26th Sunday in Ordinary Time — Homily for September 27, 2026
Lectionary Year A · Ordinary Time
Readings: Ezekiel 18:25–28 | Psalm 25:4–9 | Philippians 2:1–11 | Matthew 21:28–32
Also today: the memorial of St. Vincent de Paul
Sunday Homily A Sunday Homily B Sunday Homily C
Which Son Are You? The Gospel of Second Chances
Good morning, brothers and sisters. A father has two sons, and he asks them both the same thing: “Go and work in the vineyard today.” The first says no — flatly, without excuse — and then goes anyway. The second says yes, all courtesy and good intention, and never shows up. Jesus asks the chief priests standing in front of him a simple question: which one did the father’s will? They answer correctly, because the answer is obvious. And then Jesus tells them, gently but without flinching, that the people they look down on — tax collectors, prostitutes, the visibly unrighteous — are entering the kingdom of God ahead of them.
It’s a short parable, almost a joke in its simplicity, and it is one of the most searching questions Jesus ever asks a religious person: not “what do you believe,” not “what do you say,” but “what did you actually do this morning?”
Three readings converge on this one point today. Ezekiel insists that a life is not sealed by its past — that the sinner who turns can live, and the virtuous man who turns away cannot coast on old credit. Paul, writing from a prison cell, holds up Christ’s self-emptying as the pattern for every Christian life. And Jesus tells a story about two sons, one of whom said all the right things and did nothing, and one of whom said the wrong thing and then quietly obeyed.
“The Soul That Sins, It Shall Die” — But the Soul That Turns, Shall Live
First Reading — Ezekiel 18:25–28
Ezekiel is speaking to a people in exile who believe they are paying for someone else’s sins — the old proverb about the fathers eating sour grapes while the children’s teeth are set on edge. God, through the prophet, dismantles that excuse completely. He insists on something almost scandalous for its time: a person is judged by where they stand now, not by the ledger of their whole life up to this point. The virtuous man who turns to wickedness cannot live on his old virtue. The wicked man who turns from his sin does not have to drown in his old guilt.
This is not a minor technical point about ancient inheritance law. It is one of the most liberating claims in the entire Old Testament. It means the past does not have the final vote. It means this morning matters more than the last twenty years. Ezekiel is not saying the past is irrelevant — he is saying it is not a life sentence. Every single day, the door swings both ways: toward the vineyard, or away from it.
This is exactly the theological ground the parable of the two sons is standing on. The first son’s “no” does not define him — his walking into the vineyard does. The second son’s “yes” does not define him either — his empty field does.
“Remember Your Mercies, O Lord”
Responsorial Psalm — Psalm 25:4–9
R/ Your ways, O Lord, are love and truth to those who keep your covenant.
The psalmist asks to be taught, not congratulated: “Make me know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths.” This is a prayer from someone who already suspects that he does not have it all figured out — which is, oddly, the safest place to pray from. “Remember not the sins of my youth” is not a request to have the past erased from history. It is a request to have it not be the last word.
“Good and upright is the LORD; thus he shows sinners the way.” Notice the order — God does not wait for people to stop sinning before showing them the way. The showing of the way is itself the mercy. The vineyard invitation goes out to both sons, the one who will refuse and the one who will comply-and-do-nothing. God is not selective about who gets asked. He is only watching, patiently, to see who eventually goes.
“Have Among Yourselves the Same Attitude That Is Also Yours in Christ Jesus”
Second Reading — Philippians 2:1–11
Paul is writing this letter from prison, to a small congregation he clearly loves, and he opens with an appeal that could sound almost naive if it weren’t so hard-won: be of the same mind, the same love, united in spirit. Do nothing out of selfishness. Regard others as more important than yourselves.
And then, to ground that appeal in something more than good advice, Paul quotes what many scholars believe was already an early Christian hymn — a description of Christ’s whole trajectory from glory to humiliation to glory again. He who was in the form of God did not cling to equality with God. He emptied himself. He took the form of a slave. He humbled himself, obedient even to death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him.
