The account of Ahab and Naboth's vineyard is an unsettling demonstration of how avarice and violence can play out if left unchecked. It seems to be a case of anything and everything going wrong, from Ahab's petulance at not getting what he wanted to Jezebel's hypocrisy by using a religious event to trap and murder Naboth. While this seems quite extreme and out of our ordinary experience, it serves as a cautionary tale for all of us as it shows what might happen as one slides into habitual sin and how that can gradually normalise, to the sinners at least, the horrific behaviour of Ahab and Jezebel.

The Lord provides a stark corrective for what we heard in the first reading. Naboth was a victim of a world where 'an eye for an eye' was the norm, where the powerful take what they want and the weak are crushed. The Lord offers us the alternative by first living out the humility that the Lord Himself showed on the cross and then seeking to be loving and forgiving as God has always been. Humility acts against greed while forgiveness leads to an end of violence. This counter-cultural witness to the materialism and vanity of our modern culture can be an uphill task for many of us but the Lord offers us also His assistance and grace to make this possible.