Whose Son?

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 26^th October 2014 11.00am

You can listen to this sermon here https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/bloomsbury-morning-service-26-october-2014mp3#t=27:10

Matthew 22.34-46

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together,  ³⁵ and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  ³⁶ "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"  ³⁷ He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'  ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment.  ³⁹ And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'  ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." 

⁴¹  Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question:  ⁴² "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?" They said to him, "The son of David."  ⁴³ He said to them, "How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,  ⁴⁴ 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet" '?  ⁴⁵ If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?"  ⁴⁶ No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Leviticus 19.1-2, 15-18  

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:  ² Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.  ¹⁶ You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD. 

¹⁷ You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.  ¹⁸ You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

The people of my country have been awaiting his return for a thousand years.

All the prophecies and legends are clear that he is coming back;

            every child learns the stories of his great deeds at their mother’s knee,

                        how his kingly rule united the country,

                        how he brought peace and prosperity to the people,

                        and how he will come again to aid us in the hour of our greatest need.

He’s coming again, we all know it,

            the question is when, and why is it taking so long?

Albion has suffered many trials,

            and still King Arthur has not returned.

The Jews are not the only nation to have a messiah mythology,

            and the archetype of a absent-but-returning hero,

                        of one who has now gone, but will come again,

            runs deep within the psyche of many people-groups and religions.

From the Graeco-Roman gods of Dionysus and Mithras,

            to the Redivivus belief that the emperor Nero

                        would return from the grave to re-take Rome,

            to the English Arthurian legends of the middle ages,

                        to the heroes of the ancient Welsh Mabinogion,

            to Gandalf returning from the fires of Mount Doom

                        to the death and return of Superman;

the trope of a hero who dies, or goes away,

            only to return victoriously, in the nick of time, to save the day,

            is one which we find repeated through many cultural incarnations.

For the Jews, the figure they were waiting for

            was called ‘the Messiah’ in Hebrew, or ‘the Christ’ in Greek.

Originally, for the Jews, the Messiah was a word that had been used to describe

            someone who was anointed with oil to perform their role;

            either as a Priest, or as a King (Lev. 4.3, 5).[1]

So, King Saul is ‘anointed’ by the prophet Samuel as the first king of Israel (1 Sam 10.1),

            and David, who succeeded him, is similarly ‘anointed’.

In many ways, as time went on,

            David became the quintessential ‘anointed one’ in the Old Testament,

                        and a couple of places even record promises by God

                        to secure David’s kingship forever (2 Sam 7.12-13, Ps. 89).

His kingship acquired mythic status,

            not dissimilar to that of King Arthur in the culture of the British Isles.

In the Judaism of the few hundred years leading up to the time of Jesus,

            the term ‘Messiah’ developed further,

                        and came to play an important function in the Jewish imagination.

Though variety exists,

            messianic expectations from this period

                        are typically of a coming Davidic military leader,

            who will free the Jewish people from foreign occupation,

                        and restore Israel’s borders to the extent

                                    that the David stories claimed for them.

                                    (e.g. Psalms of Solomon 17)

The Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from about the time of Jesus,

            reveal an interesting expectation of not one, but two Jewish Messiahs;

            one militaristic, and the other priestly.

And Jesus certainly wasn’t the only important historical figure

            to be named the Messiah.

For example, it was also a term that was applied

            to the non-Israelite King Cyrus of Persia (Isa 45.1),

            who brought an end to the Babylonian exile of the Jews in the sixth century BC,

And much closer to the time of Jesus,

            ‘Messiah’ was used of the leader of the Bar Kokhba Revolt

            which took place in the second century BC.

All of this lies behind the gospel writers’ invitation

            to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, or the Messiah.

It seems that questions over whether Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah

            had been asked of him during his lifetime,

with, for example, John the Baptist asking Jesus

            if he was ‘the one who is to come’

            or whether John and his followers should wait for another? (Luke 7.20).

However, a related question, to sit alongside that of whether Jesus is the Messiah,

            was the question of, what kind of Messiah is he?

