Grafted

Scripture: Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

Three out of our four Scripture readings this morning all have to do with vineyards. I know a few oenophiles out there who must be very excited about this.

The vineyard is a very common biblical symbol for God’s people Israel. Israel has always been God’s secret weapon. When the world had fallen into sin and disobedience, with every sort of wickedness and disrupted relationship that you can think of, God chose an old man named Abraham from whom to make a chosen people. All the nations of the earth belong to God, of course, but this family of Abraham would be a special possession, a priestly people, whom God would claim as His own. And through this family, God promised to bless all the peoples of the world.

God kept His promises, as He always does, and against all odds ancient Abraham and his equally withered wife Sarah bore a son, Isaac. Isaac had two sons of his own, Esau and Jacob. And Jacob, who proved to be a particularly rascally fellow, God renamed Israel, so that Jacob’s 12 sons became the 12 Tribes of Israel. Through Moses and the Exodus God made the 12 Tribes into one nation, and brought them out into the land of their ancestors, giving them one Law, one king, and one Temple. The vast majority of the Bible is the story of Israel, of God’s chosen people, as God patiently protects and prepares them to become His promised blessing to all the nations of the earth.

But the Israelites were not supermen. They were just people, just sinners, like you and I. So while God of course kept His promises to them, they did not always keep their promises to Him—and this proved to have dire consequences indeed. For you see, Israel has ever been God’s great love. He has sung to her as a bridegroom sings to his beloved bride. And the thing about love is that it cannot be forced; it cannot be coerced. If Israel wants out of the relationship, God must give to her what she wants, no matter how foolish the choice, for indeed God is love.

And so the people of Israel turned from God, time and again, pursuing other gods of wealth or lust or power. And such pursuits always ended tragically for the Israelites, as they ever do for all people. But whenever Israel turned back—whenever the people asked forgiveness, for a renewal of the ancient covenant—God came powerfully to their rescue, no matter what their transgressions, no matter how few remained faithful. Time and again, Israel rose and fell, like all nations under the sun. But unlike others, which fell never to rise again, Israel always resurrected, always rose from the dead. She was not like the other nations; she was the chosen possession of God.

This is what Isaiah prophesies this morning, when he sings about Israel as a vineyard. God brought the vine out of Egypt, cleared the earth for its flourishing, tended and watered and cared for the vine, even erecting walls to defend the vineyard. But when the vine refuses to be cultivated, and instead produces wild, sour grapes, the owner of the vineyard gives the vine what it wants, lets it grow wild. So it is with God and His people. Every few centuries Israel asserts that she would be better off without God, and so God grants to her the independence upon which she insists.

In the time of Isaiah, the great shadow of the Babylonian Empire looms large over Israel, and without God she will be ransacked and carried off into Exile. Yet even then, separated from the land and king and Temple that made her who she was—even then God will remain faithful, marching into Exile alongside His people.

Nearly 600 years after Isaiah, Jesus too tells the story of a vineyard. By Jesus’ time Babylon has long since fallen, and Israel has risen once again. She has returned to her God and to her home, and rebuilt the great Temple in Jerusalem. A new power occupies the country now: Romans from the west. But Israel has every confidence that just as God toppled Babylon and so many others before, surely He will topple Rome soon and very soon. Jesus now tells the familiar story of the vineyard, but with new and surprising twists. In Jesus’ tale, the vineyard is not the problem: the vines do not grow wild. Rather, the tenant farmers entrusted with stewarding the vineyard have grown greedy.

When the landowner sends his servants to collect his vineyard’s produce, the servants find themselves beaten, stoned, and murdered. Aghast, the landlord sends his own son, confident that the tenants will show respect to the heir as they did not to the servants. Alas, even the landlord’s own son is seized and killed. The tenants seem to think that the landlord will not come, that killing his son will keep him away, so that they can have the vineyard all to themselves. “Now when the owner of the vineyard does come,” Jesus asks cryptically, “what will he do to those tenants?”

“He will put those wretches to a miserable death!” the people cry out. “And he will entrust the vineyard to other tenants who will steward it faithfully and well!”

Upon hearing this, the chief priests and the Pharisees—who represent the religious and social authorities—want to arrest Jesus. For of course everybody knows that the vineyard represents Israel and the vineyard owner Israel’s God. Who then can the wicked tenants of the parable be but they themselves, who are unquestionably in charge? Jesus seems to be saying that God will put them all to death and place in their stead new authorities more loyal to God than they. You can see how that might upset some people.

Of course we know that the owner’s son represents Jesus, the only begotten Son of God, and that He will, in fact, be turned over by the chief priests and Pharisees for public execution upon a Roman Cross. Moreover, we know that shortly thereafter, in less than a single generation, Rome will annihilate completely the city of Jerusalem and the great Temple, eventually expelling the Israelites—that is, the entire Jewish people—from the land of Israel. For thousands of years, they will be a nation without a country, a people without a home.

In light of such events, it seems as if God has, in fact, put the chief priests and Pharisees to death, and entrusted the people of God to new stewards: the Apostles of Jesus Christ. Some in the Church have taken this interpretation even a step further and applied it to the plight of the entire Jewish people. “See?” they say. “The Jews were unfaithful one too many times, so God broke His covenant with them and replaced it with a New Covenant, a New Testament, so that the Jews have been rejected. And we the Gentiles, the non-Jews, have superseded them in the eyes of God. We are God’s people now, not them.” And this of course has been used as an excuse to mistreat and terrorize the people of Israel for thousands of years. Because they “deserve” it.

What is the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, between Israel and the Church? Has the former been rejected and the latter elected? It would be a special sort of lunacy to look at the history of the Church and to imagine that the Gentiles have somehow been more faithful to the heart of God than Israel. Jesus Christ is a Jew. So are His Mother Mary and earthly father Joseph. So are every one of the 12 Apostles, St. Paul, and all 50 authors of the Bible short of St. Luke. The entire first generation of Christianity, and many of our greatest theologians in every generation, have all been Jewish. “Salvation is from the Jews,” says Jesus in Scripture. We are all spiritual Semites.

As Christians we believe that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, that Abraham’s family would become a blessing to the entire world. Through Baptism into the Body of Christ, we are called out from the nations and adopted into the family of Abraham, into a new Tribe of Christians. The people of God is open now not just to those who share the blood of Abraham but to all those, Gentile and Jew alike, who share faith in Abraham’s God. The New Covenant has not replaced the Old but fulfilled it. The New Israel does not reject the Old but opens her arms to all the peoples of the earth. No one knew this better than St. Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, and who as both a pious Israelite and a Roman citizen had a foot in both the Jewish and Gentile worlds.

Let us recall that Jesus never said that the unfaithful tenants of His parable would be killed and replaced. We said that—the people listening and blurting out how we would finish the tale. But that’s not how Jesus finished it at all, was it? Jesus, crucified upon the Cross by the sins of Gentile and Jew alike, called out, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” None of us ever does.

Brothers and sisters, God does not break promises. He did not abandon one vineyard to plant a new one. Nor did He plant two in parallel, one for Jew and one for Gentile. Rather, He has grafted us in, as wild branches on a cultivated vine, so that there is no longer Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free. For all are one in Christ.

Thanks be to God in Christ Jesus, Who is both the Messiah of Israel and Savior of the entire world. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.