Handing the vineyard over to other tenants
Ordinary Sunday 27, 6th October, 2002
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
He will hand the vineyard over to other tenants . . . The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that yields the proper fruits. (Mt 21:41,43)
On the surface, the parable that forms this morning's Gospel appears almost simple. It features a group of people whose responsibility for a property is clear, and who behave in an increasingly appalling way to others who represent its owner. This culminates in their murder of his heir, a family member. By any standards, common sense or legal, it is their actions that destroy any claim they might otherwise have to the vineyard and its produce. They invite dismissal and punishment, and get it. Looked at from this standpoint, there are no complexities or ambiguities. However, instead of concluding at this point (and thereby creating the shortest sermon I might ever otherwise have delivered), I have to say that the parable still invites questions that aren't all that simple or easily solved.
To begin with, if one way we are meant to read this parable is to equate the property owner with God – is this parable hinting that He is just not very good at sorting out suitable staff or tenants? Or is it that He offers all sorts an opportunity, including tho those who are as likely as anything to repeatedly abuse the privilege? Although she made no direct reference to this parable, the direction of my first suggested interpretation underlies a response to God by St Teresa of Avila: If You treat Your friends the way you do, it's not surprising that You don't have that many of them. The parable can be read as hinting that as we try to wrestle with the more outrageous elements in human behaviour, and form a reasonable framework for dealing with injustice, bringing God into the equation doesn't immediately (or even medium term) provide us with a set of tidy answers. What is God doing handing the property over to such people, and letting them remain there, despite their increasingly aggressive behaviour – it doesn't make sense.
Another way of reading the parable is to see the landowner's choices as a metaphor for the way in which the opportunities offered by Him to us are out of all proportion to our abilities or (in more legalistic terms), our deserts. One of the Prayer Book collects reminded us of precisely this kind of gap when it addressed God as 'always more ready to hear than we to pray, and constantly giving more than we either desire or deserve'. More broadly, the sense of that kind of gap is present in the way in which many great theologians classical and modern have discussed the Incarnation. We say that the Incarnation is the act in which He reveals Himself most clearly and distinctively; that may be, but what we see as we observe Jesus giving in various ways again and again, is still strange and odd. It is not in any sense logical. And statements that are in various ways true, such as 'this demonstrates the nature and quality of God's love', don't alter the essential strangeness of the way in which God deals with us.
And this can be both a challenge and a frustration to us. Many if not all of us have either experienced or still hold within ourselves a strong degree of annoyance at what seems illogical and unfair when it comes to sufferings and injustices to which others are subject, or which we ourselves endure. Weary, worldly wise voices saying 'Grow up dear, that's just the way the world is . . .' offer no lasting satisfaction or solution. We remain called to do what we can to right the inequities borne by others, and to deal positively with those across our own path. Meanwhile, for all the injustices and abuses suffered by others or by ourselves, life, or better, God, doesn't withdraw a prodigal range of continuing opportunities from all kinds of people – including those who, like the vineyard staff, don't make responsible or good use of such opportunities.
If thus far I have been focussing on interpreting the parable in terms of what it hints at about God, there is a second area on which it invites us to raise questions – who are God's people? At first the parable might seem to present us with a tidy answer. We meet the first group of people, who are offered the opportunity and who lose it through a string of outrageous acts; there are hints of replacement by a different group who 'do the right thing'. But while the apparent clarity of that kind of interpretation appeals to the legalistic, there are other points in the gospel which complicate this kind of interpretation. What do we make of the publican whose sense of his own shortcomings (presumably quite real) contrasts with the attitude of the pharisee? Or of the penitent thief? Both have spontaneous responses that contrast with much of their life and acts, and that God seems to accept? How do they fit into the concept of a nation bearing appropriate fruits?
The question 'Who are God's people and how can we tell' is one that has been with Christians since the first century; and over a long period of time, quite different theological streams have acknowledged that the answer to this question is not a simple one. A classical answer has often been given in the past in terms of two churches. The first is the 'visible' church, in which membership is proven by specific demonstrable acts, baptism being the basic introductory point, and regular public (eucharistic) worship as the sign of ongoing involvement. But what about the fact that, defined in this way, God's people was and is made up of a very mixed lot – from those trying to take it seriously according to their particular situation, to people worshipping regularly, infrequently, or not at all beyond their baptism, whose lives deny the spirit of the Gospel? And what of those who might rarely have any involvement in institutional Christianity, and indeed the many who were not baptised by choice or because they had never been exposed to Christianity, and whose lives were of such quality as to put many institutional church members to shame? The answer was to speak of a second, invisible and true church, whose members were recognised by God but would be revealed to humanity at the end of history. They embraced some but not all of the members of the visible, institutional body, along with others who were not its members at all. Contemporary Christianity does not use this terminology, but still recognises the truth to which it points. Modern Biblical scholarship affirms that the kingdom of God of which Jesus speaks in the parables is not to be equated with any particular institution (the church in general, or any one denomination in particular), but is a reality that transcends all kinds of humanly conceived institutions and boundaries – in other worlds, something very close to the 'invisible church'.
I find this classical, perhaps old-fashioned, presentation, quite helpful right now. The parable speaks at one point of those who belong to God in terms of nation. But this is a term that needs approaching with great caution, and has been subject to great abuse. Very recent events, as well as incidents across many different points of Christian history, remind us of the dangers that occur when the leaders of people of particular cultures reinforce that identity by encouraging an identity between their particular nation or culture, and God. One only has to recall centuries of conflict in the Balkan states in which different cultural groups have identified with and committed atrocities against others in the name of particular forms of Christianity (Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats), while Muslims and Christians have each claimed to be God's, and killed one another. Which particular group is God's people? Any, or none? On a larger scale, we hear voices since September 11 from opposite directions which overtly or implicitly identify particular cultures representing God – while some in the Moslem world might speak of holy war, an American president moved quickly to speak of armed intervention in Afghanistan as crusade. I feel much more comfortable with that old distinction between a visible and invisible church, as I am increasingly suspicious of invitations to understand the current tension and possible conflict as either crusade, a defence of Western civilisation and Christianity, or jihad, a Moslem holy war, as though God's people are clearly visible on one side or another. I am also reminded of an episode in a remarkable but largely forgotten prize winning piece of anti-war literature from the First World War period, Henri Barbusse's novel Le Feu. In one episode, in which the author makes the hero use modern technology to temporarily have a position akin to that of God, he swoops in a plane across the lines of two armies, confronting one another before battle. As he comes closer, he can see and hear that the troops on each side are involved in services led by their chaplains. The lower down he flies and the closer he comes, the more alike the sounds and sight are on each side of the line, till he can't tell the difference. They seem the same.
To go back to the close of this morning's gospel, the point at which I began: 'He will hand the vineyard over to other tenants . . . The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that yields the proper fruits.' Might it be that the kind of strident insistence in the rightness of our cause, particularly the insistence that it is in some way God's. is one of the things that leads to the disappearance of the kingdom from our midst? Might it be that both George Bush and his speech writers, and Saddam Hussein are all inhabitants of one impoverished and spiritual waste land, from which grace, gentleness, forgiveness, and many other virtues departed some time ago? The kingdom transcends particular religious affiliations, not to mention associations based on culture or ethnicity. It is very much part of our calling, if we seek to be part of that kingdom, to express our unity with others who share simular values, including those of other religious traditions, and none. It seeks our response – but if our responses are inappropriate, then it can disappear from our midst, leaving us infinitely poorer.
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