Is he a priestly Messiah, or a militaristic Messiah,

            Will he restore the temple, or the monarchy?

Whose messiah will he be?

            The messiah of the religious radicals?

            Or the messiah of the political radicals?

And it is these questions that underlie the exchange

            that Jesus has with the Pharisees

            in our reading today from Matthew’s gospel.

The Pharisees have heard that Jesus has managed to out-smart the Sadducees,

            and they decide that it’s now their turn again to play ‘Ridicule the Rabbi’.

So they wheel in their specialist lawyer,

            to ask Jesus a tried-and-tested no-win question

            with the intent of trapping him whatever his answer.

‘Tell us, teacher’, they say, ‘which commandment is the greatest?’

The idea is that whichever command Jesus picked,

            would get him into trouble.

If, for example, he picked ‘having no other gods before the Lord’,

            they would accuse him of moral laxity

            because he was relegating the command about adultery.

However, if he picked ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’,

            he’d be accused of idolatry because he’d ignore the first command!

And so on – the perfect no-win question

            to derail the cock-sure carpenter from Nazareth.

But, as with the Pharisees previous trap,

            the one about paying taxes to the emperor, which we heard about last week,

Jesus shrugs off their trap with ease;

            giving them an answer that covers all the bases:

            ‘Love God, and Love Neighbour’, he says.

Both commands, but neither ‘commandments’.

Jesus takes the popular Shema command from Deuteronomy (6.4-5)

            and combines it with a lesser-known injunction

                        to love of neighbour from Leviticus (19.18)

The Pharisees would have been right in there

            with the ‘Love of God’ part of Jesus’ answer,

but by adding to it the love of one’s neighbour, as an equal command,

            Jesus highlighted to the Pharisees

            the weakness inherent in their own super-religious ideology.

So far, so clever.

            Well done Jesus!

Not only has he, once again, dodged the trap that has been set for him,

            but he has also managed to prick the pomposity of the Pharisees,

            unmasking their potential for heartless religious conservatism.

However, this is not just a story

            about Jesus beating the Pharisees at their own game.

Because the story continues,

            with Jesus taking the opportunity to push the Pharisees a bit further

            by setting them a riddle of his own.

‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’

This is a classic riddle, one with a seemingly obvious answer,

            which will turn out to be unsustainable.

The clue to this being a riddle is in the phrase, ‘what do you think…’,

            which is something we’ve heard from the lips of Jesus before

                        as he has asked a variety of difficult questions

                        to stimulate thought from both disciples and opponents alike.

                                    (17.25, 18.12, 21.28).

            But most recently, it is the phrase that the Pharisees have used

                        when asking Jesus their previous question about paying taxes.[2]

            ‘What do you think,’ they asked Jesus,

                        ‘is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?’ (22.17)

‘So’, says Jesus back to them, ‘what do you think… whose son is the Messiah?’

            And the Pharisees, after a few moments of careful thought,

            supply what they believe to be the safe and scriptural answer:

                        ‘He’s the son of David’.

He’s not the son of Joseph and Mary from Nazareth,

            he’s not the son of Kokhba,[3]

            he’s not the son of righteousness,[4]

he’s the son of David.

However, in giving this answer,

            the Pharisees have been forced into revealing their hand,

because it turns out that what you hope for, tells a lot about what you believe in,

            and the Pharisees were hoping for a Davidic Messiah,

                        a military messiah,

                        a messiah who would overthrow the oppressors,

                        and restore the nation to its former glory.

The answer they give to this seemingly innocent question from Jesus,

            is far more revealing of the Pharisees’ deeper motives

            than they realise.

So Jesus decides to push it a bit,

            and takes his riddle to the next level:

‘Right then,’ he says, ‘so the Messiah is David’s son, is he?’

            ‘So how then is it that, in one of the worship psalms written by David himself,

                        he calls the messiah his “Lord”?’

