ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

PALM SUNDAY, 2007
Sermon preached at Evensong by the Vicar

Readings Isaiah 5.1-7, Luke 20.9-19

Psalm 51, the "Miserere", which we have just heard in Allegri's breath-taking setting, is one of the seven psalms which the Church calls the "Penitential Psalms".

If you look it up in your Bible rather than in the Prayer Book, you will see that it has a superscription: "For the director of music. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba."

This was probably added by editors to invite us to hear the psalm against the background of David's taking of Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, and the subsequent confrontation between the prophet Nathan and David.

There is a similarity in method between that encounter and the Parable of the Vineyard in Isaiah (and Jesus' reworking of it in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants). After David had taken Bathsheba and had her husband Uriah killed, Nathan tells him the story of the rich man who steals a poor man's favourite lamb in order to feed a visitor. When the king responds in anger and pronounces judgement on the rich man, Nathan says, "You are the man!"

Sometimes prophets and preachers use a sledgehammer,. They confront their hearers directly and bluntly. In the Parable of the Vineyard, as in Nathan's story, the sledgehammer is concealed until the end. The rhetoric is subtle and inviting. It catches the attention of hearers , then it draws them into a process which leads to decision. Like many Gospel parables, the Song of the Vineyard invites the hearers to draw the conclusion. In this case, to pronounce judgement on themselves. Like David in Nathan's story, the hearers become convinced of the logic of the argument. Only then do they recognise that it applies to them.

The Song of the Vineyard is on of the most famous passages in Isaiah. What begins as a love sing ends as a trial scene in which Isaiah, speaking on behalf of God, argues a case before an Israelite audience.

That owner brings charges against his vineyard, as if in court. He asks his hearers to act as judge. He has done everything required to promote growth. In spite of this the vineyard has failed him. The final verse reveals the identity of the characters in the drama. The vineyard is Israel and the owner is the Lord of hosts. The indictment implied in the parable is made explicit:
"He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!"

Here the rhetoric is continued by a clever play on Hebrew words which we miss in English:

sedaqa = righteouness
se aqa = a cry

mispat = justice
mispah = bloodshed

The vineyard has failed in what it was created to be Judah and Israel were created by the Lord, "his pleasant planting", to embody justice and righteousness; but they had instead lived by violence. Justice means equitable relationships within a society grounded in the just will of God and established through honest procedures. When justice fails it is because the economically and politically powerful have taken advantage of the weak. "Righteousness" is that relationship with the Lord from which springs loyalty to the Lord's expectations of justice.

The hearers listen to a parable that leads them to pronounce judgement on an unproductive vineyard. In doing so they pronounce judgement upon themselves. For the vineyard is Israel and its owner is God.

Jesus tells the Parable of the Wicked Tenants to "the people" but "against" the scribes and the chief priests. The parable shows and intensifies the opposition between Jesus and the religious leaders who have just been questioning his authority. It serves as a commentary of the characters and plot of the unfolding narrative of Jesus' death.

The practice of absentee landlords leasing vineyards or olive groves to tenants was common. One such landlord sends a slave to collect his share of the proceeds. After the abuse of not one but three of his servants, Luke lets us listen in on the owner deciding what to do. His decision to send his "beloved son" echoes the reference to Jesus as the "beloved son" at his baptism and "the chosen" at his transfiguration. The allusion is clear. The prophets of God were stoned and killed. John the Baptist, the greatest of the prophets, was rejected and killed. Now it is Jesus who will face death.

Just as in the Song of the Vineyard, which Jesus reworks, the story draws the hearers in and puts a question to them: "What then will the owner of the vineyard do ?" The question reminds the audience that the owner still holds the initiative for determining the end of the story. Jesus invites his audience, which includes the chief priests and scribes, to consider what God will do with them for their failed stewardship over Israel.

"He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others."

The destruction of the wicked tenants and the giving of the vineyard to others predicts the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the passing of leadership from Israel's religious leaders to the church.

The focus then switches from the parable to two responses.

Those who heard it responded with a forceful exclamation, "Heaven forbid"
Then Jesus poses a riddle for the hearers. "What then does this text mean:
"The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone"?
Words we will hear often in the liturgy of Easter.
The stone, which is himself, will judge those who reject it. The religious leaders get the message. They see clearly that they are the target of the story. Do they respond not with penitence like David? No, they plot to silence the voice which condemns them and their stewardship. Their defensive reaction; their refusal to accept their guilt and responsibility for their neglect of the duties God had assigned them, is not untypical of the religious in any age. We can all see in our two parables the condemnation of others who have failed God, but we find it more difficult to see it as our own. We can enter so far into the story, but then refuse to go the whole way.

I began with a psalm set to music, let me finish with a parable painted. The artist Lucas Cranach the Younger worked in Wittenberg, the centre of the Lutheran Reformation. He placed his skills at the service of the Reformation. One of his paintings links the Parable of the Vineyard with the Reformation

Cranach explains the meaning of the Reformation by portraying the medieval clergy and Lutheran Reformers as labouring in the vineyard of the Lord. The vineyard is split down the middle by a hedge. On one side it has withered from neglect and mismanagement by the pope and his clergy. They can be seen at the bottom, trying unsuccessfully to collect their wages from Christ. On the other, the vineyard is flourishing under Lutheran cultivation. The picture is a work of propaganda, obviously one-sided and polemical. It exalts the reformers at the expense of the Roman clergy. Medieval Christianity looks worse than it was; the Reformation more cooperative and successful than it was. There were many contented lay people in medieval Europe, and many dedicated clergy, including not a few who sought the reform of the Church. Reformation Europe contained sickly plants alongside healthy growth, and clergy and reformers who disagreed with one another as stridently as they condemned the Roman church.

The picture ignores the continuity between medieval and Reformation religion. Instead of a solid hedge between the two halves of the vineyard, it would have been more accurate to have paths through the hedge through which the reformers would carry healthy plants from medieval Christianity into the Reformation: the basic doctrine and rituals of the faith from which the reformers derived their knowledge of Christianity in the first place.

Reformers of the Church in every age tend to see the faults of others - and make no mistake, the faults are often real, as they were in late medieval Christianity in which the Papacy had obstinately resisted calls for renewal - but they tend to see these as the failings of others rather than ones in which they share too. They assume the good and true to have begun with them - or at least to have re-appeared after a long absence.

In English Church history, the Methodist Revival undoubtedly met a real spiritual need, but it did tend to exaggerate the shortcomings of the Church of England both then and later when separation had to be justified. Equally, some of our Tractarian forebears were given to over-stressing the decrepit state of the Church of England before they came along to rescue it. There was truth in what both groups of reformers said but it was not the whole truth.

As we stand together as Christians in this Holy Week, at the foot of the cross, we come as those who all in different ways, deny and betray. We are drawn into the story of the passion which judges and saves us all. We are all people who are guilty of neglect of the Lord's call to be and tend his vineyard. We all fail to live in his righteousness and peace. We all need to say our Miserere.