18 PENTECOST
- PROPER XXII - A - 17 MATTHEW 21. 33-46
While serving with the Army in Germany many years ago now, I was fortunate enough to travel through the Rhine Valley. If you are not familiar with that part of Germany, it is Germany’s wine producing region. Vineyards dot the countryside much like the Napa valley in California.
In ancient
Palestine for one to own a vineyard was a sign of wealth. It was not uncommon
for the owner to be an absentee. Thus, the vineyard was rented to tenants who
were responsible for keeping it up and producing the fruit the true owner
expected to receive when he sent his servants to collect.
Today’s gospel along with the first lesson and
psalm speak to the image of vineyards. In the first lesson, God is reacting to
his disappointment in the house of Israel, which is His vineyard. She has not
produced the fruit God was expecting. God expected justice, but saw bloodshed;
righteousness, but heard a cry.
The Psalmist
is crying to the Lord in time of distress. Israel sees herself as God’s
vineyard; God’s planting, but now it is as if the protecting walls of God’s
presence are gone, and enemies crowd in to strip the vine of its fruit and to
up root it like wild hogs. The psalmist prays for the return of God’s saving
presence.
You may
recall that when they were asked which son had done the will of the father, the
religious leaders had answered correctly and thus convicted themselves. They do
so again in today’s parable by giving Jesus the correct answer when asked what
the landowner will do to the wicked tenants who dealt violently with his
messengers and killed the heir.
Their answer
is no sooner out of their mouths when they perceive that Jesus is speaking
about them. They become angry and would like nothing more than to lay hands on
him but are afraid of the crowd who regards him as a prophet.
God regards
Israel as his vineyard, as his own planting and has now sent His Son to
Jerusalem to confront the ones God has left in charge with His demand that they
repent and turn from their refusing to follow Him and become at last what God
has called Israel to be, the light of God’s world.
Unfortunately,
it is a story of how Israel is going to refuse God’s demand. It is a story that
shows the hard-heartedness or sinfulness of the people. It is a story that
reveals that God’s Son will receive the same treatment as the prophets who
preceded him. To the degree that the prophets are heard, they are rejected.
Jesus’ story,
however, has a different ending. The rejected one becomes the chief cornerstone
of the new foundation. In the first lesson, the prophet Isaiah makes it
perfectly clear what God wanted, justice. In addition, he makes it clear what
God received, violence. In the gospel lesson, not much has changed. Injustice
and violence mark the response of the tenants.
When we stop
and think about it, not much has changed in our own culture today. Injustice
and violence seem to be our characteristic response in contrast to God’s
overtures of care and love. Both Matthew and Isaiah are teaching us about
hardness of heart and ingratitude to God. Both have to do with the choices we
make in response to God.
God has made us in His image but some choose
to present themselves in this world as anything but by the choices they make
and by the things, they do and say. That’s why we have injustice and violence
today. Evil exists. Not because God created it but because with the God-given
gift of choice, some choose to rebel against God and to go their own way
without any compassion or concern for others.
Las Vegas is
an example of one man’s choosing to conduct evil. The secular press, the
irreligious, the liberal minded can all claim that he acted out of this or that
reason, but the bottom line is he chose to kill, wound and maim and in the end,
he chose to kill himself.
No one made
him do it. He made the choice. How sad. How unfortunate. How unnecessary. One
man’s evil caused scores of lives to be lost and countless lives to be scarred
forever, and for what.
Jesus
confronts the leaders of God’s chosen people in his telling of these two
parables as a means of waking them up, shaking them out of their lethargy, and
re-orienting them to their divine calling. However, they chose to reject his
demand that they become what God created them to be. In addition, they chose to
reject Him whom God has sent and will eventually hand Him over to be crucified.
It is easy
for us to stand back after hearing the parable and comment why God’s chosen
would do that. Likewise, it is easy for us to listen to the reports coming out of
Las Vegas and ask why anyone would choose to do something like that. None of us
likes to think that Jesus is telling the parable against us, we are not like
that. Yet the truth is we have all been guilty of acting without justice.
We are all
capable of becoming violent, of living a life void of compassion, of focusing
entirely on self based on the choices we make. Compassion keeps us human. To
choose to be compassionate is dangerous, because it means we choose to live our
lives in response to God’s overtures of care and love, instead of acting out of
our own human will and emotions.
It is
dangerous because to live with compassion runs crosscurrent with today’s
society where it seems to be every man for himself. God, the compassionate one,
longs for us to see things as God sees them. The religious leaders of Jesus’
day lacked compassion and Jesus called them on it.
They became
defensive and their anger moved them to seek a violent way in which they could
rid themselves of Him. Lack of compassion allows us to slip into evil; to
contemplate and commit such violent acts as Jesus describes in the parable, and
which befell Him on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and most recently occurred in
Las Vegas.
However, the
world does not have to be like that. In God’s eyes, we are his vineyard. We are
His planting in the world. Like Israel, God expects from us a certain fruit: to
do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6.8), in
other words to live a righteous life.
Righteousness
is God’s gift based on our faith in Christ. It is a gift given in response to
our choosing to live our lives in accordance with God’s will and in response to
His Divine Love manifested most perfectly in His Son, Jesus.
To live a
righteous life is to shun evil, injustice and violence and forgetting all which may have been part of our former lives “strain
forward to what lies ahead; to press on,” as St. Paul says, “toward the goal
for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus,” - to share in His glory. AMEN+
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