MONDAY OF HOLY WEEK, Year C: March 29 2010

Preacher: Fr Peter Waddell
Is 5:1–7; Luke 20:9–19

How on earth is the Gospel we've just read good news? People often think the parables are lovely stories with comforting messages: lost sheep recovered; the wounds of strangers bound up; prodigal sons forgiven. But this parable is not lovely. It is, in some ways, pretty appalling.

'There was a landowner who planted a vineyard'. To any Jew, that says this is a story about Israel, God's vineyard, the place and people that God has carefully tended and nurtured so that it may produce fine fruit. That tending and nurturing task he has given to his tenants, as St Luke tells the story, the chief priests and the scribes. Their job is to look after Israel for God, to make it fruitful for him: to make it a nation blooming with goodness and justice.

The story, however, is of their treachery. They reject their Lord's messengers, the prophets; they will not serve Him but aim to seize the vineyard for themselves; their greed culminates in murder as the Lord's Son arrives to assert His rights. To St Luke the point was clear: 'What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.' In other words, because they murdered Christ, the Jewish religious leadership is doomed. They are out of God's plan, and their place is given to new tenants: to the fledgling Christian Church and its leaders.

Why is that appalling? Well, how would you begin to explain it to a Jewish person? 'Hello, your religion is bankrupt, dead since its rejection of Jesus'? You might say, I suppose, that it's just about the leaders at that time, and not about the Jewish people themselves. That's probably just about arguable for this passage; although you do have other tricky texts to deal with. In Matthew's Gospel for example, at the trial of Jesus, the Evangelist is very clear that the people as a whole — his phrase, the people as a whole — cried out 'his blood be upon us and on our children'. For Matthew and much of the New Testament, the only good Jew is a Christian Jew. It's not a long jump from there to persecuting the ones who won't convert, calling them Christ-killers, putting them in ghettos and making them wear yellow stars. There were lots of reasons for Auschwitz; one of them is in texts like this. You can certainly bet that if it were in the Qu'ran, you would have heard by now about how it demonstrated that Islam was an intrinsically violent and anti-Jewish religion.

So we have a lot of questions. Did Jesus really tell this story? Did He tell it in exactly this way? Did He make a distinction between the Jewish leadership and the Jewish people and religion as a whole? Did He think His death meant the end of one religion and the beginning of another? To Him, was the only good Jew a Christian Jew? Should we then be urgently trying to convert Jews to save them? Or did St Luke misunderstand Jesus, and what would that mean for the rest of his Gospel? Can we trust the New Testament? And even if we can, if parts of it set us on the road to Auschwitz, in what sense is it the Word of God?

There's nothing like enough time to explore those questions this evening. For the moment, I want to develop just one thought about this passage. Why are we given it to read? If, like most of the Christian Church today, we do not want to teach that Judaism is spiritually bankrupt what is the point of hearing this passage?

I'd suggest this. This passage is a warning. It is about how the very people God charges with looking after his vineyards end up betraying God's purposes. Luke has a black and white mind; he finds it difficult to think of the chief priests' and the Pharisees' sin as anything other than perverse, deliberate rebellion against God. It probably appeared otherwise to them. No doubt some were callous, power-hungry thugs. But others might well have thought they were serving God when they rejected Jesus. They might have thought that He was a reckless, fanatical preacher who overthrew traditional values and threatened the peace. That would certainly have been a superficially reasonable conclusion for a priest to arrive at. And perhaps they were so used to thinking of themselves as on the right side, the side of goodness and justice and God, that killing for it simply seemed a grim duty. And so they drifted, without even realizing, into deep, dark wrong. Think about how Paul describes his own past in the letter to the Philippians: 'As to zeal, a persecutor of the Church,' so godly as to kill for God's sake. Or think, perhaps, of how those who covered up child abuse in the Church seem really to have thought that they were doing the right thing. Or of how some today value democracy and human rights so much that it seems any means of defending them is justifiable — torture in secret prisons, drone strikes in remote Pakistan, nuclear weaponry always looming in the background. We're so used to thinking ourselves right that we too drift easily into deep and deadly sin.

That's what this story is about; that's why we should still read it. Just when we are at our most confident righteousness, that is when God says, are you sure you haven't missed Me? Are you sure you haven't deluded yourselves? Being Christian is about not being sure of ourselves. That's why the Eucharist begins with a confession. We come before God and we remind ourselves that the human heart is a deep and mysterious thing, that we are not the best judges of our own goodness, that we are flawed in ways we have not begun to comprehend. This parable, that confession, is there to make us constantly question the complacent assumption that we are fine, reasonable people in a fine, reasonable society. The truly Christian way to read this story is not as a condemnation of others, but as a questioning of ourselves.

And from the confession we will move to the Communion in a few minutes. And that is crucial. It tells us the acknowledgement of failure and corruption is not the end of the story. Christianity is not just about humility. Christianity is about the amazing truth that these very flawed people — CIA torturers; cardinals who cover up; me and you, each one of us, with all our flaws — the ones we see, the ones we don't — each one of us is summoned to share the life of God. God intends to take each one of us, whatever we are, and make us wonderful. He takes this poor, scrappy, flawed humanity and makes it part of the risen Jesus. That is what the Bible says, 'You are the Body of Christ'. 'You are the Body of Christ'. There is a great, great mystery in those words, a mystery which is starting to happen to us as we share this bread and wine. My hope for each of us, this Holy Week, is that together we will enter ever more deeply into that mystery.