NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 27 in Ordinary Time Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, for this homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And as you can see, I'm in a different undisclosed location from where I usually am, and you can see the French bulldog Nicholas, who has decided that he will accompany me while I talk, and woe betide me if I suggest otherwise. So today's Gospel is the direct continuation of where we left off last Sunday. Just to recap a little, to remind you where we are: this is the week in which Jesus has come into Jerusalem on what we normally refer to as Palm Sunday. He's come in fulfilling and enacting the Davidic prophecy — that the Davidic heir, this anointed priestly-kingly figure, would come in to Jerusalem, would arrive, would perform the sacrifice, and this would be the first sign of the end; the Temple would then be destroyed, and the idea is that a new Israel would arrive. These were ancient prophecies that were very much alive at the time of Christ. And so here he had come into the Temple, he'd done a number of signs which were Davidic signs, and the Temple authorities, reasonably enough, wanted to know whether he was the right guy. After all, any number of charlatans could and did claim to be the one who is to come. So they come to him the day after the cleansing of the Temple, the day after they've got cross with him for healing a number of blind and lame people, and they say to him, "By what authority do you do these things, and who gave you this authority?" As I said last Sunday, not a stupid question. It's their job, in a sense. Their job is — you know, they're the guardians of the watchtower — they have to work out whether this is another charlatan or whether this is the real thing, because they knew that the real thing was coming. So to work out what it's going to be like was very much part of their job description. As you remember, Jesus asked them how they had read the sign of John the Baptist: by what authority did he preach, and who gave him that authority? And they showed themselves unwilling to answer that question. So Jesus tried to make things easy for them. He told them the story of the two sons — the one who said no but did, and the one who said yes but didn't — just to make it clear how easy it was for them in fact to work out who was doing the will of the Father. This is not difficult. But then pointed out that this made their own acting out at the time of John the Baptist somewhat suspect, because it was perfectly clear that he must have been genuine, because those who had said no were in fact finding themselves saying yes after all, and this was quite a new thing. So after this, Jesus then tells this parable — the parable of the wicked tenants in the vineyard — and please remember that this is all about the arrival of an heir. Remember that that was what was in question: what is the arrival of the Davidic heir going to look like? How can you tell whether this is the real thing? That's the context in which Jesus is answering — giving this parable as an answer to the temple authorities. So he says: "Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it and built a watchtower." Okay, so far obvious reference to Isaiah 5:1–7, which is our first reading this week. He more or less quotes it and can take for granted that it's the whole passage that he has in mind: the notion of the Lord setting up Israel, planting vines in it, wanting it to produce fruit for the whole world and putting a watchtower in it — watchtower being a synonym for Temple. This would have been what David had sought to do but Solomon actually did. This is about setting up Israel. This is God's plan for Israel. Now, if you read the Isaiah text, it then goes on to say that God had developed a bit of a squabble with his tenants in the vineyard, because they hadn't been producing the goods. He wanted fruit, but all he got was bloodshed, and so he was angry and planned to destroy it. So the message is a happy thing, and then the conclusion is wrath and setting it up for someone else to produce its fruit. Okay, so Jesus then carries on his parable: "Then the landowner leased it to tenants and went to another country." Okay, so he's gone away; it's now in the hands of tenants. "When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect the produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first, and they treated them in the same way." Okay, so fairly obviously, if you're listening to this in prophetic mode, this refers to the prophets from before the exile and the prophets after the exile — the landowner being God, and the prophets trying to persuade Israel to produce its fruit and always getting rejected and punished by the people of Israel at the time. But this is also being told in strictly agricultural terms, and remember that here we're in the land of something quite sensible, something quite understandable. If you were tenants and your landlord had gone away out of the country, there would have been contracts carefully set up as to how much was owed in what period. But there were also laws — Jewish laws, very clear in Deuteronomy — regarding fruit and profit from fruit, and how much in what year. None of this was arbitrary; it was all very, very clearly set out. But there's also the law of adverse possession, which is something that any tenant would know and any landowner would know, which is that once you set up tenants in a property of yours, you need to be careful, because if they can ward off your attempts to establish your ownership of your property for a certain number of years, they win. They can in fact steal, usurp your land, having occupied it successfully against your attempts — your just attempts to get it back — over a certain number of years. So there was automatically a tension set up in this relationship, and everybody knew this. So sending the servant the first year: