- Isaiah 5:1-7
- Psalm 80:7-15
- Philippians 3:4b-14
- Matthew 21: 33-46
To be perfectly honest with you, I find this particular combination of scriptures to be a bit disturbing, more from the Lutheran way of combining them than from the scriptures themselves. The gospel reading, the psalm and the prophet’s message here all contain the same imagery: a vineyard which has been carefully and professionally planted to produce fine wine, but which provides no such joy for its owner. Isaiah blames the vines themselves: they were carefully chosen, and they got such good care, so why can’t they provide a decent tasting crop rather than bitter wild grapes? The psalmist takes things from the vines’ perspective and sings out his blues: “We were growing so strong and massive! Why did the vineyard keeper all of the sudden decide to let us go to waste?” Jesus’ parable about this disappointing vineyard blames the vines not so much as their keepers, implying something about how the spiritual leaders of the Jews were going to put him to death and God was going to be seriously pissed with them about this! In all three of these cases the vineyard is Israel or the Jewish people, and because of the disappointment they bring to God by providing him with none of the drunken joy of a good wine, God is going make them regret this failure! Then we come to the epistle with Paul telling his readers that all of the merits he had from being an excellent Jew he counted as loss, implying that he was switching teams so as to be among those God would be giving over “his vineyard” to instead of the Jews.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how a virulently anti-Semitic sermon could be constructed on the basis of this combination of scripture passages, blaming the Jews for all of their own problems and a whole lot more. And as we approach the 500th anniversary of Luther starting his protest against the abuses of the medieval Catholic Church, it is important to remember that for all Luther’s heroic qualities he also had some majorly screwed up personal issues, one of which was a tendency to preach such sermons. Of course we can hope and try to believe that over the last 500 years, and over the last 70 years in particular, Protestant churches may have outgrown the urge to attack Judaism from the pulpit –– and maybe someday they will also outgrow the urge to attack Muslims from the pulpit –– but I’m not willing to wager on it in the former case, on that I’m not holding my breath waiting to see the latter happen.
My first point first point here then, as a preface to talking about these passages themselves, is that using scriptures to justify attacking Jews –– or for other hateful practices like keeping slaves, treating women as men’s rightful property, or committing genocide –– is what the Bible itself is talking about regarding “twisting scriptures to our own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). Let’s avoid that temptation.
So with that out of the way, what do these passages have to say to us today? Let’s start with the irony of Israel coming to be compared with a vineyard to begin with.
The early Israelites were a nomadic shepherd people, and they considered that to be a holier way of life, to wander with their flocks, than to be rooted in place attending to vineyards and the like. This was a significant cultural difference between the Hebrews and the Egyptians from the moment Joseph moved his family into his adopted homeland in Egypt (Genesis 46:34), and we actually see this tension reflected all the way back in the story of Cain and Abel: God liked Abel’s lamb offering more than Cain’s fruit offering (Genesis 4:4-5), so JHWH was the sort of deity who favored shepherds over fruit farmers. And then there was the Nazarite vow system in Numbers 6, where to be specially dedicated to the God for a particular time a man would go without haircuts and shaves, and without consuming anything related to grapes, until he went through the prescribed concluding ritual at the tabernacle or temple. John the Baptist seems to have been observing some variation on this vow: not touching wine and living off of the land to extreme down by the Jordan River.
So with all this in mind, why did these biblical writers choose grape vines of all things as the metaphor for Israel?
Let me get off on a side issue for just a moment here, relating to grapes and wine: around the time that the Old Testament canon was closing there was this Greek philosopher named Aristotle, whom the Catholic Church came to accept in the Middle Ages as a source of great wisdom, even though it later turned out that Aristotle was scientifically wrong about all kinds of things. Anyway, when it comes to leading a good, decent moral life, Aristotle’s main book on the subject is called the Nicomachean Ethics, written as a general advice collection for his oldest son, Nicomachus, to live by. The core message of the Nicomachean Ethics is that what you most want to do is look for lasting satisfaction in life –– which may or may not be the same thing as “happiness” though many translators use that word to describe Aristotle’s goal in English –– and the most important principle to focus on in order to achieve that lasting satisfaction is balance. (Hang on, I’m coming to the point here.)
