Vineyard

 

Propers: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 26), AD 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

It’s Holy Week—not for us, perhaps, but certainly in our Gospel reading this morning.

Jesus has come to the climax of His three and a half years of public ministry. These are His final days on earth before the Crucifixion. And He is spending them teaching the crowd in the Temple, the very heart of religious life for God’s people Israel. And there are gathered Judeans and God-fearers from every nation under heaven, from the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire, to celebrate the Passover, the deliverance of God’s people from slavery into freedom, from death unto life.

And because of this—because of the crowds, because of the high holy days—Jerusalem is a powder keg. Israel has always been a nation that has punched above its weight class. Tiny by our standards, it isn’t much larger than New Jersey. Yet it is situated at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, really the center of the known world at the time. And Israel has produced some of humanity’s greatest ideas, most notably monotheism, which spread out into the continents around it.

Because of its importance, little Israel has always been threatened by the great empires of every age, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Persia and Greece. Rome is but the latest in a long line of conquerors, seeking to control the center of the world. But the Israelites have been here before. They have outlasted every other tyrant, every other empire. They have their Book, they have their God, and they have the promise of the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ, who is to descend from heaven and liberate His people. And all this makes them quite unruly.

There is a precarious peace between conqueror and conquered. Rome desires order, by any means necessary. If that means butchery, so be it. But if it can be attained quietly, so much the better. And the local authorities of Roman Judea know this. The elders of the people, and chief priests of the Temple, know that their power, their influence, their very livelihoods depend on keeping the people quiet enough that Rome does not bring the hammer down.

If they bow too far to Rome, the people will rise up to overthrow them. Yet if they mouth off too much, Rome will execute them as rebels. It is an uneasy dance at best. And now here, at the most volatile time of the year—Jerusalem at the Passover—here comes this Jesus, this wandering rabbi from the Galilee, who kicked up such a storm of messianic hope that many expect Him to lead a new war against Rome.

The priests and the elders must nip this in the bud, must deflate the passions and the furor surrounding this Jesus, before the whole city explodes into political violence, calling down the fury of the Legions upon Jerusalem—which is, incidentally, exactly how Jerusalem will be destroyed some 40 years hence, in 70 AD.

So Jesus is teaching the crowds when these notable bigwigs show up. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they demand. But they aren’t really asking. If they’d truly wanted to know, they could’ve simply listened. Jesus was never shy about His authority. They’re trying to shut Him down, and they can’t even be bothered to be honest about it.

The priests and the elders are, in the eyes of this Gospel, moral cowards. They make choices based on political expedience, on fear of what the people will think of them, how the crowd will react. They seek to protect their authority, their power. Such behavior is considered reprehensible amongst politicians even today, let alone amongst religious leaders—the clergy—whose job is ostensibly to speak the truth. Jesus will not play their game. He is too rebellious for that. Jesus pushes back.

“I’ll answer you truly if you’ll answer Me truly,” He replies. “John the Baptist—did his authority come from God or from men?” At this, the priests and elders hem and haw. If we say God, they mutter, He will ask us why we didn’t listen to John. But if we say from men, the crowd will turn on us, for they all see John as a prophet. “We—we don’t know,” they finally lamely manage. And in response to their non-answer, Jesus gives them no answer. Instead, He turns to a parable.

A man had two sons, He says, whom he asked to work in the family vineyard. The first son answered, “I will not!” but later changed his mind and went. The second son answered, “I go, sir!” But he did not go. Which then did the will of his father? The first, reply the elders and the priests, the one who actually went and worked. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to them, “the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the God’s Kingdom ahead of you, because they trusted in John’s word. Yet even after you saw him for yourselves, you would not change your minds and believe.”

Here we have Jesus at His most coolly acerbic, publicly comparing the highest religious authorities in the land to prostitutes and tax collectors—people reviled as traitors, as imperial collaborators selling their bodies, or selling out their brothers, for pagan Roman coin. But were the Temple clergy really all that different? They too kowtowed to Caesar in order to maintain their positions. They too sold out their countrymen to keep the Peace of Rome.

Would that such a critique were limited to the long ago and far away. But in fact plenty of modern Christian clergy are just as guilty as our forebears. We too fear what people will say, how the crowd will react. We too are more than happy to bow to Caesar, so long as it means a steady paycheck and a stable congregation. When politics has become a sort of religion in its own right, it can be so much easier to make religion political: red churches, blue churches, conservatives, progressives.

We are no better than tax collectors. We are no better than prostitutes. At least they’re honest about what they do and why. At least they listen when Jesus speaks.

What is the will of the father—both in the parable and in its purpose? What does it mean to labor in God’s vineyard, to do the will of the Lord? To do the will of the Father is to believe in the one whom He has sent, Jesus Christ our Lord. It is to repent of our sins, to swallow our pride, to love our neighbor, and to trust in Jesus’ sure promise of mercy, forgiveness, and healing.

It is to be baptized, and to return to that Baptism every moment of our lives. It is to gather together in the Lord’s Supper, around the Table which is also our Altar; to receive the gifts of God, freely given, which we could never earn for ourselves. It is not a matter of works-righteousness: of making proper choices, of doing good deeds for hope of just reward. No. We come to the Cup without money, without cost.

Yet at the same time, faith in Christ is more than just affirming a checklist of abstract assertions, picking the right beliefs for a multiple-choice test. It makes no sense to say we have faith in Jesus if we will not do what He tells us. Faith is lived. We are to love others as Christ has first loved us. We are to proclaim the forgiveness of sins—the true Baptism of which John’s was but preparation—and we are to minister always to the last, the lost, the little, and the least; to give freely as God gives freely to us; to live as little Christs both for the world and for each other.

And yes, we are but sinners. And yes, we still make great mistakes. But it is this life of Christ within us, renewed in Holy Baptism, strengthened in Holy Communion, which reaps the vineyard’s harvest through us, for us, in us. When people see the life of Christ within us, they want Him for themselves. And so honestly all we need do for the Church to truly thrive is to show the world Jesus Christ. And all we need to do for that, is to get ourselves out of His way.

This is the will of the Father. And it is accomplished in the life of the Son.

This Gospel of Jesus Christ—of God become one of us, to live and die and rise for us, to forgive us even as we murdered Him, and to love us all the way to hell and back—is such Good News that it cannot help but bring life to the world: a life which overcomes sin and death and hell; a life which overcomes all fears and divisions and hatreds here below. Jesus died for all, that all shall rise in Him.

The prostitutes and tax collectors will enter the Kingdom before you, Jesus said. But He didn’t say instead. His love is for those who oppose Him, those who betray Him, those who say one thing with their mouths and another with their lives. Jesus’ love is the love of God for everyone and everything that He has ever made. There is no sin He cannot forgive, no wrong He cannot right, no wound He cannot heal, no soul He cannot save.

The Good News is so good we scarcely dare believe it’s true. This is the love that remakes our world. And it is given here freely to you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.