God’s Vineyard

T he Scripture readings this morning present us with a difficult problem — the question of God’s judgment of his own people. The dominant metaphor or image is that of the vineyard. In two of the passages, the vineyard imagery is used to express divine judgment on God’s people, specifically the people of Israel. In both cases, God exercises judgment because he does not meet with the expected response from his people. In the Old Testament reading, God sends his people into exile.

And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; . . . (Isaiah 5:5-6a)

In the gospel reading (Mt.21:33 ff), God judges the tenants of the vineyard by taking the vineyard away from them, and giving it to someone else. In the third passage, the Psalm (Ps. 80), the point of view is that of the tenant who asks why God has allowed his vineyard to be neglected. The passage questions God’s righteousness in judging Israel and allowing her enemies to triumph. Finally, even Paul’s letter to the Philippians, though it does not use the vineyard imagery, speaks of those who “ live as enemies of the cross of Christ; . . .” Paul says: “ Their end is destruction.” (Phil. 3:18,19) These hard sayings contrast sharply with other passages in the Scriptures which speak so emphatically of God’s love for his people. Paul (or the Pauline author) prays in Ephesians, for example, “ that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:18,19)

Some people have not seen a problem here. For many Christians, the contrast between divine judgment and divine love is not even recognized because the two concepts are applied so completely to different groups of people. God’s judgment applies to Israel, for having rejected Christ. God’s love applies to the Church because we have accepted Christ. Another popular (but heretical) approach is to contrast the Old Testament God of justice and wrath with the New Testament God of love. I once actually heard the wife of an Episcopal priest say that the God of the Old Testament was the devil in the New Testament. A more modern approach is that of those Liberal Protestants who simply dismiss any discussion of God’s judgment as “ primitive” and to be removed from the Scriptures as incompatible with Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness. I have heard sermons in which ordained clergy, instead of preaching on the morning’s readings, repudiated lectionary passages like this morning’s as being anti-Semitic.

The above solutions to the problem will not work, however. The God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God who is presented in Matthew’s gospel as exercising judgment against the tenants of his vineyard. And the message of judgment in Matthew’s gospel is not addressed against outsiders. Granted, Matthew is a Christian, but Matthew is also a believing Jew. His gospel is the most Jewish of all of the gospels, and Matthew writes as a member of a Jewish Christian community. And of course Our Lord Jesus Christ — Jesus of Nazareth to his contemporaries — was himself a Jew. When he spoke this parable, he spoke it as a Jew speaking to his fellow Jews. When Jesus spoke of the divine judgment, he spoke as an insider, as a member of God’s covenant community of Israel, at the same time that he spoke of judgment on that community. No doubt Jesus had these passages from Isaiah 5 and Psalm 80 in mind when he told this story of the wicked tenants and the vineyard. What we find in the New Testament then is not anti-Semitism but one side of a disagreement between two groups about which one truly represents the heritage of Judaism.

The question then, has to do with the identity of the people of God. Who are God’s people? And how can God exercise judgment against those to whom he has given his promises? If the Christian Church sees itself as the people of God it can see itself as such only in solidarity with these Hebrew people with whom God has already entered into covenant. The early Christians did not live in Rome or Geneva or Canterbury. They were a Jewish sect who believed that God had fulfilled his promises to Israel through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The first Gentiles who became Christians became members of this Jewish sect. For a Gentile to become a Christian was, in a sense, to become an honorary Jew by placing faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, the Messiah, the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel.

The stance of the early Church toward Israel was therefore ambivalent. On the one hand, the early Church saw itself as the people of God, the people to whom the promises were made. They were only able to do so however in continuity with God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel from whom Jesus had been born. They accepted the Hebrew Scriptures as their Scriptures. The earliest Christians even continued to worship in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem until it became impossible for them to do so.

On the other hand, Israel as a whole did not accept Jesus as the Messiah and this created a severe problem for the early Church. Could it be that God’s own people had rejected their promised Messiah? Another major question was whether the Gentiles had to fulfill the Jewish law in order to become Christians. The message of all of Paul’s letters is that Gentiles had only to have faith in Christ to become part of the Church. To insist on fulfillment of the Jewish law was to substitute self-justification for God’s justification of the sinner through Jesus Christ. The Law of the Hebrew Scriptures was not then intended by God to bring about salvation but was, in Paul’s metaphor, a schoolmaster to bring us to salvation through Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:24, 25).

