Judgment and Love

The parable Jesus told about a landowner who planted a vineyard and then leased it out to tenants (Mt. 21:33-46) appears to be about judgment.  I have begun to question that. 

The landowner planted a fine vineyard.  He put a fence around it, dug a wine press, and built a watchtower.  Then he leased it to tenants.  When the time of the harvest came, he sent his slaves to collect the produce of the vineyard as rent.  But the tenants killed the slaves and did not send the produce.  He sent more slaves.  The same result.  Finally, the landowner sent his son to collect the produce.  He also was killed.  Jesus asked his hearers what would be the natural result of this sort of behavior.  They replied, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give them the produce at the harvest time.”  Sounds like judgment to me. 

There is another story in the Bible about just such a vineyard, and it happens to be one of this week’s options for an Old Testament reading (Isa. 5:1-7).  The parallel is uncanny.  It is about another landowner who planted a vineyard.  He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines.  He built a watchtower in the midst of it.  He hewed out a vine vat in it.  Still, despite all the effort, it yielded inferior grapes.  And then Isaiah goes on to pronounce judgment on the vineyard, the removal of its hedge, the breaking down of its wall, its trampling down, its wasting away.  It would sound like judgment were it not for the way Isaiah begins his story:  “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.” 

It is a song of love and a broken heart more than it is a prophecy of judgment.  It is a song of God’s wooing of the people as if a landowner tending the most beloved and cared for of vineyards even if it ends in disappointment.

Perhaps Jesus’ parable bears looking at again in light of the love song that its original hearers would have had in mind when Jesus told it to begin with.  Immediately after the answer that the tenants will no doubt be put to a miserable death, Jesus quotes Psalm 118 with reference to the son of the landowner who had been killed in the story and no doubt with reference to his own imminent death.  “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”  And then he goes on to refer to that stone again in the very next verse after our reading for this week ends.  It is this.  “The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”  Sounds like judgment, but is it really?

If we take the rejected cornerstone as a metaphor for Jesus, Jesus is not judgment.  Jesus is love.  Jesus came, he said, not to judge the world but that the world might live.  In Jesus, we are not broken by judgment.  We are broken by love.  And over and over, when we fall on the rock solid love of Jesus, what is broken are our own hearts.  What is crushed is not our spirits or our lives but our hardness of heart.  It takes the rock solid cornerstone to break the stone cold hardness of our souls.  If there is judgment in this parable that Jesus told, and in the love song that Isaiah sung, it is the judgment of love, which is perhaps the hardest judgment of all to face, and also the softest.

Peace,

Intentions

Jesus tells a little parable in this week’s gospel reading, Matthew 21:23-32, that rings true to me as the father of two sons.  I doubt it would be different if I were the father of two daughters.  At any rate, Jesus’ choice to make the characters boys hits home.

A father told his sons to go and work in the vineyard.  The first defied him, but later changed his mind and went.  His intentions were not good, at least at first.  The second complied, but then did not go.  We do not know whether he, like his older brother, also changed his mind, or whether he deceived his father from the beginning, so we can’t be sure what his intentions were.  I don’t think Jesus cared which it was.  It’s because the only thing we can be sure of is behavior. 

The point for the father was the working in the vineyard, and not what was in the heads of his two sons.  As a dad who has needed more than once desperately to get some yard work done, this also makes sense to me.  There is no indication that he held the older son’s defiance against him, which speaking as a father, I know is hard to do, but in the end, getting the work done matters more.  The point is the eventual behavior—that the boy went and worked in the vineyard.

Likewise, there is no indication that the father cared whether the younger son lied or changed his mind, only that he did not go and work in the vineyard.  Maybe that’s because fathers would have time for little else if they got bent out of shape every time they got lied to.  What matters, once again, is the behavior and not that the younger son’s intentions either to go (in which case he just changed his mind) or not to go from the very beginning (in which case he was lying).  What matters is his behavior, or lack thereof. 

There are other occasions for dealing with the relational consequences of not telling the truth.  For now, the point is that behavior is what matters.  Intentions, for good or for ill, are not nearly so important.

Peace,

The Test of Freedom

After the Hebrew people were liberated from slavery in Egypt, after they crossed safely through the Red Sea and escaped Pharaoh’s army, after all the ways God had cared for them, there came a time when they grew weary of it all and longed for the days before their liberation.

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.  The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”  (Ex. 16:2-3)

The story of the Exodus is one of the world’s great stories of liberation.  Liberation, though, no matter how marvelous it may be, is still change.  And change is hard.  Liberation is particularly hard.  It means taking responsibility.  It means being at risk.  It means paying a price.  Freedom does not exist without cost, and the cost of freedom in ongoing.   The temptation as old as humanity itself is to trade freedom for slavery in order to avoid paying the price.

