The Bent Nail

We all know the difference between just talking the talk and really walking the walk. In Jesus’ Gospel today, a father tells his two sons, “Go and work in the vineyard.” One says, “I will not” — but later changes his mind and goes. The other says, “Yes, sir,” and never shows up. The point isn’t which son says the right words. It’s which son does the right thing.

You may know the story of a man for whom drink had become an obsession, pulling him away from his family and God. One day, walking and thinking about the mess he was making of his life, he came across a bent, rusty nail on the road. Something about it stopped him — it looked like he felt. He picked it up, took it home, set it on an anvil, and straightened it out until it looked new again. And as he worked it, the thought hit him: I could do that to my own life. That thought — grace, working on him the way he was working the nail — became the turning point. He gave up drink and went back to his family. He still carries that nail in his pocket, to remind him which son he wants to be.

That’s one way the parable plays out — an initial “no” that becomes a “yes.” But Jesus tells this story to make a second, harder point too: it’s not always the people who look most faithful who actually are. There’s a scene in the movie The Motorcycle Diaries where a young Che Guevara is volunteering at a leper colony in Peru. His first morning, he heads in for breakfast, but the sister in charge stops him: only those who went to Mass eat. He tells her he’s an atheist. She turns him away. He’s sitting outside on a bench when a leper — someone with every reason to keep what little she has — comes and sits beside him and shares her own breakfast with him. The leper and the sister both went to Mass that morning. Only one of them actually said “yes” to God.

That’s exactly the charge Jesus levels at the religious leaders at the end of the Gospel: they say the right words and pray the right prayers, but when John the Baptist called them to change, they didn’t move — while tax collectors and people the leaders had written off said “yes” to God and meant it, and walked into the kingdom ahead of them.

Jesus’ point for us is this: prayer and pious practice aren’t the purpose of religion. They’re the means religion gives us to be sent into the vineyard of our world and actually do God’s work there.

Today the Church asks us to hold that word “vineyard” up against a particular mirror, because today is World Day of Migrants and Refugees — a day set aside to pray for migrants and refugees, and to ask ourselves honestly which son we are when it comes to them. It is easy to say the right words about welcoming the stranger — we say them every time we pray the Scriptures, which are full of God’s own people as migrants and exiles. It is harder to walk into the vineyard and do something about a policy, a family, a neighbor who is undocumented and afraid. The world says “no” to God when it treats a migrant family as a threat rather than a household like our own. It says “no” to God when children are separated from parents, or when fear keeps a mother from taking her sick child to a clinic. And it says “yes” to God every time someone opens a door instead — a meal shared, a ride given, a form filled out, a hand extended without asking first what someone’s papers say.

Our challenge — every one of us, in whatever corner of the vineyard we’ve been given — is to say “yes” to God and “no” to whatever in the world pulls against that. We cannot do everything. That should never stop us from doing whatever we can. It’s our “yes” — lived, not just spoken — that ushers us into God’s kingdom and ushers God’s kingdom into the world.

We cannot do everything. That should never stop us from doing whatever we can.

So let this Eucharist be the anvil. Whatever in us is bent — whatever “no” we’ve been carrying — let this be the place where grace goes to work on it, so that we leave ready to say “yes”: in our families, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and to the stranger among us who is waiting simply to be seen.