of course there was no fruit the first year. According to the book of Deuteronomy, there's no fruit for the first three years; you can't get any profit from it. The fourth year there is only just enough fruit for the first fruits to be paid, the tithes to the Temple, and only in the fifth year can you start to have some sort of profit. Nevertheless, the landowner has to send servants each year to establish his claim, so as to show that he's alive, be interested. And naturally enough, one of the things that has to happen is that the servants have to show that they've been through their job. But one of the ways that was standard at the time for servants to show that they'd been and done their job, even when there was no money to be brought back, was to get beaten up. This seems a bizarre thing for us, but it makes perfect sense. They didn't have cell phones, couldn't take selfies of themselves at the boss's plantation. So what they had to do was to get themselves beaten up and bruised, which was the sign that they had been and staked the claim. There was no money to be brought back, but at least they could say, "Yes, I did. I went there. I staked the claim." In other words, this beating up — everyone knew what this was about. Of course, the more serious version here of killing them and stoning them obviously refers to the prophets. So finally the landowner says, "They will respect my son," to send his son. Now, again, please remember that here we are in a parable about the coming of the heir, the Davidic heir. "By whose authority do you do these things, and who gave you this authority? Are you the Davidic heir? And if you are the Davidic heir, was it God who sent you?" The only possible positive answer to that sounded blasphemous. How to make the knowledge that this was in fact the case available without blasphemy — that is what Jesus is doing in this parable. He says, "They will respect my son." But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, "This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and get his inheritance." Okay, now maybe wicked, but not stupid. If they were stupid, they would have thought, "Oh, this is the heir, and his dad has sent him anyhow — let's kill him even though his dad is still alive, and we'll get the inheritance," because of course if the dad was still alive he could rustle up a militia and punish them greatly. But the word "heir" can also mean the guy who has just inherited, given that his dad has died. In other words, this is the actual owner who's turning up, and if it's the owner and we kill him – wicked, but not stupid – because we get to keep the property. And guess what? There's no one to make a counterclaim, no witnesses to what's happened. It was all just a strange thing: we heard about this man who went away a long time ago, we've never heard anything back from him. You can see what a convenient move this would be. And of course now Jesus is going to put this back in the hands of the temple authorities, asking them to work out where they are in this story. So far so good, if this was an agricultural story. But in the prophetic story, of course, the owner who's in another land is God. So what is his coming back? What kind of vengeance would he take against the tenants? "So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him." Very important that they throw him out of the vineyard, because if you kill someone in the vineyard then you desecrate the land, the ground, and it means that you can only sell the wine or the grapes to Gentiles; you couldn't sell it kosher to Jews, and its value would drop to about a third. So massive loss if you killed the owner or anybody on the territory. You needed to take them outside and kill them. So very good commercial sense there. Now, then Jesus says, "When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" And that's the question that's putting them on the spot, since they have to ask: hmm, which owner and which tenants are we talking about? Are we talking about God the owner, as in the prophet Isaiah? Are we talking about an agricultural owner who is in fact at a distance and whose son has just been killed? Well, that seems the easiest and the most obvious one. It assumes that the tenants are stupid, that they've killed the son knowing that the dad is still alive. But anyhow, so they say: "He'll put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time." In other words, they go along with the vengeful version of Isaiah and with the obvious reading of the stupid tenants. But this is the time when there's a pause, and then Jesus says to them, "Have you never read in the Scriptures: 'The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?" Because of course, if he is the Son and heir, and the God who has sent him – the one who set up Israel – is not this vengeful figure, then something entirely different is going on here. He is coming… into their midst, allowing himself to be killed, knowing that it's only by occupying the space of death and enabling us to be moved out of that shame, that violence, that fear, that hatred – it's only by occupying that space that we'll actually be able to grow at all. If he's done that, then that's the gift. That's the wonderful thing. And he's actually pleading on behalf of the wicked tenants. He's saying, "Yep, okay, they were going to do this, but for anyone who's able to accept this as a way of being forgiven, that's how you're going to produce the fruits. I'm actually giving you – I, the heir – I'm coming in as the one who you are going to kill, so that you can have the vineyard. You will be able to produce its fruits. You won't owe any more tithes to the Temple. You will be able to produce its fruits. You will be the Temple. I will have been the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, all in one, so that you can be the new Temple." In other words, he's doing something which the Temple authorities seem to be unable to imagine.