Sermon. On wicked tenants and faithful Gd

Sermon, St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford, 4 October 2020

Trinity 17 (Year A)

·        Isaiah 5:1-7

·        Psalm 80:7-15

·        Philippians 3:4b-14

·        Matthew 21:33-46

 

Today’s theme, set by the readings, is judgement. Worse, it is judgement and condemnation. Worse still, it is judgement and condemnation and punishment. Worst of all, it is judgement and condemnation and punishment – all from Gd. We may as well face it.

 

From the First Reading, from Isaiah: “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.” It isn’t quite clear who the “beloved” is, but we are primed to expect a “love-song”, something intimate, tender, loving.

 

The vineyard is indeed planted and built up with diligence, with love. The beloved had every reason to expect “it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It is a useless vineyard, a non-vineyard, and so the beloved says: “I will make it a waste… it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns”, deprived even of rain.

 

Then Isaiah tells us that the vineyard is the House of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) and the House of Judah (the Southern Kingdom). Gd “expected justice but saw bloodshed”. So this looks like a non-love-song, an anti-love-song. It is promise of punishment.

 

And in today’s Gospel, Jesus - or Matthew - is clearly referring back to this strange love-song. As with Isaiah, someone takes great care to build up a wonderful vineyard, and has high hopes for it. But, again, it goes wrong. The nature of the problem is different, and the story is heightened. The vineyard itself seems to be fine. But the tenant-farmers? They evidently hate the landowner, and kill first his slaves, and then his son. They do this (they say) to inherit the vineyard. It’s not clear what the tenants were really imagining would happen, and people in the crowd recognise that they too can be killed off, rather than become inheritors.

 

And as Isaiah explained the parable, so does Jesus: “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” So the “you” in question are clearly not producing fruits, are neither just nor righteous, are like the sinners of Israel and Judah in the first passage.  

As I say, judgement, condemnation, punishment. Best faced head on. But what is really going on?

 

*

 

I think we had better take a step back. We can then see that not only Isaiah but Jesus too is speaking prophetically. By speaking prophetically, I don’t mean so much predicting the future (although that may be part of it). I mean: using the genre of prophecy to make a point, a point about the present, about the here and now.

 

The genre of prophecy is always emotional language. A prophet very seldom if ever says: “Gd judges this or that to be wrong.” Rather, a prophet says: “Gd is furious with you.” But the meaning may well be more the former.

 

Again, the genre of prophecy always ratches up the intensity. It uses hyperbole, exaggeration. So typically, the line of a prophecy, says:

·        “You’re doomed, you’re damned, you’re lost, Gd has rejected you, utterly abandoned you;

·        repent and Gd will shower you with blessings, and Gd will do this as Gd loves you, is determined to stick with you.”

 

·        The judgement is final, and the punishment is inevitable.

·        And the punishment is provisional, and can be stopped the moment you set about changing your ways.

 

It makes no sense, or rather it makes sense only if you recognise the exaggeration for what it is – a rhetorical device.[1]

 

Do feel free to test this out. There are plenty of short books of prophecy in the Bible. So have a read of Amos, or Hosea, or Micah, to see this pattern in action. Or, if you are really keen, you might read through Isaiah, to see how today’s passage fits in, as one strand of a very tangled-up ball.  

 

*

 

What is Jesus saying, using the genre of prophecy, in today’s parable? I’m suggesting this will take a little working on. But there’s no doubt about it, a popular Christian interpretation, from very early days, has said that the interpretation is clear, and is easy.  

 

Christians have preached that when Jesus says: “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” he means that Gd’s covenant, Gd’s blessing, Gd’s promises are taken away from the People of Israel, the Jewish People, and given to the gentiles, in the form of the Church. And this is because the Jewish People have killed the Son. As in the parable, so in life. Jesus is killed around the year 30; the Temple is destroyed in the year 70; exile for the People comes in the year 135. This parable is prediction. Gd is finished with Israel understood as the Jewish People. The only Israel in Gd’s eyes now is the Church. So the argument has gone, over many centuries.

 

For most of us, these days, that interpretation doesn’t ring true. We don’t think of ourselves as being the only true Israel. We don’t think that Gd’s purposes for the Jewish People as Israel are over. But, whether we are uncomfortable with it or not, is it what the text says?

 

I suggest it is fair to say that this “traditional” interpretation (and I fear we do have to call it that) is wrong.

 

It forgets (perhaps even deliberately forgets) all that I have said about the prophetic genre. That Gd, and the prophets, can say

·        both that judgement is final and

·        that judgement is conditional

·        at the same time, for dramatic effect.

So the parable truly is a warning more than it is a prediction. It is a warning about the importance of justice and righteousness, which are lacking. In other words, it is in that biblical tradition which sets that the hurdle of holiness for Gd’s People very high, arguably impossibly high. Holiness is to be expected, not something exceptional, for the odd saint here, or the odd act of self-sacrifice there. Holiness is to be the norm. So this is a warning, which is also a compliment. (Think about it.)

 

But there is another, separate reason why this parable cannot be saying that the People of Israel are to lose the covenant with Gd, why it’s not that the Church replaces Israel. That is that Matthew tells us that is not the meaning. He writes [v 45]: “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.” And the Greek for “realized” here is the normal word for “knew”. They didn’t surmise it, or choose to interpret things this way; they “knew” it; they got it right.

 

It cannot be that the leaders of the People of Gd are to be condemned for leading them astray, if the people they are leading astray are no longer the People of Gd. It has to be one or the other. And Matthew says it’s the one, not the other. It’s the (presumed) leaders, and not the People as a whole, who are here being given a full-on, dramatic, exaggerated warning, in true prophetic style.

 

We can rejoice that we live in a day when Jewish-Christian dialogue and rapprochement are real, and we don’t (as many have) readily interpret New Testament texts as being a judgement on Jews, all Jews everywhere and throughout time. We can rejoice in this, I want to insist, whether it’s a special interest of ours, or whether we simply want to read our Scriptures with care.

 

*

 

What reads as Gd’s judgement and condemnation and punishment always leads back to Gd’s forgiveness, just as the killing of the Son leads on to his being raised from the dead, with forgiveness in every encounter He has. We also see this in another of today’s readings.

 

I am thinking of the Psalm (even though we are not reciting them in these days). The psalm takes the strange love-song of the vineyard and makes it into a prayer for recovery, repentance and restoration. The psalmist is confident that that is just what Gd wills. This can be our prayer too.  

 

Restore us, O God of hosts;

let your face shine, that we may be saved.
You brought a vine out of Egypt;

you drove out the nations and planted it.
You cleared the ground for it;

it took deep root and filled the land.
The mountains were covered with its shade,

the mighty cedars with its branches;
it sent out its branches to the sea,

and its shoots to the River.
Why then have you broken down its walls,

so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit?
The boar from the forest ravages it,

and all that move in the field feed on it.
Turn again, O God of hosts;

look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine,
the stock that your right hand planted.

Amen. 

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[1] Another theory is that the prophetic books as we have them contain material written by different people at different times, and the final editor did not bother to smooth things out. This is possible, at least at times, but it has the quality of a circular argument. and that prophets might like hyperbole seems a more fitting argument.