The word Paul uses — emptied himself — is the Greek kenosis, and it describes something almost impossible to picture: divinity choosing limitation, choosing servanthood, choosing the lowest possible position. This is the deepest answer to the parable Jesus will tell in the Gospel. The first son’s obedience — reluctant, unglamorous, unannounced — is a small human echo of exactly this pattern. Christ does not talk about servanthood from a throne. He goes into the vineyard.
“Every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” But notice: the confession comes after the emptying, not instead of it. The words follow the deed. This is Paul’s version of the parable’s punchline.
“Which of the Two Did the Father’s Will?”
Gospel — Matthew 21:28–32
Jesus tells this parable to the chief priests and elders, in the temple, in the days right before his passion, after they have just challenged his authority. It is aimed, pointedly, at people whose religious identity depends on saying the right things in the right places.
A man has two sons. He says to the first, “Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.” The son says, “I will not,” but afterward changes his mind and goes. The father says the same thing to the second son, who answers, “Yes, sir,” and does not go.
Jesus asks: which one did the father’s will? The chief priests answer correctly — the first. And then Jesus delivers the line that must have landed like a slap: “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.” Not instead of you — before you. There is still a door open. But John the Baptist came in the way of righteousness, and the tax collectors and prostitutes believed him, while the religious leaders, who saw it happen, did not even change their minds afterward.
That last detail is the sharpest edge of the parable. It is not simply that the second son said yes and didn’t go. It’s that even watching other people repent — watching sinners walk into the vineyard right in front of him — didn’t move him to reconsider. The first son’s story has a turn in it. The second son’s story, as Jesus tells it here, does not.
Which is the harder failure — the blunt refusal that eventually yields, or the polished agreement that never costs anything? Jesus is not romanticizing rebellion. The first son was still wrong to say no. But his “no” was honest, and honesty left room for a change of heart. The second son’s “yes” cost him nothing to say and changed nothing in him — a compliance so painless it never had to become real.
A Story for This Sunday: The Man Who Kept the Books
There was a parish in the Midwest with a finance council chairman named Walter — a retired accountant, precise, a little severe, the kind of man other people described as “solid” without much warmth in the word. Walter had never missed a Sunday Mass in forty years. He said the responses loudly. He was, by every visible measure, the model parishioner.
He also, for reasons even he couldn’t fully explain years later, had spent almost two decades quietly resenting his younger brother, Tom, who had left the Church in his twenties, made a mess of two marriages, and only came back into their mother’s life during her final illness — showing up at the hospital in work clothes, smelling like the auto shop where he’d finally landed a steady job, sitting with her at three in the morning when Walter, tired from the drive, had gone home to sleep.
At their mother’s funeral, the priest asked if anyone wanted to speak. Walter had prepared something — appropriate, well-organized, about their mother’s faith and her devotion to the rosary. He never got to give it, because Tom stood up first, unplanned, and talked for two unpolished minutes about how their mother used to sit with him on the porch during his worst year and never once say “I told you so.” He cried. He sat down.
Walter sat in the front pew and realized, with a kind of vertigo, that his brother — divorced, lapsed, rough around every edge — had actually been doing the work of loving their mother for the last three years of her life, while he, Walter, had been keeping perfect attendance and calling it faithfulness. He had said yes to God every single Sunday of his life. His brother, who had spent a decade saying no, had gone out to the vineyard and stayed there, unglamorously, at three in the morning, with no one watching.
Walter called Tom that night. It was the first real conversation the two of them had had in eleven years. He told this story himself, years later, to a group preparing for confirmation, and he ended it the same way every time: “I don’t tell you this because I stopped going to Mass. I tell you this because I finally understood what I was doing there.”
A Saint for This Feast: St. Vincent de Paul
Today the Church also keeps the memorial of St. Vincent de Paul (1581–1660), and it is hard to imagine a saint who embodies the first son of the parable more completely.