The logic is simple:

            If David calls the Messiah ‘Lord’,

            how can the Messiah be his son?

At this point the Pharisees back off,

            but not simply because they’ve been caught out on a technicality

                        in some obscure game of Hebrew Bible proof-texting.

            Rather, they back off

                        because the whole basis of their belief in a Davidic Messiah

                                    as a military, politically centrist, nationalistic hero

                        has just been unmasked and exposed to ridicule.

They have just discovered

            that what you hope for, reveals a lot about what you believe in.

And Jesus, in subverting the neat logic of their hoped-for Davidic Messiah,

            has also subverted the cold logic of their militaristic, nationalistic God.

This, it turns out, is not simply a story

            about how Jesus is cleverer than the Pharisees.

Rather, it’s a debate about the nature of faith itself,

            and it raises fundamental questions about what is meant by salvation.

Is our hoped-for salvation

            simply synonymous with divine vindication of our shared ideology?

Is salvation to be understood in terms of victory for ‘me and mine’?

            With ‘them and theirs’ of, at best, secondary concern?

You see, the answer we might give to the question

            of what kind of Messiah we hope for,

will tell us a lot

            about the God we believe in.

And Jesus, it seems, is challenging in no uncertain terms,

            any kind of belief in a Messiah that is understood

            as a politicised, nationalistic, tribal, partisan, Davidic hero.

And yet, the people of God, both in the first century,

            and in the twenty-first century,

            and in all the centuries in between,

have found it all-too-easy

            to become trapped in a belief system

            that is predicated upon a Davidic ideology.

Any attempt to equate national identity with the people of God

            represents an expression of Davidic messianic ideology.

From the Christianisation of the Roman empire under Constantine,

            to the development of Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire,

            to the alliances of the middle ages between Church and Monarch,

            to the contemporary tabloid-esque assertion

                        that ‘we are, after all, supposed to be a Christian country!’

            to the anointing of the Monarch in Westminster Abbey

                        by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury…

We have repeatedly, through Christian history,

            revealed that what we long for is a Davidic Messiah.

The people of Christ have joined their voices with those of the Pharisees,

            in answering that the Messiah is the son of David.

But this is not how Jesus describes himself.

Every time, in the gospels, that Jesus is called ‘Son of David’,

            it is someone else using the language.

He never calls himself the ‘son of David’,

            and in fact, when he does use the term, here in Matthew,

                        and in the parallel passage in Mark’s gospel,

            he does so to undermine its use of him.

Jesus does not, it seems, see himself as a Son of David,

            he is not the Davidic Messiah.

He is not the answer to the put-upon-people-of-God’s desire

            to have their powerlessness reversed,

and he is not the ‘just cause’ in whose name

            armies might march to overthrow the evils of the ‘other’.

Rather, Jesus uses a different title for himself:

            Consistently through the Gospels,

                        Jesus describes himself not as the ‘son of David’

                        but as the ‘son of man’.

The pursuit of a Davidic ideology has taken the people of God

            into conflict, division, and violence.

It is a failed ideology based on nationalism and power-politics,

            and it is not the path that Christ sets his face to.

He does not go to Jerusalem to overthrow the Romans,

            leading the longed-for rebel-army to victory over the oppressors

            and establishing the kingdom of Davidic justice and peace on earth.

Rather, he breaks out of the Davidic ideology,

            by identifying himself not as the son of David,

but as the son of man from the Jewish apocalyptic tradition.

The Messiah Jesus is the son of man,

            he is the son of the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel,

            he is a child of the margins,

                        not of the centre,

            he is the offspring of the oppressed,

                        not the progeny of power.

            He is the scion of the kingdom of heaven,

                        not the spawn of the kingdom of David.

And as such he challenges those of us who bear his name,

            and in whose lives his spirit is active,

to turn our backs on our dreams of a Davidic messiah.

He challenges us to give up our dreams of power,

            and our hopes for vindication for our deeply held convictions.

He calls us to step away from our ideologies

            of militarism, nationalism, and imperialism.