In the Hebrew Scriptures — what we Christians call The Old Testament — the question of the identity of the people of God had earlier already become tied up not merely with membership in the Hebrew nation but with faithfulness to the LORD of the covenant. Physical descent was not enough. The ten northern tribes were eventually taken into captivity and only the tribe of Judah remained. The people of God still continued. The prophets finally identified the true people of God with a faithful remnant who remained true to the covenant (Is. 10:20-23). This remnant became even smaller until it was reduced to one person, the Suffering Servant of the LORD of Isaiah 53, the Son of Man of Daniel 7, the new prophet like Moses of Deuteronomy(18:15) , the ideal Davidic king (2 Sam. 7:12 ff.; Jer. 33:15 ff.) who would reign in the future. This figure or these figures were understood to represent the entire nation. Though the nation might be unfaithful, the Servant, the Son of Man, the Prophet, the righteous King was faithful. At the same time, there were in the Hebrew Scriptures promises that God’s covenant would one day extend not only to Israel but also to the nations (Is. 56:7; Is. 60).

For the New Testament Church, Jesus the Messiah is seen to be the fulfillment of these promises. The New Testament Scriptures repeatedly identify Jesus as the Suffering Servant, the Son of Man, the Prophet like Moses, the Son of David. From this point on, the people of God are identified not by physical descent but by their allegiance to Jesus. Jesus sets out to form a new community. His twelve apostles represent the twelve tribes of the new Israel. Jesus says at the Last Supper that the new covenant promised by the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 31:31-34) has been fulfilled in the shedding of his blood and the breaking of his body (Luke 19:20). St. Peter says in his sermon on Pentecost that the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the Church is a fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel. “ In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” (Acts 2:16 ff; cf. Joel 2:28 ff.) Finally, God’s people is further expanded to include not only those Jews who have faith in Jesus, but Gentiles as well (Acts 10:34,35, Rom. 1:16). That is why we who are of European, East Asian, and African descent can now be part of the New Covenant, the New Israel, the people of God.

What then of Israel “ according to the flesh,” the physical descendants of the Hebrew people? Are we to conclude that God has simply abandoned them, and that now only Gentile Christians are the people of God? The Scriptures do not allow us that option. The apostle Paul tells us that “ God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.” (Rom. 11:2) The Gentiles have been admitted into the Church to make Israel jealous, Paul says, that through the admission of the Gentiles eventually “all Israel will be saved.” (Rom. 11:11,26)

We cannot then judge those outside the Church, but we can have hope for them. The place of the Church is not to condemn those outside its borders, but to announce to them the good news that Jesus Christ has died for them, whether they acknowledge it or not. Only God knows their destiny. You may remember that a decade or so ago, Bailey Smith, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention said that God does not hear the prayer of a Jew. But we know differently. God does hear the prayer of one Jew, for God hears the prayers of the risen Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel and our Lord, who now stands at the right hand of his Father and offers prayer on our behalf and on behalf of all sinners, whether Jew or Gentile.

And what of the Church? Is our position secure? On the one hand, of course, yes. We have received the promise: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Rom. 10:9) But we must still remember that the call to salvation is a call to responsibility. Remember that Jesus addressed his message of judgment to the fellow members of the covenant community. He went only to the House of Israel. We have now become part of that community. We therefore are subject to the same judgment. The apostle Paul uses imagery similar to that of today’s passages in Romans 11. He says that we Gentiles are like a wild branch which has been grafted into the cultivated olive tree of Israel. If we fail to be faithful to that which we have been called, God can remove our wild branch from the original tree. In John’s gospel, Jesus says to his followers on the night before his crucifixion: “ I am the vine; you are the branches. If you abide in me, you will bear much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:4) But Jesus goes on to say: “ Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers.” (John 15:5) If we do not abide in Christ, we will face judgment.

