This in a way is the follow up to last month's Stebbing and Lindsell double header, ending as it does on the matter of my CLP project, which is why ther are differnt endings for each church.
On Wednesday evening at Stebbing, when we as a deanery welcomed Cilla in her new role as deanery priest, Bishop Christopher made the important point that God does not send us out to where he is not going, or instead of him, but he sends us out to proclaim his kingdom and his gospel – the heart of which is of course the fact that he is coming in power. God is not an absentee landlord; that’s what the incarnation is about – God became one of us to redeem us and transform our lives.
Absentee landlords were not popular in Palestine; many of Jesus' hearers will have been on the tenants' side, when he told this parable, at least until the murders start. In a society where people believed there was only a fixed amount of wealth, one person's wealth was another one's loss. The absentee landlord was making his wealth out of the labour of those who owned no land.
That’s a big difference for us; today I don’t think we do live as if there is a fixed amount of wealth; instead we live as if even the sky is not the limit to how much money and consequently how much material wealth – stuff – we can obtain for ourselves. But we do have absentee landlords of many kinds, and some of them I guess at the moment are finding their property devaluing pretty fast.
But we need to remember that Matthew makes no criticism of the people, the generators of the fruit, but only of those who govern them, the tenant farmers - a big challenge, then, to the prevailing attitude, and the opposite way round to the last vineyard parable we looked at a couple of weeks back from Matthew chapter 20. The main difference is the absentee landlord; the interpretation of this element in the parable seems to suggest that the Jewish people are in a new kind of captivity, held away from God. God's anger does not respond by destroying them, but by wrenching them away from their rulers and putting them in new hands.
By using this image to make the reference to Israel and its leaders implied by the 'vineyard' image, common in the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was creating unsettling juxtapositions. Was God understood to have been an absentee landlord? Perhaps people did feel God had abandoned Israel to its fate under the tyranny of Rome. If so, in whose hands had it been left? Are these tenants the Jewish leaders or Roman collaborators or both? Perhaps that dichotomy is reflected in the reality that both Pilate and Herod ended up bowing to pressure and condemning Jesus to death.
Matthew uses this parable to drive home again the growing opposition in his day between the emerging Jewish leadership and the Christian movement. God is the landowner, the slaves are the prophets and the son is Jesus. And after the destruction of Jerusalem, God's project has been put in new hands: the new people of God who comprise the Church. Interestingly Paul uses a vineyard theme in the letter to the Romans when he writes of the gentiles being grafted in to the plant that he sees Israel as.
How does this fit with the passage from Philippians? Perhaps the key is Paul's recognition that, despite having been in his pre-Christian past a member of the Pharisaic group that leads popular Judaism, he has nothing worth relying on other than Christ. He is a tenant who did not throw out the son, but welcomed him.
In Philippians 3.4b-14, Paul is engaged in argument with those who want the nascent Church to be more Jewish in its practice and observance, and uses the rhetorical device of pointing out that he himself is as Jewish as they come. The things he had no choice over – his circumcision, his language, his tribe, his ancestry – make him fully authentic. The choices he made – to become a Pharisee, to be zealous about the law, to oppose the early Jesus movement – showed his commitment to Judaism. No one could accuse him of special pleading, so his argument deserves a hearing.
In reality, however, all these things of which he has every right to be proud he regards as worthless. What he then goes on to say has been variously interpreted. He clearly suggests that the 'prize' – the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus – is still ahead of him. He hasn't yet reached his goal. He still needs to 'know' Christ by becoming like him in his death. But already he is content that he doesn't have to establish his own righteousness, because he has a righteousness that comes from God and is based on faith. These verses don't fit any of the neat theological schemes Christians are wont to adopt, but they do fit the common experience of Christian believers, that our salvation is both 'now' and 'not yet'.
LINDSELL I did say we would be taking our little questionnaires a little further, and this is the theme of that further work; where are we heading, what is our purpose and goal. I will take names of 4 or 5 people after the service today that would be willing to help me with this project.
STEBBING You may remember last month I asked you to consider some questions about your church; how you felt most blessed and what you hoped for in the future. Some of you shared with me after the service and that was a great blessing.
So for now let us rejoice that we, the church, are the people that God has entrusted his vineyard to, and let us reach out to him for the power, the grace and the love with which we can bear fruit. Let us remember that the vineyard is not to be identified with the church, but with God’s Kingdom, his world in the world.