He calls us to abandon the cause of the ‘Christian Country’

            and to look instead for the in-breaking kingdom of heaven,

                        which knows no national borders,

                        and transcends all political creeds.

He calls us to relinquish our dogmas of certainty,

            and to embrace the quest for questions

He calls us to love the Lord our God,

            with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind,

And also to love our neighbour as we love ourselves.

The ‘love of God’, on its own, gives birth too easily

            to a tribal understanding of faith,

where we are defined in opposition to those who love God differently to us,

            or those love a different God to us.

The ‘love of God’ on its own, all too easily makes Pharisees of us all,

            as the quest for the Davidic messiah takes shape in our midst

            and we seek to ‘take the world’ for the God we believe in.

The ‘love of God’ on its own, all too easily justifies a desire to win the world for Christ,

            it justifies the Cross of St George on the Shield of the Crusader,

            and it justifies the all-too-frequent equation

                        of earthly territory, with the kingdom of heaven.

The current crisis in Iraq and Syria is predicated upon an ‘us and them’ dogma,

            where two sides, each believing that they are right, and that the other is evil,

            are fighting for territory, resources, and ideological superiority,

                        all in the name of God.

Both sides believe that the end justifies the means.

            And so Islamic State fighters are prepared to perpetrate terrible acts of brutality

                                    on innocent aid workers and local populations alike,

                        because they believe that this furthers their divinely sanctioned objective.

            But we in the West are prepared to live with the unfortunate phenomenon

                                    which we call ‘collateral damage’

                        because we believe that we are in the right

                                    and that the enemy must be stopped.

This is where Davidic messianism take us.

            This is where devotion to our God, and our God alone, takes us.

And so Jesus says to the Davidic Pharisees,

            that they need to learn to love their neighbour as they love themselves.

And who is my neighbour?

            Well, that’s another story for another day…

But what if my neighbour in this global village of ours doesn’t look like me,

            or believe like me, or speak like me.

What if my neighbour in this great city of ours

            is an immigrant family from another part of the world,

                        ‘coming over here…’

(Actually, my neighbour is an immigrant family,

            they’re from India, and they’re really nice,

            but you know what I mean!)

The rise of xenophobic, anti-immigration, racist politics

            in the so-called Christian countries of the western world,

is another function of our embracing of a Davidic ideology,

            that sees us-and-ours as more important than them-and-theirs.

And it’s got to stop, and it’s got to stop with us.

            because if it doesn’t stop with us, it’s not going to stop.

It is directly challenged by Jesus, the son of Man,

            who calls us all to love God,

                        with all of our hearts, and all of our souls, and all of our minds.

But not just to love God, and not just to love ourselves,

            but to love our neighbour as ourselves.

---

[1] See ‘Christ’ in Beavis, Mary Ann, and Michael Gilmour, eds. Dictionary of the Bible and Western Culture: A Handbook for Students. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012, p.87.

[2] See Tom Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler, 2006.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_bar_Kokhba

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teacher_of_Righteousness

Faith and Thought Symposium on Homosexuality

On Saturday, I was one of the speakers at the Faith and Thought symposium on homosexuality, a forum that brings together both scientific and pastoral/theological insights. The talks are now online. I'd like to highlight three of these as of particular interest to those wanting to explore a more inclusive position.

Firstly, Eleanor Whiteway (Cambridge University) offered a clear scientific analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7IpoT9upzc

Then, Stephen Keyworth (Baptist Union of Great Britain) gave a presentation on social developments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qSZqmEfq60

And then Luke Dowding and I spoke to the topic of pastoral care:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayDCKOapTDY

What God, and So What?

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

5^th October 2014 11.00am

Matthew 21.33-46   "Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.  ³⁴ When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.  ³⁵ But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.  ³⁶ Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way.  ³⁷ Finally he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'  ³⁸ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.'  ³⁹ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.  ⁴⁰ Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?"  ⁴¹ They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time."  ⁴² ¶ Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the scriptures: 'The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?  ⁴³ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.  ⁴⁴ The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls."  ⁴⁵ ¶ When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.  ⁴⁶ They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

Isaiah 5.1-7  Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.  ² He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.  ³ And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard.  ⁴ What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?  ⁵ And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.  ⁶ I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.  ⁷ For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!

