Gd's Offer of Love and Our Response

Sermon. 8 October 2017. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Trinity 17 (Year A)

Isaiah 5.1-7

Psalm 80.9-17

Matthew 21.33-end

Isaiah 5.1-7 - own over-literal translation [not preached]:

Let me sing now for my beloved

the song of my love, about his vineyard.

A vineyard there was for my beloved

on a ‘horn’ a ‘son of oil’ [of a hill].

And he dug it over, and he de-stoned it, 

and he planted it [with] [a] vine.

And he built  a watchtower in its midst, 

and even a wine-press he dug in it. 

And he hoped for [it] to make grapes,

but it made stinking things.

And now, dweller of Jerusalem, and man of Judah,

judge [ye] now between me and [between] my vineyard.

What [would be] to do more for my vineyard

that I did not do it in it?

Why did I hope for [it] it to make grapes

and it made stinking things? 

And now let me make you know now

what I myself am on the point of doing to my vineyard.

Making turn away its hedge, and it will be for devouring;

breeching its wall, and it will be for a trampling. 

And I will make it a desolation [Hebrew uncertain - Greek: I will forsake my vineyard]

and it will not be pruned and it will not be hoed

and there will grow up thorn and thistle.

And to the clouds I will command

away from raining upon it rain. 

For the vineyard of YHWH of Forces is the House if Israel

and the Man of Judah is the planting of his delightful-delight.

And he looked for fairness but behold blood-flow;

for rightness but behold roaring! 

There is a school of thought in Christian teaching which has been very influential and powerful. I’ll give you its names. It is known as ‘supersessionism’ or ‘replacement theology’. (Those two tend to mean the same thing.) The terms may sound abstract or complicated. But it’s not hard to say what it means. 

It’s this: the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible can be divided up. Systematically. 

All the blessings and promises move from the People Israel to the Church; 

all the curses and threats stay with the People Israel. 

• Blessings, promises - Church
• Curses, threats - Jews. 

I say this because our First Reading and our Gospel today (they hang together, remember) have been used to reinforce this line of teaching. In the first reading, a vineyard goes to seed, or goes wrong. And the text is clear: the vines are the Houses of Israel and Judah, and are judged for it. Even: devoured and trampled on. The gospel clearly echoes precisely this story (even down to some of the vocabulary), but the parts are altered. Now it’s the people in charge of the vineyard who mess up. And Jesus is just as clear: these represent the leaders of the Jewish people, and the kingdom is to be taken away from them. 

So you can perhaps see how the idea arose:

• Blessings, promises - Church
• Curses, threats - Jews. 

Sisters and brothers, we know each other fairly well by now. You will know that I think this school of thought is wrong, very wrong. It is wrong for all kinds of reasons. The most fundamental reason is this: if Gd is such a Gd that Gd makes a promise, and then changes Gd’s own mind when people fail and fall into sin, withdraws the promise, and hands it over to others, then how do we know that Gd is still with us? After all, Christians have sinned, and the Church has failed, in all kinds of ways. Surely (if Gd changes Gd’s mind), we too deserve the curses and the threats, and Gd’s best bet is to try again with a third people, a fourth community? 

No, Gd as Gd is not like that. Gd does not change Gd’s mind. Gd is, as we say (and mean), faithful. When Gd makes a promise, the promise stands, whatever people do or don’t do. When Gd calls a people, called is who they are. It is their nature to be called. And if that is true of the Church (as we believe it is), then it must also be true of the People Gd called first (as, to exaggerate slightly, pretty much every page of the Bible insists), the People Israel. 

There are many other reasons why that division (blessings/promises - church; curses/threats - Jews) is so wrong.  One I want to draw out from the First Reading from the Hebrew Bible, from Isaiah. It is summed up by this phrase 'more in sorrow than in anger'. It’s a phrase we might hear in all kinds of contexts. I want to suggest it is a phrase which sums up how Gd is, when Gd makes negative statements. Gd speaks more in sorrow than in anger. 

For that first reading is a poem (isn’t it?). And as a poem it is a lament. It is a song of grief for a vineyard which had such great promise. It was made with the kind of care and attention which is love. Indeed, quite explicitly, this is the ‘song of my love’ about and for “my beloved”. Two terms are used (yadid and dod). The second we find throughout the great Love Song of the Bible, the Song of Songs. And here the repetition is quite intentional: ‘my beloved... song of my love... my beloved’. There is love here, intimacy (or a desire for intimacy), passion. That Gd loves us is not an idea which first comes with Jesus and in the New Testament. Isaiah (and other prophets) already knew of Gd’s love. Which is why it is so painful - for Gd, for people, for all parties - when human beings mess up - spurn Gd - when they do not respond to Gd’s love with love for Gd and one another. 

Our translation speaks of grapes and wild grapes. Gd loved the people so that they had every chance to build a community of love. They could have been fruitful. Indeed more than fruitful:  we are talking about grapes for wine; they could have been joyful, feasting, full of wine, company and song, we might say. 

But instead…  well, wild grapes doesn’t capture the Hebrew. The Hebrew means more literally ‘stinking things’ - so ‘foul fruit’, maybe. That’s the imagery that fits how wrong is the response of the people. It is summed up in that last line: the beloved hoped for ‘justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry’. Again, the Hebrew is more powerful, with a play on words: 

he hoped for mishpat and got mispach, for tzedekah and got tza’akah.

So the message here is not that Gd is giving up on Gd’s People, and moving on. 
It is Gd’s own cry, urgent cry, desperate cry (we might almost say) 
for justice and righteousness - 
to and from the People Gd is sticking with. 

This cry has been Isaiah’s burden from the very beginning. In Isaiah’s opening chapter, he has Gd saying that Gd cannot abide the People’s religion - not even their prayers - and commands: 

‘cease to do evil, 

learn to do good; 

seek justice, 

rescue the oppressed, 

defend the orphan, 

plead for the widow.’ [1. 16bf] 

The message then is strong. Let me put it like this: 

‘Only worship me as much as you care for one another. 

Anything more than that stinks, stinks like rotten fruit. 

And if you want to know whether you are caring for one another, 

don’t look in the obvious places, 

like among your family and friends or people you are drawn to;

look to, well, “widows and orphans” in biblical language -

those who are weak, who are different, who are pushed out.

Only worship me as much as you care for the un-cared-for.’

A strong challenge. And one we can only bear if we remember the context. 
Remember: more in sorrow than in anger. 
The warning always comes within a love song. 
It is a song of unrequited love, for sure, and so is also lament. 
Gd loves us, and we… 
we do not hate Gd. 
But we somehow never quite get round to loving Gd back with any kind of consistency. 
So the fruit we might be bearing sometimes turns foul. 
As and when this happens, we don’t beat ourselves up.
We return to the love-song of Gd:

‘Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: 

My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. 

He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; 

he build a watch-tower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it’

so that it has all that it needs, to yield finest grapes.

Amen.