Vineyards

A sermon preached today at Dovaston on Isaiah 5.1-7 and Matthew 21.33-46

The two readings I’ve used this morning have a certain similarity to them, since they both are about vines and vineyards. But there are important differences too, which we’ll think about as we go along. Vines and vineyards were familiar places to the people of Israel, and the vine in its abundant fruitfulness symbolised not only God’s gifts to his people, not least his gift of the land itself in which they lived, but it also symbolised what God asked of his people - that they were to be as fruitful, as abundantly fruitful as the vine; all their thoughts and actions were to be a thank offering to the Lord who had blessed them so richly and abundantly. And the vine was seen as a sign of sacrifice: vines had to be staked and supported, the branches couldn’t support themselves; so it was seen as choosing not even to support its own branches, but to give everything of itself away.

Our first reading, from Isaiah is a poignant statement of God's loving care for his people. The People of Israel are God's vineyard, we read, and the Lord has tended that vineyard with loving care: he has cleared it of stones, and dug the soil, and planted choice vines in it. After all that care, why then has the vine produced so poorly? And what should I now do? That’s what the Lord asks through his prophet.

When we moved into a new home many years ago, we were delighted to find a well-stocked and nicely cared for back garden, with fruit trees that included the only peach tree I’ve ever had - and it did bear fruit, just a few, but freshly picked peaches from your own tree knock anything you might buy into a cocked hat. Anyway, there was also a vine, which grew and grew and grew. It looked handsome, vine leaves are quite attractive, but it produced not a thing. Probably it wasn’t meant to, and was always supposed to be just ornamental, and it did do its bit to add to the beauty of what was a pretty good garden. But I like grapes, so I was a bit disappointed.

I might have dug up that vine, but I didn’t. I grew quite fond of it, and anyway we weren’t in that house for very long, only three or four summers. But in general, it’s never enough just to look good. Vines are supposed to be fruitful. Think on this: coming to church isn’t being fruitful. Singing hymns, even saying prayers isn’t being fruitful. All these things are essential steps towards being fruitful, but fruitfulness is proved not by what we do on a Sunday, but by what we decide and give and do in the rest of the week, in our off-duty moments, our everyday lives.

Now here’s an interesting thought. God created the Earth and all that moves within it. And there it was, moving and working and blending together very well, each ecosystem finding its own harmony, to use scientific language, each different environment fruitful and productive in its own way, as its own version if you like of the Garden of Eden. Only when people appear on the scene do things start to go wrong. If you’re being picky and Biblically precise, only when the man and the woman eat the fruit that was forbidden to them does it all start to go wrong. And while you could blame it all on the serpent, I think it was always going to happen. God made us with the capacity for independent thought. He made us with the ability to be disobedient.

Since we also read that he made us in his own image and likeness, that’s an interesting thought. You might wonder, why on earth would God want to spoil the harmony and loveliness of what he had made, by adding disobedience into the mix. The answer has to do with love. God could have created automata who would do his every bidding - like a modern production line in a car factory where robots install each component in exactly the same way and can be relied on to get it right all the time every shift.

But we are made in his image: made therefore with the capacity to love, and you can’t programme love. However much you love someone you can’t make them love you back. God makes us with the capacity to respond to his love, but that includes the risk that we won’t.

God wants his world to be filled with peace and love. But for that to happen he accepts the risk of hatred, discord, injustice. He creates us to be fruitful, and in the summary of the law we’re told how to be: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.” Getting back to the image of the vines in the vineyard, God showers us with gifts that should encourage us to bear fruit - by sharing, by caring, by responding to our neighbour in need, by desiring a better world and helping to build it. But what if we just keep those gifts for ourselves? That’s the risk he takes with us.

But if you’re a vine grower and your vines aren’t producing, I guess there does come a point when you have to act, when you have to accept that the vines you’ve got are just taking up space and using resources, without giving anything back. What would you do with your vines, asks the Lord - and what should I do with mine?

Our Gospel reading also ends with a question. Probably the story from Isaiah was in the mind of Jesus when he spoke as he did to the religious leaders; but the story as Jesus tells it isn’t about the vines but about those who tend them, and by the time Jesus finished telling the story, the chief priests and Pharisees knew perfectly well just who it was aimed at: themselves.

Jesus had already told them the parable of the two brothers, one of whom offers to help his father but doesn’t, while the second says he’ll not do it but then changes his mind and does it after all. The religious high-fliers, temple priests and Pharisees, may have looked good and said all the right things, but in the end they were not delivering, they were not doing it.

Now in this parable he takes his accusation against them a step further. He tells them that to further their own ends and looks after their own well feathered nests, they’ve been prepared actively to oppose the will of God.

In Isaiah’s story the people of Israel are the vines; in the story told by Jesus, the tenants who’re supposed to be caring for the vines are the religious leaders: formally designated leaders like the high priests, or self-appointed religious authorities like the party of the Pharisees. Those who have the privilege of caring for the vineyard, have also responsibility towards the owner of the vineyard, to make sure his vines produce a good harvest.

A short aside: I remember some years ago, at rather a low point in my life, going one Sunday to a large and well attended and outwardly very successful church (I won’t say where). I’d not been there before, but I’d heard it was lively, and to begin with I was impressed. But as the worship went on I was becoming uncomfortably aware that no-one from start to finish had said a single word to me. Not even the minister did as I left; he was so happily engaged with conversation elsewhere that he never noticed me as I went past. Maybe I caught them on a bad day; maybe their welcome team was on holiday or laid low by the flu. But maybe, just maybe, this outwardly successful church might have been a little too full of itself, rather than of the Spirit.

As I say, I may have judged them harshly and unfairly. But one sense I get from the parable Jesus told is that the tenants in the vineyard had got a nice little business going there. They got a good living out of it, and they didn’t want the boss disrupting things by wanting his share. So they thrashed and sent away the messengers sent to them (in other words, the prophets). And then the owner sends his son.

Well, we know what happened next. Jesus predicts his own destiny in this parable; and indeed the parable itself may have played its part in provoking some of the opposition that would in time see him taken and tried and sent to be crucified. Jesus asks a question: “How would the owner of a vineyard deal with tenants like that?”

“He’d bring them to a bad end,” reply the priests, and in a sense they’re condemned from their own lips as they say that. Maybe they only realised that later. Jesus went on to speak to them about “the stone the builders rejected, that has become the chief cornerstone.” In the Bible the cornerstone’s often used to describe the relationship between us and God. Nothing we build will last, unless we build on him, as in Psalm 127 - “Unless the Lord build the house, its builders labour in vain. Unless the Lord watch over the city, its watchmen stand guard to no avail.”

So Jesus is telling them: “What you are building you’re building for yourselves, to please yourselves. Unless you choose to build on the foundation God provides, that corner stone you have rejected, you build in vain. You’re just like the rebellious and self-serving tenants.” No wonder they didn’t like to hear it.

The challenge of the parables told by Isaiah and Jesus is one we need to hear too. The Gospels show us that we are both sheep and shepherds (sheep as we hear and obey the shepherd’s voice, shepherds ourselves in the care and leadership we offer one another); and I think we’re also both vines and vine-growers - and as both vines and vine-growers we’ve a responsibility to the one whose vineyard this is. We should be fruitful as vines, not just looking good on a Sunday by Sunday basis, but really delivering on that: by on a daily basis being the servant people God desires us to be, in his image, in the image of the servant-King; and we should be fruitful as vine-growers, loyally encouraging and directing and supporting one another in a ministry we all have a share in, that honours and serves the one who is the giver of all life, and who will in the fullness of time call each one of us to account.