What does he mean by balance? Well, to start with a simple example, Aristotle believed that everyone needs to enjoy food as part of living a happy life. There is a very definite form of satisfaction that comes with the pleasure of eating, and Aristotle firmly believed that you cannot be a happy person without that. That’s easy enough to agree with him on. An anorectic cannot be considered a happy person. But at the same time, someone who takes eating to extremes –– the obese glutton –– cannot be considered a happy person either. Everyone needs to enjoy their food, but they need to find the balanced amount of such enjoyment which is suitable for them at any given stage in life in order to be a properly happy person.
The same principle applies to many other things. And perhaps by now you’ve guessed where I’m going with this: Aristotle told is son that, beside food, there are at least two other things which are necessary in order to lead a happy life, but which also must be appreciated in balance and moderation: wine and sex. From Aristotle’s perspective people who live entirely without either of those cannot be happy people, but people who let either of those dominate their lives likewise cannot be happy people.
I’m not going to take a stand one way or the other on the question of whether Aristotle was right about those last two matters; I’m just going to say that I strongly believe God has nothing against happiness, including the kind that comes from these three things Aristotle doesn’t believe any person should live entirely without. I further believe that these things should not be taken as the focus of what counts as godliness: John the Baptist lived a life of complete self-deprivation, and that certainly didn’t make him any less godly; whether that made his life less satisfying is harder to say. Jesus “came eating and drinking” (Matthew 11:19, Luke 7:34), and that certainly didn’t make him any less godly! God has nothing against happiness, even if many of those who claim to represent him are some of the most virulently anti-happiness campaigners you could ever imagine.
Groucho Marx tells the story of meeting a Catholic priest in Canada one time. The priest asked to shake his hand, and said, “I want to thank you for all the happiness you have brought into the world.” Groucho shook his hand and replied, “And I would like to thank you for all of the happiness that you have taken out of this world.”
How does that happen? I believe it has to do with a misinterpretation of the general principle that I mentioned in closing last time: the Gospel message is intended to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Or to quote from the president’s well written speech following the mass-killing in Las Vegas this month, “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit [Psalm 34:18]. We seek comfort in those words, for we know that God lives in the hearts of those who grieve.”
As important as this is though, many people get it flipped around the wrong direction: they make themselves and other more miserable on purpose, thinking that doing so will bring them closer to God as a result. That is completely not the point, and Jesus came “eating and drinking” to prove it to us.
But Jesus also came to show us that attaining a comfy position in life and “being a winner” is not the point in life either. He spent his own life with outcasts and losers on purpose, and he eventually sacrificed his life so we would get that point. We don’t need to be occupied with what magnificent branches our vines have, or what sort of prestigious stock they come from. Psalm 80 makes it abundantly clear that those are not the sort of things God is after. The point is that we are to love God and let ourselves be loved by him.
One of the main points of anything that can be called love is to connect with the other in a way that his joys become part of your joys, and his pains become part of your pains. So how do we apply that to loving God? To start with, a major part of loving God is, in terms of the analogies in the scriptures read here today, giving him access to what would for him be “good wine” –– what he finds satisfying and enjoyable.
So what constitutes “good wine” for God? Hint: it has nothing to do with making ourselves miserable on purpose just to show God that we’re ready to be miserable for him! That would be more like the kind of bitter wild-tasting fruit, or sour grapes, that Isaiah was talking about. Closer to target would be for each of us to have the kind of joy for ourselves that God most intended for us to have: through being fully connected with him and each other; caring about something bigger than ourselves and knowing that we have a role in the greatest power this earth has ever known: God’s kingdom.
In the Gospel of John chapter 15 Jesus flips the whole vineyard analogy, which we’ve seen here in the negative, in a much more positive direction: He is the vine and we are his branches. God’s love flows through him into us, making us fruitful and properly completing our joy. And the completion of this is found in the ways in which we care for and care about one another. The rest is details.
The portion from Philippians 3 that we read today is Paul’s personal application of the core message of the opening verses of Philippians 2: “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind…”
Are we ready to take a chance on loving each other in this sort of way? If not we probably shouldn’t pretend to be followers of Jesus.
I leave it to each of you to meditate on how you believe God would have you apply that in your own lives.
Let us pray.
Dog Collar Dreams 