Bloomsbury Central Baptist
Church
5th 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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