Vincent was ordained young, ambitious for advancement in the Church, and by his own later admission not especially devout in his early priesthood — he pursued benefices and comfortable postings the way any careerist cleric of his time might. Something changed in him gradually, through a series of encounters: hearing the confession of a dying peasant whose reconciliation had been badly neglected by careless clergy; a period of captivity and enslavement in North Africa that reordered his sense of what suffering actually looked like; his growing friendship with St. Francis de Sales and with Louise de Marillac.
What Vincent became known for was not eloquence — by most accounts he was not a dazzling preacher — but relentless, unglamorous action. He organized the Ladies of Charity and later founded the Daughters of Charity to nurse the sick and feed the poor door to door. He established the Congregation of the Mission to train priests for parish work among the rural poor whom the Church of his day had largely forgotten. He ransomed galley slaves. He fed famine victims by the thousands during the wars that devastated France. He is reported to have said, “Go to the poor: you will find God.”
He did not begin as the son who said yes. His early career was closer to comfortable ambition than to vineyard labor. But somewhere along the way he changed his mind — and unlike the second son in the parable, once he turned, he stayed turned, for the rest of a very long life. He is the patron saint, fittingly, of charitable societies, precisely because he understood that charity that only speaks is not yet charity at all.
The Two Sons and the American Catholic in 2026
The Comfortable “Yes”
It is entirely possible to have excellent theology, a well-decorated faith life, and a vineyard that has never once seen you in it. American Catholic culture makes this especially easy — it is possible to defend the faith fluently online, to have strong and correct opinions about liturgy or doctrine, and to have done nothing this week that cost you anything. The second son’s sin was not disagreement; it was frictionlessness. His yes required nothing of him, so it produced nothing from him.
The Honest “No” That Turns
The first son’s story is good news for anyone whose relationship with God has been messier than presentable — anyone who has walked away, said no clearly, meant it at the time, and is only now circling back toward the vineyard gate. Ezekiel already told us this: the turning is what counts, not the tidiness of the record leading up to it. The Church, at her best, exists to keep that gate open and to stop confusing the loudness of someone’s original “no” with the finality of their story.
The Uncomfortable Mercy
“Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you” is not a line meant to comfort religious people. It is meant to unsettle them productively. If the people we are most tempted to write off are, in fact, ahead of us in the vineyard, the appropriate response is not defensiveness but self-examination: where, exactly, have I been saying yes and staying home?
Scriptures to Carry Into This Week
- Luke 15:20 — “While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him and was filled with compassion.” The prodigal son’s return, read alongside the two sons of Matthew’s vineyard: the father is always watching the road.
- James 2:17 — “Faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” The New Testament’s plainest restatement of the parable’s whole logic.
- 1 John 3:18 — “Let us love not in word or speech, but in deed and truth.” Almost a one-line summary of both the Gospel and Paul’s hymn to Christ.
- Ezekiel 33:11 — “I do not desire the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” The same mercy as today’s first reading, restated a few chapters later.
- Micah 6:8 — “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Not a creed to recite — a walk to take.
Conclusion: Go to the Vineyard
Brothers and sisters, the parable does not ask which son had better theology, or which one phrased his answer more respectfully, or which one made his father feel better in the moment. It asks only one thing: which son actually went. Ezekiel tells us the turning is always available, today, regardless of what came before. Paul tells us the pattern for that turning was written first in Christ, who did not talk about lowering himself — he simply went all the way down. And St. Vincent de Paul, on his own feast day, stands as proof that a comfortable “yes” can, with enough grace and enough years, become the real thing.
So the question is not whether you have said the right words about God this week. It’s whether the vineyard has seen you in it.
Glory and praise forever. Amen.
Reflection Questions for Personal Prayer or Group Discussion
- Where in your life right now are you the second son — someone who has said yes easily, in a way that has cost you nothing and changed nothing?
- Ezekiel insists that the past does not have the final vote over your life today. Is there an old “no” you are still living under that God may already consider closed?
- St. Vincent de Paul’s early ambition looked very little like his later life of service. What began the turn in him — and is there a comparable moment you can name in your own story?
- Paul asks the Philippians to regard others as more important than themselves, grounding the appeal in Christ’s self-emptying. Where would that kind of humility cost you something real this week?
