Sing a Love Song
Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-46
St. Andrews
Scots Memorial Church October 5, 2014
“Blood soaked fields will never be fertile
and blood reforms will never bear fruit.”
Archbishop Oscar Romero
At the end of the ceasefire I escaped
for a few days to the lovely island of Crete. It was a difficult summer for
everyone with violence erupting everywhere even outside my home in Wadi Joz. I
needed a break so I did what I know how to do to take care of myself. I headed
to the blue ink waters of the Aegean Sea and the turquoise waters of the Mediterrean.
I swam day and night and took excursions around the island to various sites. On
one of these long bus rides we passed a beautiful vineyard with the sunlight
hitting the vines in such a lovely way---all was green. The vineyard didn’t
look like any vineyards I had seen before in Palestine and then I winced and
remembered why. This land was not occupied. The farmers had plenty of water and
no worries about angry settlers coming to destroy their crops or soldiers
coming to destroy the trees to declare the land state property. I started to
cry as I looked at the beautiful trees which would soon be harvested for grape
juice or wine. I wept quietly for my friends at Tent of Nations who lost 1,500
fruit trees this spring one early morning when the soldiers came and bulldozed
them into the ground. These were mature fruit bearing trees like these vines
outside my window. They were trees that had been cultivated---pruned and weeded
so they could produce the largest crop.
So why am I telling you this dear ones?
Because it has everything to do with these lectionary harvest texts from the
prophet Isaiah and the Gospel writer Matthew.
Let
me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard;
I’ll
sing a ballad to the one I love
A
love ballad about his vineyard…
God is the beloved. The call to
prophetic action is a love song about the vineyard. We are not the owners but
the workers. But how can we sing if we have desecrated the vineyard through
neglect or greed or allowed the poisonous weeds of violence to take over?
A well kept vineyard has been cleared of
stones and can be found on terraces to maximize water for irrigation. There is
usually a hedge to keep out animals and a watchtower for the farmer to rest and
keep watch for other incursions. Isaiah’s description fits perfectly the
vineyards I saw from my bus window and the one’s I have seen up close in the
West Bank in places like Battir. And unfortunately his description of what is
happening to the vineyards now in Palestine is also true. The fields are dripping
in blood. “The vineyard of the Lord
expected righteousness but heard only the cries of injustice… or as it is
translated in the Message, “He looked for
a crop of justice and saw them murdering each other. He looked for a harvest of
righteousness and heard only the moans of his victims.”
Some read Isaiah literally and say
Israel is the vineyard who is now being assessed by God, the landowner, for
grinding the face of the poor and crushing the people with greed. Others say no,
the land is God’s and we are all but tenants on it and we are very bad tenants
because we exploit the land and the workers. Either way, the grapes harvested
are wild which means they are un-useable and not what God was expecting not
what God demands.
Verse 8 is not part of our lectionary
but it is necessary for our understanding, “Ah, you who join house to house,
who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are
left to live alone in the midst of this land!”
Greed, taking more than you need, taking
what is not yours, adding fields to your fields until there is only room for
you and no-one else. Church, isn’t this what is going on here today or out in
Daher’s Vineyard? Isn’t this what the uprooting of 1,500 trees is about?
And it is happening not just with
vineyards but olive groves too. And unfortunately now as we approach the time
to begin the harvest we will witness or hear about carefully cultivated trees
being uprooted or burned so as a way to destroy a farmer’s livelihood, as a way
to “join field to field.”
This
stealing of land in Matthew’s parable about the reign of God to come speaks
back to Isaiah’s vision of the vineyard and describes another form of
exploitation. Many preachers try to avoid this text as it seems to be condoning
violence. The Biblical headings also steer us to focus on the wicked tenants
instead of the absentee landlord adding to the confusion.
It
is helpful I think to remember that these parables are about what the kingdom
or kin-dom of heaven should look like. And they are directed to the rulers or those who have power
as a stern warning for them to change their exploitive behavior or else. The
function of the parable then is to educate the followers but also to issue a
strong warning or reprimand to those in power, in this case the Pharisees who
are listening to Jesus.
To understand the parable better it’s helpful to know a little about the socio-economic political landscape of the day. The first thing to know is that wealthy landowners commonly converted land into vineyards because grapes could be processed into wine, which then could be exported as a commodity. Vineyards also took four years before the vines were mature enough to produce grapes which meant that you had to be wealthy enough to be able to wait for your profit. It meant land was purchased that did not provide sustenance. For the tenant it meant you could not feed your family from your crops like you used to. On top these landowners also often acquired their land by dispossessing the peasants. They got the land often on the cheap because the farmers often had trouble paying the high Roman taxes or Temple tithes. Thus, the commercialization of agriculture, the selling of grapes for wine instead of crops for food, along with high taxes and temple tithes led directly to farmers losing their land and becoming tenants of another man’s land, sometimes of even their own previously owned land. Under such incredible stresses and oppression, armed resistance or redemptive violence was seen as a reasonable response or way out. It is what everyone hearing Jesus’ parable was thinking, especially the zealots who were in favor of an armed revolt.