I'll put this as plainly as I can:

            the answer we give, to the problem of human sinfulness,

            reveals the nature of the God in which we ultimately believe.

But I'll come back to that.

A friend of mine, who used to be a lecturer at Spurgeon's college [John Colwell],

            often says that there are two key questions that we must bear in mind

            when we come to try and understand a biblical passage.

The first question is: what God?

            And the second question is: so what?

What God, and So what?

Firstly, what God do we encounter through this text?

            And secondly, what difference does that make? 

These are not trivial questions.

And there is no straightforward way out of them,

            for example by asserting that there is only one God,

            or that we all believe in the same God.

To give you an example, the God that Richard Dawkins claims not to believe in,

            is very definitely not the same God

                        as the one that I do believe in.

If I thought that God was what Richard Dawkins thinks God is,

            then I'm fairly sure that I wouldn't believe in him either.

However, Dawkins' God is not the God

            in which I do very firmly believe,

as those of you who have read my poem in this month's Church magazine

            will know by now.

                        http://baptistbookworm.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/i-do-believe.html

This question of "What God?" is never an easy one to answer,

            because there is none so deceived in this life as thee and me.

The level of self awareness that is required

                        to be honest about our view of God

            is something which most of us, most of the time,

                        find hard to achieve.

And so sometimes we need some help.

Sometimes that help can take the form of a friend,

            someone who comes alongside us and asks us gently

                        why it is that we are finding it so difficult to be tolerant

                        of those who differ from our own perspectives.

In this way they might gently help us towards the insight

            that our own intolerance of others

            has its roots deep in our fear that God will judge us harshly.

An insight such as this, once it has been reached,

            opens the door to the possibility of transformation and change,

            and the friend who helps us gain it is a friend indeed.

But sometimes we need more than a kindly hand on the shoulder

            to release us from our self-deception.

Sometimes we need to be actively shocked from our delusions,

            if we are to have our eyes opened

            to an alternative and more healthy reality.

Think of King David,

            at the depths of his murderous adultery with Bathsheba.

Had the prophet Nathan simply confronted him

                        with a challenge about his behaviour,

            it would, surely, have been,

                        "off with Nathan's head too!"

So Nathan wisely chose a less direct approach,

            and instead of a direct confrontation,

            he simply told David a story, a parable, about two men,

                        one who had everything,

                        and one who had nothing except a tiny little pet lamb

                                    which he loved and kept as part of his household.

When, in Nathan's story, the rich man took the tiny lamb

            from the poor man to cook it for a guest,

                        rather than taking one of his own flocks,

            David was hooked into the story.

Little did he realise, of course that the rich man was him,

            the poor man was Uriah,

            and the little lamb was the beautiful Bathsheba

                        whom he had stolen for himself.

So when David, caught up in the story,

            pronounced that the man who had taken this little lamb deserved to die,

            he was of course condemning himself out of his own mouth.

When Nathan turns to David and says "you are that man",

            the way is open for David's repentance and transformation.

This kind of parable has a name, it is known as a 'juridical' parable.

            These are stories where the reader is forced into the circumstances of the parable,

                        and only once they have become complicit

                                    in passing judgement on characters in the story

                        does the lens drop, and they realise

                                    that they have actually pronounced judgement upon themselves.

Kierkegaard describes these parables as,

            "thoughts which wound from behind".

And this is exactly what we find going on

            in Matthew's version of the parable of the unfaithful servants in the vineyard. 

We know this story so well, don't we?

            A man, a landowner, plants a vineyard,

                        puts a fence around it and leases it to tenants

                        whilst he is away in another country.

            When the time has come for the harvest, he sends his slaves,

                        but they are beaten and killed and stoned.