In the story from Exodus, God provided manna for the people to eat, but there was more to God’s provision of bread than met the eye.  Doing so was not simply a gift for the hungry people. Nor was it just a way to get them to stop their complaining.  It was a test.

“I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.  In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not.”  (v.4) 

I’ve never noticed that detail before, that manna from heaven was not only a gift; it was a test.  Liberation from slavery and deliverance from Pharaoh were not only given to the Hebrew people by God; they were a test. 

Freedom is a test—a test to see what we will do with it.  So what will we?  Are we up to the responsibility? The risk?  The price?  God makes great promises.  Even promises must be accepted.  Big promises must be acted upon.

Peace,

Exodus: Life and Death

The Exodus from Egypt.  It may be a pretty central story to the story of God as told in the Bible, but it is a pretty disturbing story nonetheless.  It is not only the story of the deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery.  It is also the story of the destruction of Egypt.

Last week’s lesson (Ex. 12:1-14) was about the Passover, surely a central theme not only of the Jewish people, but of the Christian.  It is the beginning of the story of deliverance.  It contains the instructions for remembrance, remembrance in a deep sense, remembrance in a sacramental sense that makes the recalling of the great event of the past real and experienced in the present.  It is the story of the Seder.  It becomes the story of the Eucharist.

But even last week, the coming of deliverance was intertwined with death and destruction.  On the night God passed over the houses marked with the blood of an unblemished lamb, God also took the lives of all the firstborn of Egypt, animals and humans alike.  As the Hebrew people prepared for their liberation, plagues descended not only upon the house of Pharaoh, but on the houses of all Egyptians. 

This week’s lesson (Ex. 14:19-31) is similar.  The waters were parted and the Hebrew people walked through on dry ground.  The waters were rejoined and the army of Egypt was drowned.  Not a single person survived. 

It paints a picture of God that is at one and the same time marvelous and terrifying, hopeful and vengeful, life-giving and death-dealing.  It is a dramatic story.  It is a disturbing picture. 

I admit that I do not know quite what to do with that.  I cannot quite bring myself to see God in precisely the way described in Exodus.  Perhaps, I fear, that is because I have an easier time looking through the eyes of the Egyptians than I do through those of the Hebrews, an easier time identifying with the oppressor than I do, the oppressed.

And while I cannot quite bring myself to see God taking the firstborn of the children of the Egyptians nor calling the water back to cover and drown such a multitude in the Red Sea, I can recognize that my own view of oppression, wherever it is found, and my response to it, puts me squarely on God’s side or its opposite.  Life is in one.  Death pervades the other.  The story of the Exodus says this in quite a dramatic way, even a horrifying way.  Still, it gets at something important.  Whether we walk through the sea on dry ground or are drowned in the chaos may have less to do with God’s vengeance and much more to do with how we respond to oppression.

Peace,

Community Property

The earliest beginnings of the Christian community experienced conflict among believers.  Jesus himself provided for it.  “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.  But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.  If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  Sin even by one believer against another, disappointing though it is, is not new. 

Here is what is new.  Sin by one member of the community against another is not a matter just between them.  Sin within the community may not surprise us.  What may is that “That’s none of my business” has no place within the community.  We’re in this together.

Sin by one against another weakens not only those two and the relationship between them, but the whole. The Christian community is only as strong as the weakest relationship within it. 

Jesus also said, “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  What I think it means is that we either all go into heaven together bound by our conflicts or we all go into heaven together liberated from them.  I’m afraid that sin in the kingdom of heaven is community property.  I’m encouraged, however, that so is righteousness.

Peace,

Survival, Growth, and the Gospel

One of the things that concerns me most about the life of the Church right now is its anxious concern for survival.  That almost always means institutional survival, by the way.  For one thing, I don’t think you could kill the institutional church if you tried.  The truth is that it’s just too strong and its resources too vast.  You can, though, subvert its reason for being.  You can lead it astray.  You can make it an instrument of something far removed from the Gospel of Love.  All those have been done many times over the 2,000 years of its life. 

But you can’t kill it.  To tell you the truth, I’m not always sure that’s completely good news.  And here’s why.

Survival is not a value of the Gospel.  Jesus said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  (Mt. 16:25)  Salvation can only be had by those who can die.  Life can only be had at the risk of losing it.  The way of life is the way of the cross, and that leaves no room for survival.  This is slightly off the point, but there is an ancient heresy called Docetism, which would say that Jesus, because he was not truly human, could not have died on the cross.  If so, that would mean there is no hope for salvation.  Jesus lives, but Jesus lives precisely because Jesus did not survive.  And that’s how we live, too, at least truly live, as individuals, as a community, and one hopes, as an institution.

