Readings: Isaiah 5:1-7 Philippians 3 4b-14 Matthew 21 33-end .
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Well, Isaiah seems a bit moody this morning. He starts of in a good mood. He tells us how God built the best, the most perfect vineyard. The owner of the vineyard has lavished it with love and attention. He found a good position on the hillside with good soil, he cleared out the stones, choose the best vines and built watch towers to guard over them. He built a good wine press ready to make the most perfect, delicious bottle of wine, mmmm, my mouth is starting to water just thinking about it.
Then comes the time for the harvest and want a disappointment. The grapes are rotten they smell awful and taste even worse. Why? Asks Isaiah why, when I did everything I could and gave the vines the perfect conditions to grow and produce good fruit, why have they produced this horrible, poisonous mess?
Not surprisingly, Isaiah feels a bit annoyed with the vineyard and threatens to undo all his hard work and destroy it. He won’t care for it anymore, he will knock down the walls so any one that wants to can trample on his vines, wild animals can dig them up and destroy them.
The people listening to Isaiah must have bee wondering where he was going. Isaiah doesn’t hold back, you he says, you are the bad vines. God gave you everything you needed to build a community where justice and righteousness were seen as the normal way of life and instead there is injustice and blood shed. The people have failed to live according to God plan and disaster is the result.
Now, it’s would be quite easy and comforting to think Isaiah was written for the Israelites and they are about to get their punishment in the form of exile to Babylon. We’re not really a bad as the Israelites are we?
A few hundred years or so later and we have another man preaching to a group of people on a hillside in Israel, and his teaching starts in a similar way. There is a vineyard, a good vineyard like the previous one and it also has defenses to protect it from damage. This vineyard however is been looked after by tenants whilst the owner is absent. It can take 2-3 years before the vines will start to produce a good crop of grapes. So, the tenants had possibly been living and working there for a few years without needing to pay. Then the owner suddenly decides the grapes should be producing a good harvest now, he wants his return.
He sends his slaves to collect the payment due and the tenants decide they don’t want to pay and beat up and kill at least one of the slaves sent to collect payment. The owner sends some more slaves, the same thing happens. So then the owner sends his son. Now the tenants seem to lose all common sense at this point. I am not an expert in first century law, but I suspect that killing the son of your landlord is in no way going to lead to you inheriting any property, but the tenants seem to think that it will and kill the son.
Now with the two thousand plus years of hindsight that we have, the meaning of this parable can seem fairly obvious. The vineyard is the earth, the pharisees are the tenants and the Son is Jesus.
The pharisees clearly did not see it that way as when asked what the punishment for the tenants should be they suggest putting them to death and giving the vineyard to new tenants. Jesus makes it clear to them that they have got it wrong, and that they are the ones that are to lose. He then goes on to quote the psalms saying the one they have rejected will become the cornerstone, that is the one stone that is vital to hold everything else up.
So where does all this talk of vineyards leave us? I would like it if it left us with a bottle or two of good wine, but I’m not sure that it does. If we are the vines in the vineyard, what is the fruit we are producing? A quick glance at the news headlines suggest that justice, righteousness and peace are not on the list.
Closer to home there has been a thread on twitter this week which has called for people to be thrown out of the church for not agreeing with a certain theological viewpoint. I may not agree with the viewpoint in question but I can know, work with and respect those hold a different view.
It could be argued that one of the greatest strengths and one of the greatest weaknesses of the Church of England is the variety of views that we try to hold in one organization. This however does also give us the chance to model to the world how we can live in peace and even respect those we may disagree with on some issues.
However this can be easier said than done. It is so easy to be sure that we are right, they are wrong and they should change to agree with us and if not we must fight against them. St Paul in our reading from Philippians today admits that he might have been a bit like this. He was a zealous persecutor of the church, of those he disagreed with. Imagine what he would have been like on social media!
But then he has his encounter with the risen Christ and suddenly, everything changes, the things it seemed important to be right on and to attack those who disagreed with you, their not important anymore. What is important is Christ, and knowing Christ. By knowing Christ and seeking to live like Christ righteousness will follow.
However, Paul makes the point that this is an on going process. He isn’t there yet and neither are we. Faith is an on going journey and like all journeys it will have it’s ups and downs. There will be the times when life is good, it’s easy to be nice to everyone and following Christ can seem relatively straight forward. Then there are the times when life is a struggle, nothing seems to be going the way we went. We may be stressed, tired, in pain, feeling hurt physically and or emotionally. Then being nice to others, especially when they annoy us or we disagree with them is a lot harder, trying to attain the ideals of Christ can seem impossible. Paul knew this and writes words of encouragement to keep going, to press on towards the goal.
This is where we as a church community come in, to support and encourage each other in the tough times, even though we might disagree on some things. If we are to support and encourage each other it means we have to be honest with each other. Most of us here are British and when asked how are you British people tend to answer along the lines, I’m fine, can’t complain and other such things, even when we are on the edge of collapse, struggling to cope with arms and legs falling off! Maybe we need a change of perspective, rather than seeing being honest and open as to how we really are as in some way admitting to failure or weakness, we should consider it an opportunity for others to help us and in doing so grow in their quest to become more Christ like and for us to grow closer as a community of faith and become vines that produce the good fruit that the world so desperately needs right now.
Amen