These are sobering words, but not words for despair. God’s promises in Christ give us room for hope, but not for presumption, for sobriety, but not for despair. Paul says in Philippians: “ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. . . . our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Phil. 3:14, 20)

What then is our calling as Church? First and foremost, we are called to be faithful to Jesus Christ and to the gospel. We are not called to save the world; that is God’s responsibility. We are not to confuse our agenda with God’s. Our mission is simply to proclaim in word and deed the good news which we have heard and come to believe in Christ.

The Church today, and the Episcopal Church is simply typical in this regard, is deeply divided. There are those who feel that our mission is to make the world a just place, to solve the world’s problems, to bring in the kingdom of God. This is the gospel of Liberal Protestantism. But this is bad faith. The Church is not called to bring in the kingdom. This is God’s work. The Church cannot force the world to be Christian. It failed to do so in the Middle Ages when everyone was supposedly Christian. It cannot do so now, when we Christians are rapidly becoming a true minority in our culture.

Other elements of the Church today want to dismiss the world completely as the realm of the devil. There have been those in recent years who have spoken of a culture war, who were convinced that the election of one candidate or another for President would mark the end of America as a Christian nation. But this too is bad faith. American never was a Christian nation. The kingdom of God is not to be identified with the American way. The gospel stands in judgment on the right as it does on the left. We are called neither to save nor to condemn the world, but to be faithful to the gospel.

There are those within our own Church who view each other as the enemies of the gospel. There are some (including some bishops, unfortunately) who seem to believe that the Episcopal Church must embrace the agenda of the politically correct secular left in order to reach the cultured despisers of religion. They seem to believe that by jettisoning anything in the traditional faith that might offend sophisticated unbelievers, they can expand the appeal of the gospel. Whether anything will be left that might be identified as either Christian or gospel is another question. Why unbelievers would want to embrace a Christianity that tells them that they are already doing just fine is not self-evident.

Others (one can understand their point of view) believe that the Episcopal Church has abandoned its claim to be Christian. They point to the events of the most recent General Convention, and seem to worry that if the Episcopal Church disappears as a viable entity, God will somehow be at a complete loss as to how to save the world.

For four hundred years now, the Western Church has been trying to get over its universal dominion during the Middle Ages. In the United States, this problem has been compounded by the continuing influence of Puritanism in our culture. If the Church is finally losing its influence and we can no longer force the world to march to our agenda, this may be a good thing. We can now be content simply to be Christians, to be faithful to what has been handed down to us, to trust God to bring about his kingdom in his own time and his own way.

In this respect, we can perhaps learn something from the Jews. For this is what they have had to do for their entire history. They have always known what it meant to be a minority group within a dominant and hostile culture. They have been content to be faithful to the Law, to believe in the One God who made his covenant with Moses and the Hebrew people. We must now learn to be content to wait on the God who has fulfilled his promises to Moses through his Son Jesus Christ. And although it may be a difficult lesson, we must learn that the Church is upheld not by us, but by God. In the words of Martin Luther:

It is not we who can sustain the Church, nor was it our forefathers, nor will it be our descendants. It was and is and will be the One who says: “ I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” . . . As it says in Hebrews: “ Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and forever.” And in Revelation: “ Who was, and is, and is to come.” Truly he is that One, and none other is or can be.

For you and I were not alive thousands of years ago, but the Church was preserved without us, and it was done by the One of whom it says, “ who was,” and “ yesterday.”

Again, we do not do it in our lifetime, for the Church is not upheld by us. . . . For us, the Church would perish before our very eyes, and we with it . . . were it not for that other Man who manifestly upholds the Church and us. . . . we must then give ourselves to the One of whom it is said, “ Who is” and “ Today.”

Again, we can do nothing to sustain the Church when we are dead. But he will do it of whom it is said, “ Who will come” and “ forever.”

. . . May Christ our dear God and the Bishop of our souls, which he he has brought with his own precious blood, sustain his little flock by the might of his own Word, that it may increase and grow in grace and knowledge and faith in him. May he comfort and strengthen it, that it may be firm and steadfast against all the crafts and assaults of Satan and this wicked world, and may he hear its hearty groaning and anxious waiting and longing for the joyful day of his glorious and blessed coming and appearing. . . . And may there come finally the revelation of the glorious liberty and blessedness of the Church of God, for which they wait and hope in patience. To which all those who love the appearing of Christ our life will say from the heart, Amen, Amen.