We spend a lot of time as the Church these days anxiously worrying about our survival.  Our numbers are dropping.  Our collections are shrinking.  We don’t have the influence we once did.  We are losing our place of power, privilege, and prestige.  And so we come up with a lot of plans to grow, to get more people in the pews, and to increase giving.  We’re trying to hang on, to survive. 

Every plan or strategy to grow born out of our survival anxiety, every single one, is doomed to failure because it cannot be blessed by God.  It may succeed for a little while, but if it does, it will be one of those moments, once again, where the church has lost its way. 

The Church can only be itself when it risks its life to pick up its cross, which is a way of saying when it carries out the ministry of Jesus, is it not?  The church can only be itself when it risks its life to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, cure the sick, restore sight to the blind, and free the oppressed.  Those may not, we must admit, be prudent growth strategies, especially when the culture around us is quite invested in keeping the poor poor (as are our own institutional interests).  They are, though, a very sound plan to be who we are, baptized, as we have been, into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 

The Church in its first four centuries grew, not dramatically as we sometimes like to imagine, but slowly, steadily and consistently.  It grew, I suspect, because it was true to itself, to what Christ had made it to be, not because it had a strategy but because it lived the Gospel.  It grew, I suspect, because it cared not for its own survival, which strangely enough, is inherently attractive.  The second century Christian apologist Tertullian said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”  I think it is true on many levels.  The pre-Constantinian Church had a plan for life, not survival.  It had a commitment to faith, not growth.  It isn’t that growth is a bad thing.  It is the inevitable fruit of the Church’s life.  But it is endangered by the Church’s survival. 

The post-Constantinian Church grew, too, by the way, maybe even more dramatically.  But it grew because it allied itself to power and forced not a few conversions at the point of the sword and became attractive as a way to partner with the culture rather than as a witness to the resurrection to it.  It shifted its focus from the reign of God’s imminent arrival to something distant and other worldly and far less threatening to its own survival.  It was, one must admit, an effective growth strategy. 

But Jesus asked, “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?  Or what will they give in return for their life?” (v. 26)  It’s a good question.  And it worries me about what this means for an institution that cannot be killed.  We’ve got to at least be willing for it to die in order for it to have any chance at life at all. 

Now is the time to ask ourselves if the fundamental reason we are in decline is that paradoxically because we have given up our willingness to die, without which there can be no life at all.  And if that’s the case, we can only hope our desire to survive will kill us.

Peace,

The Rock on Which It is All Built

[Jesus] said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”  Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.  And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Mt. 16:15-18)

There are two general ways to interpret this exchange.  One is what I call the institutional interpretation, that Jesus was naming Peter personally and his successors as the rock on which the church was to be built far into the future.  The only problem with that, though, is that Jesus did not seem to have expected there to be any need for a church to be built.  He seemed instead to expect the imminent end of the world as we know it.  Indeed, he once proclaimed, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”  (That’s next week’s Gospel.)  But while Jesus was planning for the immediate coming of the reign of God, the church is planning on the long haul. This is the interpretation of institutional power.

An alternative line of interpretation is that this is somehow about Peter’s individual faith as the rock against which the powers of hell shall not prevail.  The problem with that is that Peter’s faith was, shall we say, not so rock solid.  It is only three verses after the passage for today ends that Jesus says to Peter, “Get behind me Satan!  You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  (That’s next week’s Gospel, too.) 

And it gets worse.  On the night before Jesus’ death, it was of course Peter who denied him.  At the foot of the cross, Peter was not to be found.  On the morning of the  Resurrection, Peter was down the list in the order of those to whom the good news was announced.  By any stretch of the imagination, Peter was not the most solid of foundations for much of anything. 

So what did Jesus mean, then, if the rock on which everything stands is neither the institution that the church has become or Peter’s individual faith.  If it is not Peter the individual or church the institution, might there be something in between those two extremes?  Might it be the church in the true meaning of the underlying Greek word, ekklesia, the community of those called out.  Is it not the community, with as little institutional trappings as possible, that is the rock on which Jesus builds?  Not the individual.  Not the institution.  The community. 

Community is the antidote to individualism, the sin so rampant in the western world of which we are a part.  Community glorifies not the isolated individual but the virtue of mutual submission, something the world has a hard time understanding.  Community is also the antidote to what is institutional.  The community, after all, is the only reason the institution exists, and the community reminds us of what is supposed to serve what. 

That, I suggest is the rock that the gates of Hades will not prevail against.

Peace,