This coming Sunday is the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time. This parable is about doing the will of God (v. 31). The question, “What is God’s will for my life?” is one that Christians often ask. However, answering that question with an unreflective “obeying God and working in the fields” too easily leads to an idea that one is able to work/earn one’s salvation. But then again, relying on faith alone can reduce action to a meaningless afterthought to one’s words.

The key to this parable is the word metamelomai. Although the NAB (Catholic Bible) translates it with the sense of changing one’s mind,” (vv. 29, 32) that is not the most literal understanding of this word. Usually the idea of “changing one’s mind” or “repenting” is conveyed by the Greek word metanoeo. One wonders if Matthew’s use of the word metamelomai points to something more subtle.

The prefix meta = “change” begins both words. The verb noeo is related to activities of the mind (nous). The verb melo has the sense “to care for,” so we might translate metamelomai as “changing what one cares about” or “to change what one is most concerned about.” – or desires.  It could be that v.29 might be translated as: “He answering said, “I am not willing,” but later having a change of heart, he went.”

We might say of the religious leaders of v. 32, “They would not change their hearts” – or to use an OT phrase: “Their hearts were hard.”

31 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.

The question that Jesus posed is now filled out: the chief priests and elders are required to adjudicate between the two brothers. For “doing the will of” God distinguishes mere profession from active compliance, and so here it suitably distinguishes between the attitudes of the two sons. Jesus’ question thus allows only one reasonable answer, which the Jewish leaders duly provide, but, like David in his response to Nathan’s parable (2 Sam 12:5–7), in so doing they provide Jesus with the ammunition he needs to mount an attack in v. 32 on their own inconsistency. First, however, he spells out its consequences.

The Jewish leaders (like the second son) claimed to be living in obedience to God’s law, and kept themselves strictly apart from those who (like the first son) made no such claim. It was Jesus’ interest in such “tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 15:1–2) which gave rise to another parable about two sons (Luke 15:11–32). In this gospel the “underclass” of Jewish society have also been described as “tax collectors and sinners” (9:10, 11; 11:19), and on two occasions the Jewish tax collectors have been even more dismissively linked with Gentiles (5:46–47; 18:17). The substitution of “prostitutes” here for either “sinners” or “Gentiles” gives an even more offensive comparison, especially in so male-dominated a society as first-century Palestine. These are the people whom the chief priests and elders most despise and most heartily thank God that they were not like (cf. Luke 18:11). They had no place in respectable, religious Jewish society — how much less in the kingdom of God. So when Jesus speaks not only of their entering God’s kingdom but also going in there first, he is making a no less radical pronouncement than when he spoke of Gentiles coming into the kingdom of heaven to sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while the “sons of the kingdom” found themselves outside (8:11–12).

Image credit: Parable of the Two Sons, Andrei Monorov, 2012 | CC BY SA 4.0 |