- Jesus tells the religious leaders that watching sinners repent didn’t move them to reconsider their own hearts. Has someone else’s honest turning toward God ever challenged — or unsettled — your own complacency?
Prayers of the Faithful — 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Presider: Brothers and sisters, trusting in the Father who calls each of us to labor in his vineyard, let us bring our prayers before him.
- For Pope Francis and the bishops of the Church: that they may lead not by comfortable words alone but by visible, costly service, after the pattern of Christ who emptied himself. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer.
- For all who have said no to God and are quietly finding their way back to the vineyard: that they may trust Ezekiel’s promise — that today matters more than yesterday — and find the Church’s door open to them. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer.
- For those of us who have grown comfortable in our faith: that we may examine honestly whether our “yes” has cost us anything this year, and find the courage to go where we have only promised to go. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer.
- In thanksgiving for St. Vincent de Paul and all who serve the poor in his spirit: that his example may move parishes and individuals alike to charity that acts and not only speaks. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer.
- For all who feel written off by religious people — the doubting, the divorced, the addicted, the estranged: that they may hear in today’s Gospel not condemnation but an open gate. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer.
- For the sick, the grieving, and all who have asked for our prayers: that the God who is “good and upright” may show them his ways in their present need. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer.
- For the faithful departed: that they may rest in the mercy of the God who does not remember the sins of our youth but the love of our turning. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer.
Presider: Father, you sent your Son not to speak of the vineyard but to labor in it, all the way to the cross. Teach us your ways, remember not our old refusals, and give us the grace this week to go where we have only promised to go. We ask this through Christ our Lord. All: Amen.
26th Sunday in Ordinary Time · September 27, 2026 · Lectionary Year A
Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 136
Reading 1
Ezekiel 18:25-28
Thus says the LORD:
You say, “The LORD’s way is not fair!”
Hear now, house of Israel:
Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair?
When someone virtuous turns away from virtue to commit iniquity, and dies,
it is because of the iniquity he committed that he must die.
But if he turns from the wickedness he has committed,
and does what is right and just,
he shall preserve his life;
since he has turned away from all the sins that he has committed,
he shall surely live, he shall not die.
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9
R. (6a) Remember your mercies, O Lord.
Your ways, O LORD, make known to me;
teach me your paths,
guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my savior.
R. Remember your mercies, O Lord.
Remember that your compassion, O LORD,
and your love are from of old.
The sins of my youth and my frailties remember not;
in your kindness remember me,
because of your goodness, O LORD.
R. Remember your mercies, O Lord.
Good and upright is the LORD;
thus he shows sinners the way.
He guides the humble to justice,
and teaches the humble his way.
R. Remember your mercies, O Lord.
Reading 2
Philippians 2:1-11
Brothers and sisters:
If there is any encouragement in Christ,
any solace in love,
any participation in the Spirit,
any compassion and mercy,
complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love,
united in heart, thinking one thing.
Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory;
rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves,
each looking out not for his own interests,
but also for those of others.
Have in you the same attitude
that is also in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
or
Philippians 2:1-5
Brothers and sisters:
If there is any encouragement in Christ,
any solace in love,
any participation in the Spirit,
any compassion and mercy,
complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love,
united in heart, thinking one thing.
Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory;
rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves,
each looking out not for his own interests,
but also for those of others.
Have in you the same attitude
that is also in Christ Jesus.
Alleluia
John 10:27
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord;
I know them, and they follow me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Matthew 21:28-32
Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people:
“What is your opinion?
A man had two sons.
He came to the first and said,
‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’
He said in reply, ‘I will not,’
but afterwards changed his mind and went.
The man came to the other son and gave the same order.
He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir, ‘but did not go.
Which of the two did his father’s will?”
They answered, “The first.”
Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you,
tax collectors and prostitutes
are entering the kingdom of God before you.
When John came to you in the way of righteousness,
you did not believe him;
but tax collectors and prostitutes did.
Yet even when you saw that,
you did not later change your minds and believe him.”
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