26th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A 2026

NATO, not “North Atlantic Treaty Organisation” but “No Action, Talk Only”. Today the Gospel gives us an example of NATO. Two sons responded to the father’s request. The one who said yes but did nothing was “NATO”. The one who said “No” but eventually carried out the work is an example of conversion to the will of God.

We all may begin with a level playing field meaning that each one of us (except, you know who) starts with a deficit. This is because each one of us, except Mary, and consequently Jesus, inherits humanity’s wounded inclination toward sin. Even though we have been created good, we are nevertheless imperfect because each one carries with himself or herself a spiritual deficit otherwise known as Original Sin. If anything, we are united in our starting point by ourneed of God’s grace for salvation.

Thus the 1st Reading makes sense. It is a given that we need grace. But the necessity of grace means we have to take personal responsibility for our behaviour. It is a wonderful realisation that God does not judge us because of our past. We hear this kind of guilt expressed when the Israelites lamented “Our forefathers ate sour grapes and our teeth are set on edge”. So how can God punish us for our fathers’ sins? And the Lord concurred. I am not punishing you because of your father. I am fair because I punish you for not taking responsibility for your future. It means that we are not locked in by our past. And what we perceived as God’s unfairness is actually His mercy.

How so?

We cannot depend on our past good deeds as if nothing of the present matters. Life is clearly unfair because one can be good or virtuous his or her entire life but because of one stupid mistake, the person is condemned. And to rub salt to wounds, a person can be dissolute his or her entire life but at the last minute is saved by conversion or a change in behaviour. Our sense of justice is somehow assaulted when we consider how that last minute or in the final moment, a bad person can gain heaven whereas a mostly good person can be condemned.

God’s fairness is basically our hope and it behoves upon us to take responsibility, not once but always. It means a life-time of choosing good and rejecting evil. No matter how late, the door of grace is always open to sinners.However, the past goodness of a person does not guarantee a person’s salvation in the matter of his or her present choice. A person who for most of his or her life has been a good person, he or she still can still go down the wrong path at the last minute.

This is frightening because it means we have great freedom. Secondly, it means we must choose wisely. And it is really a challenge not to be proud. The 2nd Reading can be interpreted from this perspective. The first part of Philippians Chapter 2 lays the foundation for our interaction with each other. We care for each other and that if there were supposed to be a competition amongst Christians, it is to have the mind of Christ. To be like Him. Even though His state was divine, He clung not to His divinity but became a slave. The Cross was Christ’s ultimate choice for His Father because He gave up His life in order that we might be saved.

In that way, both the Readings come together and they invite us to think more of who we are with regard to God’s will in our lives. When Christ told the elders that prostitutes and tax collectors were beating their paths to heaven, He was not condemning the elders. Instead He was warning them not to be blinded by their complacency.

Like the elders, we can be faithfully attending Mass Sunday in and Sunday out. We go for Confession regularly, recite the Creed each Sunday, receive Holy Communion faithfully and yet our hearts can be far away from God in the sense that we think these are enough to get us past the pearly gates. That is the danger of a complacency that considers the minimum as an expression of our relationship with God.

What happens when we leave our Sunday worship? We only spend an hour or thereabout each weekend in Church. The vineyard which the father asked the sons to labour in is not restricted to Church-grounds. There is a vast vineyard where we can still cultivate our relationship with God through our interactions with the world. Out there, we can still be selfish in our behaviour. Or we may continue to gossip about people we do not like. We might just live an unexamined life.

The point here is not so much to label whether one were inside or outside. Rather we can be both. We can be both outsiders and insiders—the prostitutes, the tax collectors and the elders and the Pharisees. It is not a matter of who is more virtuous. The fragility of grace indicates that one day we can choose good and the danger is the next day we choose otherwise. We are called to consistently to choose God and this ability is assisted by God’s grace and the faculty of choice for the good is strengthened by the Sacraments that we receive.

I guess for many of us, we have a lifetime of faithfulness to concretise meaning that we strive day in and out to live according to God’s laws. If we are good and if we consistently choose God, all the better and perhaps the challenge is not to be prideful that we are on the side of good. If we are struggling to be faithful and we are failing time and again, then the challenge is to cling on to God and not to give in to despair trusting that even at the end God’s mercy awaits us.