Redemption - Pentecost 19 OS 27

Redemption

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Isaiah 5.1-7, Psalm 80.9-17, Philippians 3.4b-14, Matthew 21.33-46.

St Peter’s Eastern Hill, October 8th, 2023.

That song from Isaiah today creates a powerful sense of shattered expectation. It begins as a love song; the prophet sings of his Beloved, the God who built the vineyard of Israel with such labour and care. Only just when we think we are in for expressions of affection and joy, we are drawn up short: he expected it to yield grapes—but it yielded wild grapes. Suddenly we hear the voice of the Beloved himself, crying out at the betrayal of his love by his people. Judge for yourselves, what have I not done for you? Still, you have yielded only bloodshed and injustice!

God gives a people everything needed to flourish, and they take it without replicating that goodness in the way they engaged with others in the world – a characteristic that is by no means limited to the people of fifth- or sixth-century Judah.

Now of course strictly speaking the notion of God having disappointed expectations is absurd. God is God, God knows the heart before we do, God sees how history unfolds from the perspective of Eternity. The point of the rhetoric is that even if God foresees our falls, there is nothing inevitable about them. They are not tragedies of fate; they are tragedies of will.

Now jump forward our Lord’s own day, when the exile the prophet predicted is over; Israel has some degree of security and autonomy within the Roman Empire. We are back in the temple with Jesus, as we were last week. The thing to understand about these Gospels is that he is speaking to the powerful. These are local authorities who from what we understand of the period, inspired a lot of popular dissatisfaction, as it seemed they were using their authority to enrich themselves rather than really restore the nation. So, Christ revives the image of the vineyard. He turns to the priests and elders and asks, You have the vineyard again, the land and the nation. Where is the fruit? The story he tells them once again includes a sense of frustrated divine expectation. When the owner’s slaves aren’t able to collect his produce from the tenants, the owner expects, They will respect my Son. But when the tenants face the Son, the heir of the vineyard, who has come without weapons, without lawsuits, hoping only to resolve the situation, rather than respect him they act out of greed. Jesus tells this parable in full awareness of what is able to happen to him at the hands, in part, of the people he is speaking to.  Once again, the violence of the selfish heart is invading God’s vineyard, and the bond of love is being torn, the Father’s expectations are shattered.

I suppose we don’t have to look far into the history of Israel or indeed of the Church to recognise moments when something like this has happened. When greed or arrogance have corrupted the influence of divine love in the actions of his people.

The powerful thing about the prophet’s outcry is twofold. One, that there is a Power Greater than the utmost of human powers, who will hold them to account. Something we can never lose sight of or faith in. The second is the implication that even when God has to hold us to account, God doesn’t forsake us, doesn’t give us up as a bad job. The Father offers to us his Living Word to awaken our conscience. God’s response is again and again to awaken a thirst for redemption.

[We can hear that in the psalmist. In exile, the psalmist pleads with God to restore the vine which his own right has planted, promising never to turn away from God again.]

I wonder if you’ve noticed, in Matthew’s telling of the Gospel parable, the Saviour concludes with a question:

What will the owner do to those tenants?

It is the priests and elders who presume that the vineyard owner will do to the tenants what they have done to his Son. Looking at it from the outside, in the form of a parable, they cannot see any coming back from the betrayal. It is this that is fatal for them: not the thousand broken commandments—do not steal, do not envy, do not abuse the vulnerable—not even the murder of the Son, but their failure to imagine Mercy, let alone to ask for it.

Whereas to the Divine Mind the death of the Son is not the last nail in the coffin. It is the gateway to redemption: The stone the builders rejected, has become the cornerstone. Christ, who is the fruit of Israel’s vine, transforms that tragic love-song in Isaiah into a tale of redemption. The fruit of the vine becomes the blood of the New Covenant, shed for the forgiveness of sins. As the apostle realised and articulates with such breathtaking clarity, the life of Jesus shifts the goal posts. Contemplate the day of judgement, and it is not the absence of sin and of failure, but the response to Mercy, by which we will be “judged”. [That is, by which one enters into union with God in his Beloved.] We enter the presence of God through the gates of his mercy, as God enters our souls through the wells of mercy inside us.

Now to the ancient mind, of course, mercy is more than an emotion. The desire for mercy is awakened in the heart, and flows from the heart into action (like justice). When Israel is languishing in exile, for instance, mercy would restore them to life (thus the psalmist: give us life, and we will call upon your name; restore us again, O God of hosts, let your face shine upon us, that we may be saved.) Mercy means healing. Mercy means restoration. It is by Mercy God makes us whole.

But all the same, in Christ, redemption is no longer primarily about the sovereignty or prosperity for which that psalmist longed. In Christ we see that in this life, such sovereignty and prosperity are always going to be compromised so long as there is a single soul in the world still in the state of those tenants, afflicted by pride or greed. So long as our own souls are still impure.

In Christ, redemption begins with a spiritual reality, the reality of meeting God in the face of our Crucified Lord and letting him change us. Redemption enters society to the extent we let the Face of Mercy and Grace mould who we are. A people willing to be redeemed. A people willing to embrace others in need of redemption. And we can apply this, of course, in our relationship to our church, to our companions, and to ourselves. Try as one might, in a fallen world, one is never going to find “righteous” allies, or a pure cause, or a blameless history. Not with a righteousness of our own that comes from the given moral law which we are able to comprehend. What one can find in this world, by grace, are redeemed allies, a people redeeming themselves or their history, a people who, above all, have been redeemed by the One who first placed the thirst for righteousness in our hearts, and who reawakens it each time we fall. So that we who drink his cup, might indeed bear the fruit of his love, which are the signs and the shadows of his eternal kingdom.

Mthr Kathryn Bellhouse