            So he sends further slaves who are treated in the same way.

            And then finally he sends his son,

                        who is also killed by the tenants. 

This is a story which those listening to Jesus

            would, like us, have found intensely familiar.

Not only did they live in a world of vineyards, tenant farmers, and absentee landlords.

            But also the chief priests and the Pharisees to whom Jesus addressed this parable

                        would have known well the story of the vineyard from Isaiah chapter 5,

            and they would have known that Isaiah's parable

                        draws a clear parallel between the vineyard in the story,

                                    and the nation of Israel.

If you were a first century Jew,

            you heard ‘vineyard’, and you knew that what was meant

            was the nation of Israel, the people of God.

However, the other aspects of the parable that Jesus told

            would have taken rather more thought and creativity to decode.

You see, Jesus' parable is different enough from Isaiah's

            for them to clearly not be the same story,

but it is similar enough for those listening to Jesus

            to think that they might be able to guess

            where he might be going to go with his vineyard story.

Let's hear it as the Chief priests and the Pharisees might have heard it.

            The vineyard is Israel, that much seems clear.

They would probably also have assumed that the landowner was God,

            a reasonable assumption on the basis of Isaiah's parable

                        where the planter of the vineyard is clearly identified as the Lord.

They would probably also have identified the servants of the landowner

            as prophets and messengers sent by God to Israel,

            to call it to fruitfulness.

They may even have seen themselves in this role;

            as the religious custodians of the nation,

                        they and their predecessors had, for generations,

                        been calling for Israel to recover its zeal for the Lord

                                    in the face of the constant pressures and temptations

                                    to compromise and collaborate with whichever imperial power

                                                held sway in the region.

            From the Assyrians to the Babylonians,

                        from the Hasmoneans to the Seleucids to the Romans,

            those who had tended the vineyard of God's people down the centuries

                        had done so by oppressing its people

                        and demanding compromise and tribute at every turn

                                    from those who had been called to be faithful to the Lord

                                                and to the Lord alone.

You can see why the Pharisees and Chief priests liked Jesus’ parable, at least at first.

            The way they heard it, they were the tragic heroes,

                        the ones who suffered for their prophetic task

                                    of calling the nation to faithfulness,

                        in the face of the unfaithful tenants

                                    who repeatedly kept trying to steal

                                    the vineyard of God for themselves. 

So it is no surprise that when Jesus springs his trap, they walk right into it

You see, using this story,

            Jesus has drawn the Pharisees into inadvertently revealing

                        what God it is that they actually believe in,

            because his parable poses the key question

                        of what the appropriate response should be to the problem of human sin.

The question, as Jesus poses it, is this:

            if God looks like the landowner,

                        what will his response be to the avaricious and unfaithful tenants

                        of his vineyard.

And it is at this point that he hears from the Pharisees' own lips

            that they believe in a God of violence and vengeance,

            a God of wrath and retaliation.

The chief priests and the Pharisees believe in a God

            who will kill the unfaithful tenants

            and hand the vineyard over to someone else.

Of course, what they were hoping for here

            was an ending to this story where God takes out his wrath on the Romans,

                        handing the care of God's nation over to the faithful,

                        and previously persecuted, Pharisees.

What they encounter instead

            is a turning of the tables against them,

            as they are revealed to be the unfaithful tenants of the story.

Like David before Nathan

            they have condemned themselves out of their own mouths.

Is it any wonder they start to want to rid themselves of this troublesome man?

These people who have just revealed themselves

            to believe in a God of violence

then do that which comes most naturally to them;

            they opt for a violent solution to their presenting problem.

The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf,

            whose theology was forged in the crucible of the Croatian civil wars,

                        says that if you believe in a god of violence,

                        you will tend to prefer a violent solution.

And so the Pharisees, having revealed just such a view of God,

            then immediately take the steps required

            to bring the tragic conclusion of Jesus' story into reality,

                        and they start to plot to kill the Son.