To understand the parable better it’s helpful to know a little about the socio-economic political landscape of the day. The first thing to know is that wealthy landowners commonly converted land into vineyards because grapes could be processed into wine, which then could be exported as a commodity. Vineyards also took four years before the vines were mature enough to produce grapes which meant that you had to be wealthy enough to be able to wait for your profit. It meant land was purchased that did not provide sustenance. For the tenant it meant you could not feed your family from your crops like you used to. On top these landowners also often acquired their land by dispossessing the peasants. They got the land often on the cheap because the farmers often had trouble paying the high Roman taxes or Temple tithes. Thus, the commercialization of agriculture, the selling of grapes for wine instead of crops for food, along with high taxes and temple tithes led directly to farmers losing their land and becoming tenants of another man’s land, sometimes of even their own previously owned land. Under such incredible stresses and oppression, armed resistance or redemptive violence was seen as a reasonable response or way out. It is what everyone hearing Jesus’ parable was thinking, especially the zealots who were in favor of an armed revolt.
In this parable then, it is unfortunate
but understandable why the servants of the vineyard owner would be met with
violence as they were seen as doing his unjust bidding. They were
collaborators in the oppressive system. Do you hear the echoes of this today
Church? Is this not similar to some of the criticism aimed at the Palestinian
Authority? Which master are they serving when their security forces allow or
round up fellow Palestinians? But
what about the son? Some have read the text as a forewarning of Jesus’ death to
come but I agree with the biblical scholar William Herzog that this is not
about Jesus because the absentee landowner is not God. The son is not Jesus
but the ‘unrightful heir’ who too must be removed. Furthermore, the
parable provided Jesus’ hearers with the vicarious experience of revenge
seeking justice because killing off the son would mean that they too might
re-inherit their own land again. Sadly then, they who were disinherited
and the rightful heirs to the land, now have become violent killers in an
effort to deny the inheritance of the land to the illegitimate heir. Church,
are we not witnessing this now still in Palestine? This repetitive cycle of
violence begetting violence over who owns the land?
Herzog says in Parables as Subversive
Speech that our understanding of the parables must be “consistent with and
shed light on Jesus’ murder, his execution as an enemy of the state.” He
reminds us that Jesus was not crucified for telling stories or parables about a
kingdom to come but how to make it come on earth as it is in heaven, to work
for the end of oppression here and now. This is what got him into trouble
with all the authorities, the powerbrokers, the rulers, and the landowners and
this is what got him eventually killed.
The parable, then, is not about God punishing the bad tenants but rather
exposing the structural violence inherent in unjust economic and social
relationships in first century Palestine. The parable provokes us to question
this unjust system and points us in the direction of how to stop it. The answer is cryptically given in the
mention of the cornerstone, the stone that the builders rejected. This stone
which is discarded and flawed, exploited and repressed, will become the
capstone, God’s most precious. Those who do not respond with violence
will become God’s living stones, cornerstones of God’s temple on earth. But redemptive violence is understandable is
it not church? Don’t people have the right to defend themselves? Don’t people
have the right to security? What kind of God would deny us these rights?
At the end of a summer of blood letting
in Gaza, the West Bank, and the mean streets of Jerusalem and as the
Palestinian bid for statehood still hangs in the balance, the question of the possibility of a just peace seems remote. No
wonder the fields and streets are blood soaked.
So
what about us? How is this issue our problem? Are we the new exploitive landowners or the
wicked tenants? Are our countries acting as de facto absentee landlords? And most importantly what is the alternative
to this violent bloodbath in God’s vineyard?
To
stop this cycle, I believe we followers of the subversive and nonviolent Jesus,
have a responsibility to address this structural violence and not just condemn
the violence it ignites. For example, we don’t get entangled in arguments about
who started it or who broke the ceasefire but we set ourselves about undoing
and challenging the structures---laws and practices that maintain the
inequality, the unjust systems that allow land confiscation and destruction of
people’s homes and properties. We put a spike in the wheel of injustice as
Bonhoeffer says.
We begin by standing with the precious
ones, the vulnerable ones, the rejected cornerstone, just as God and Jesus
did. We seek their freedom like it was our own because it is. We are all
one body in Christ.
Our charge is to put an end to this
cycle of violence by protecting and becoming God’s living stone, cornerstones
in God’s living temple.
We cannot sing a love ballad in God’s
vineyard if we don’t try to address the fundamental issues of socio-economic
injustices that are leading to these blood soaked fields and defiled vineyards.
Our Beloved is waiting for our love song, waiting for our delicious grapes so
that all will be able to have life abundantly. Amen.
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