“My Three Sons” was a 1960s hit sitcom about a widower raising three boys. I suspect many Catholics who heard Sunday’s Gospel would have preferred a parable about the man’s three sons. But Jesus gave us only two.

In Christ’s parable, the first son is told to go work in the vineyard and he flat out refuses, then changes his mind and goes. The second son, given the same task, says he will go — but doesn’t.

As Fr. Tim Banach noted, we probably would have liked a third son, one who given an assignment follows the will of his father and labors for the harvest. We’d probably like to flatter ourselves as such a model son. But, as Fr. Banach notes, there was no such son and, being all sinners, we fall short of what we should do.

For me, Sunday’s Gospel raises two important moral lessons.

First, it probes something of how later Catholic theology would understand the act. Every act has three components: the act in itself (finis operis), the intention (finis operantis), and circumstances. Our modern world, influenced by the dictatorship of relativism, likes to focus on intentions: what did the moral actor “want” to do? But, as the adage goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Human acts are not infinitely malleable. They “say” things independently of what we intend. If I punch you in the nose, that act does not say “I love you” regardless of how much you insist it does. The reason I put quotes around “want” above is because “wanting” is not just what I explicitly advert to; by being willing to give somebody lethal drugs, I want him dead, whether or not I admit to that.

Our age has lost the sense that acts say things in themselves, especially on the life issues. Rejecting openness to a child does not get sanitized by protestations of wanting a child to be “wanted.” Injecting somebody with lethal drugs doesn’t stop being murder because we had a “good intention” to put Uncle Joe out of his “misery.” Indeed, in a very real sense, the finis operis is more important because it causes objective results in the outside world. Yes, it’s nice you have good intentions about Uncle Joe’s suffering. But he’s just as dead whether your intentions were benevolent or malevolent. It’s not all about you.

Circumstances, the third component, generally enter acts in other ways, connected again to their objective situation. Theft is theft; but there’s an added degree of gravity by the circumstance of the theft being a silver chalice rather than a silver spoon, for example.

Orthodox Catholic theology insists an act must be good at all three levels (which is why we want to find a model third son). If it is wrong at any of those levels, it is wrong. A good intention does not cleanse an evil act. (Dissident theologians, who are now making something of a comeback, want to reduce morality to a preponderance of more good than evil, i.e., utilitarianism with a dash of holy water.) That’s why while neither son is a model, the one who recognizes what he is asked to do and repents did the will of his father. He may not have liked it. He may have grumbled all day in the vineyard. But he did what his father asked, and that’s important. It’s the motif in Polish author Roman Brandstaetter’s novella The Prophet Jonah, which, unlike the Biblical book, concludes with a warm dialogue between God and Jonah. God blesses Jonah for having done what God called him to do. Joah demurs, acknowledging he did it against his will. God replies that made the act all the more good, because Jonah in the end did what God wanted despite himself. That is also the lesson of the first son: the value of repentance.

The second lesson from Sunday’s Gospel reinforces that value of repentance. When Jesus explains the parables to his pharisaic interlocutors, he contrasts them to the tax collectors and prostitutes. All those listening to Jesus were, like us, sinners. The difference was the tax collectors and prostitutes realized that and repented in response to John or to Jesus. I was particularly struck by how the Gospel speaks of the pharisaic reaction to the repentance of tax collectors and prostitutes: “even when you saw that, you did not change your minds…”

The Greek word for repentance is “metanoia” (though not the word used in v. 32). The literal meaning of “metanoia” is “to change one’s mind.” Conversion implies changing one’s thinking about one’s life, how one has been living it, and how life should be lived. It involves breaking from established ways to put on a new man. But the Pharisees did not “change their minds.” So convinced were they of their righteousness that even the phenomenon of those they (rightly) recognized to be sinners changing their minds (and ways) did not change the Pharisees. It’s the same theme Jesus picks up in the Johannine parable of the man born blind, where Jesus rightly notes that willful blindness is a lot worse and incurable than physical loss of sight (Jn 9:40-41).

Last Sunday’s Gospel is here.