to fill our minds with that goodness of God.  Then we know that what is true, noble and good  is where God is at work and that God’s peace is with us (Second Reading).

The peace of God does not promise that we will not have heartbreak or loss or anxiety; or that we will not feel weighed down. It would be very strange if Jesus, who died a cruel, unjust death, betrayed by a friend and abandoned most of his followers, was telling us that there would be no pain in our lives.

But he does give us the hope that answers the questions that often gnaw at our hearts – does life have any meaning? Is life worth living at all? What happens when we die?  The distinguishing mark of Christians, Pope Benedict told us, is hope: “they know that their lives will not end in emptiness”. In fact, to people who are overwhelmed by anxiety or depression, the Gospel offers the promise of being “overwhelmed by joy”.  That is the joy that those who are feeling low or anxious or disturbed should be able to recognise in the life of our community.

+Donal Murray