We are used to thinking in terms of investment and return. We invest money in a house hoping its value will rise. We invest time and energy in our work and hope we will get a salary increase or a promotion. Students invest hard in their studies, expecting their efforts to bear fruit. Perhaps the greatest investment we ever make, though, is in other people. Parents pour extraordinary amounts of love, patience, time and sacrifice into their children, hoping that what they have given will help them flourish. Yet… life teaches us that investment and return do not always match. Markets fall, examinations go badly, projects fail, and sometimes the people to whom we have given most seem to give very little back.

That is the painful image at the heart of today’s first reading. Isaiah describes a landowner who lavishes care upon his vineyard. He chooses good ground, clears away the stones, plants the finest vines and builds everything necessary for a successful harvest. He could hardly have done more. Naturally, he waits for good grapes. Instead, the vineyard produces sour ones. Isaiah then reveals that the vineyard is an image of God’s people. God had given them so much, hoping to find justice and goodness growing among them. Instead, he finds violence and hears the cries of those who are suffering. The problem was not that God had failed to give enough; it was that what he had given had not been allowed to bear fruit.

And yet this is where the story of God becomes so remarkable. Faced with such a poor return, God does not withdraw his investment. He gives more. In the parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel, the owner of the vineyard finally sends his own son. Even when the son is rejected and killed, God still does not abandon humanity. The Cross becomes the extraordinary sign of just how much God is prepared to invest in us. We may disappoint him, ignore what he gives us and produce rather more sour grapes than we would care to admit. Yet God continues to sow. His generosity towards us is far greater than the return we could ever offer him.

The art market, perhaps more than most worlds, is driven by the idea of return on investment. Paintings are bought not only because someone loves them, but also as investment. Few examples are as spectacular as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled of 1982. The painting, with its huge, almost electric skull-like head emerging from a field of blue, was bought at auction in 1984 for just $19,000. Thirty-three years later, in 2017, it returned to auction and sold at Sotheby’s for an astonishing $110.5 million. That is nearly 5,800 times what had originally been paid for it. Whatever one thinks of the painting itself, as an investment it produced some very sweet grapes indeed.

But the Gospel invites us to measure investment rather differently. God is not a collector watching the market, wondering whether we have increased sufficiently in value to justify what he has spent on us. He invests in us simply because he loves us! The question the vineyard leaves with us then, is not simply how much God has invested in our lives, but what fruit are we bearing for Him? In the economy of God, what have we truly given back to Him?