What Are You Producing?

If you have ever been fired (or had to fire someone) you know there isn’t much pleasant about it. At some point, the question becomes unavoidable: A job was given. Was it done? That is a hard enough question at work. It becomes considerably more uncomfortable when we ask it about our faith.

In this Sunday’s Gospel from Matthew 21:33–43, a landowner builds a vineyard, equips it, and entrusts it to tenants. When the time comes for the harvest, he expects fruit. Instead, the tenants begin acting as though the vineyard belongs to them. That may be where this Gospel gets uncomfortably close to home. We are very good at thinking like owners.

My career. My money. My house. My abilities. My family. My life.

Work hard enough and it is easy to start believing we built the whole thing ourselves. But Christianity begins with a very different understanding: we are not the owners. We are stewards. Everything we have, our abilities, opportunities, relationships, possessions, even the fact that we woke up this morning, was ultimately given to us.

And the Owner expects something from what He entrusted to us.

That doesn’t mean Christianity is a performance review where enough good deeds earn us heaven. Grace comes first. But grace is supposed to do something to us. Christ repeatedly tells us that discipleship bears fruit.

That is considerably more demanding than simply being a “nice guy.” An atheist can be generous. A man with no faith at all can give to charity, love his children and help his neighbor. Those are good things, but Christianity cannot simply mean being reasonably decent human being.

Jesus sets the bar higher. He tells us elsewhere that not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In Matthew 25, He separates the sheep from the goats according to what their lives actually produced.

So perhaps the uncomfortable question is not merely, “Am I a Christian?”

It is: What is my Christianity producing?

Has following Christ made me more forgiving? More courageous? More willing to sacrifice? More faithful to my wife? More patient with my children? More generous with what I have? More willing to tell the truth when it costs me something?

Or have I mostly been punching the clock because its my life and I set the rules?

The tenants in the Gospel forgot the most important fact about the vineyard: it wasn’t theirs. Maybe we forget that too. And once we start believing we are the owners, naturally we begin deciding for ourselves how much fruit is enough, what the rules should be, and what the Owner has a right to expect.

But stewardship works the other way around.  A steward is well aware they have been entrusted with something, and its their responsibility to make the most of it.

The real question isn’t what I feel like giving God from the life I built. The question is what God expects me to do with the life He gave me.

That is a much harder question….and probably one worth asking before the final quitting time.

— Chris Teague, member, Men of St. Joseph