In doing so,

            they reveal themselves unambiguously to be the unfaithful tenants,

                        condemned by their own theology

                        to the wrathful judgment of the God they have created. 

Meanwhile, of course,

            the reality inhabited by the Pharisees is not the reality of God.

Because God revealed in Christ Jesus

            is not a God of violence and retribution,

            but a God of peace and forgiveness.

The Pharisees had got God wrong.

            God is not the landowner of Jesus's parable,

                        he does not kill the Jews and take away from them the kingdom of God,

            and any attempt to read this parable in that direction

                        runs a profound risk of capitulating with anti-Semitism.

If the Jewish leaders are condemned,

            it is on the basis of their own theology of condemnation.

God is not the landowner of the Pharisees’ imagining.

            Rather, he is the one who offers forgiveness to those who betray him,

                        the one who reverses the horrific effects

                                    of the worst violence the human heart can conceive

                        by raising his son from death to life.

            And in so doing, opening the door for new life

                        for all those trapped in the psychotic spirals

                        of violence and counter-violence unto death.

This is the God revealed in Jesus,

            and it is a very different God to that feared by the Pharisees.

So, "what God?"

Do we worship a God of violence, or a God of peace,

            do we worship a God of vengeance, or a God of forgiveness?

Do we worship a God of justice, or a God of bloodshed,

            a God of righteousness, or a God of weeping and crying,

as Isaiah posed it?

Well, as Jesus said to his disciples earlier in Matthew's gospel,

            "You will know them by their fruits" (7.16).

Our answer to the "so what" question

            may well offer us our insight into "what God" we actually worship.

It certainly did for the Pharisees,

            who discovered “what God” they believed in

            when they were confronted with their default answer

                        to the question of what the appropriate response should be

                        to the question of human sinfulness,

            encapsulated for them in the horrific actions

                        of the unfaithful and violent tenants. 

But what about us?

We don't live in an agrarian society,

            and analogies based on vineyards don't carry such rhetorical force

                        in our technologized world.

But consider this... 

A man went to a foreign country

            to bring help to those who were suffering there,

            because this country had been torn apart by war for many years.

He was taken prisoner by some of those who lived there,

            people who wanted to take control of the country for themselves.

They brutally murdered the innocent aid worker

            and posted a video of his beheading on the Internet.

Now, what should the leader of that man's country

            do to those who had killed the man?

I suspect that the answer we give to that question

            may tell us more about our view of God than we want to know.

Those who imagine a violent God

            have a predisposition to seeing violence

            as the divinely legitimated solution to human sin,

and those who see violence as the answer

            may well discover that this reveals

            “what God” it is that they worship.

Jesus invites us all to imagine God differently,

            he invites us to step into a world where God is the God of peace and justice,

                        and not the God of vengeance and bloodshed.

So, what answer should we give to the problem of human sinfulness,

            especially when the latest personification of that problem

            is committing terrible atrocities before our very eyes?

Well, our response will be shaped by our view of God.

Is our God a God of war,

            fighting for the right,

            baring his holy arm before the nations in a show of divine defiance,

                        and demanding obedience and compliance to his holy path?

If so, then send in the drones!

But if our God is a god of peace,

            whose response to human violence is to absorb it into his own body,

            and to go to the cross of broken flesh and spilled blood

            to enter into and redeem the worst excesses of human sinfulness,

then we too are called to be people of peace and not war.

This coming week is the Week of Action on Drones,[1]

            and the Times has reported recently that British armed unmanned drones

            may well be in the skies above Iraq before the end of the year.[2]

If we are the people of God,

            then we are the vineyard of the Lord of hosts.

And the words of the prophet Isaiah echo down the millennia to us:

‘He expected justice, but saw bloodshed;

            righteousness, but heard a cry!’.

So what fruit will be found among us?

            “What God” do we worship,

            and “So What?”

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[1] http://dronecampaignnetwork.wordpress.com/drones-week-of-action-2014/

[2] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article4216166.ece