Homilies for Lent

Second Sunday in Lent

12 March 2006

Chaplaincy of St. George’s

Orange City, Iowa

Self-Denial

“I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!” Thus St. Paul’s exhaltant exclamation in his letter to the Romans. But then what about Jesus’ own harsh words here in Mark’s Gospel? It sounds as though there is something that can separate us from the Love of God in Christ: “Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” If you’re ashamed of God, well then, tit-for tat, he’ll be ashamed of you, and you’re done for!

Should we hear these awful words as threatening ultimate rejection, condemnation, damnation? I don’t think we can. You can be ashamed only of someone you recognize as your own, someone who, for better or—in this case—for worse, you identify with. I can be ashamed of my friends and relations, but not of strangers. I can be ashamed of Northwestern or of the United States, but not of Dordt or Brazil. If Jesus is ashamed of you, then—even then—he acknowledges you as his, though obviously not in the way you would want to be owned by him.

Jesus has someone specific in mind. It’s Peter who has demonstrated that he is ashamed of Jesus. It’s Peter who has made Jesus ashamed of him. Today’s lesson immediately follows Jesus asking the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” The question elicits Peter’s bold response, “You are the Christ!”, a messianic confession that in turn elicits an unexpected response: Jesus tells Peter to keep quiet about him. And, as we move into the lesson for today, Jesus starts to portray himself as the complete opposite of the victorious messiah Peter wants him to be, warning that he will suffer, be rejected, and be killed by the authorities. He’s going to wind up like all the other would-be messiahs of Israel who have gone before, discredited, destroyed, forgotten, their humiliated disciples scattered. Peter, who regards himself as Jesus’ confidante and advisor, is appalled. Up to this point in the Marcan narrative, everything Jesus has done has given his entourage reason to be proud of him, and to take pride in being with him. Jesus has shown up the scribes, teaching in the synagogues with the authority they lack. He’s given the full-of-themselves Pharisees fits, flouting their purity codes and hanging out with the common people and lowlifes they despise. And he’s exercised powers that can come only from God, healing the sick, casting out demons, feeding the crowds, calming the waves, even raising the dead. Jesus has power and authority, and he’s sharing it with his disciples, sending them out to heal and preach in his name.

But now Jesus is throwing it all away. He’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Peter thinks it’s his place to pull Jesus aside to tell him to can it. He’s not living up to his potential as Messiah. He’s embarrassing himself and his supporters. I’m imagining Karl Rove’s reaction to George W. Bush calling a press conference to announce he expects he’ll lose the next election by a landslide, and be indicted and impeached.

Peter passionately wants to be in on the deliverance of Israel; he wants the people of God vindicated and their enemies trounced, and for him Jesus is the means to this end. He has called Jesus the Christ, but he’s clueless; he doesn’t know who Jesus is. Jesus forces him to look into the abyss that separates his way from God’s way, the way of triumph from the way of the Cross, and Peter angrily rebukes him; he’s ashamed of Jesus’ foolishness, his weakness.

It is precisely this that Jesus targets with the famous words, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me!” Jesus calls Peter—and the rest of us—to self-denial, but it’s crucial that we do not mistake this for a platitudinous recommendation of altruism, or of some sort of quasi-Buddhist renunciation of the ego. What’s at stake is whether we forsake our own judgment, the common sense self-preservation that invariably latches on to power, propriety, plausibility and runs like

hell away from folly, weakness, contamination, and death, and against all odds accept the foolishness of God in Christ, the shameful way of the Cross.

Beginning with Peter behaving like an ass here in Mark’s account, there’s a long sad history of people ashamed of the real God who makes himself known in the real Jesus, and putting him to shame by insisting on their own way, devising, in the name of the crucified God, a religion on good terms with the powerful, arrogant in its certainty, its rules of purity, its exclusion, condemnation, moralizing respectability, and cold inhumanity.

When I was an undergraduate, a fellow student, exasperated about something or other that Christians were doing in the name of Christ, exclaimed, “If Jesus saw this, he’d turn over in his grave!” The assertion of course suggests a less than fully internalized belief in Jesus’ resurrection, but it’s easy to sympathize with the sentiment. Which is to say that it’s easy to see how other would-be followers of Jesus get up to things that must make Jesus ashamed of them. It’s probably a bit too easy. I find that other people’s sin is always so much more important and interesting than my own. Yet the exercise fitting for this Lenten season is to ask ourselves how, in the name of Christ, we deny Christ rather than ourselves. Emo Phillips says, “When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle, but then I realized that God doesn’t work that way—so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness!” Unfortunately, the stratagems by which we sacrifice the true God for a god made a means to our ends are rarely so blatant, at least to ourselves.

Yet, we take heart. Peter’s denial of Jesus, implicit here, emerges full form on the night of Jesus’ arrest, lurking outside the temple, moved now more by fear than pride, he invokes a curse on himself and swears “I do not know this man of whom you speak!” telling more truth than he intends. But in the end even he at last does come to know Jesus, and who he is. Peter is ashamed, he denies, he seeks to save his life, but Jesus gives his life, forgives, and saves. Our trust is that, despite ourselves, what St. Paul says is true: Nothing—not even all the ways we deny him and put him to shame—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Amen.

3rd Sunday in Lent

23 March 2003

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

John 2.13-22

How To Make God Mad

What sign can you show us for doing this? John 2.18

The sign outside the restaurant reads: Lenten Buffet – All You Can Eat. The tendency to find commercial opportunities in religious observances is nothing new. There’s always someone who thinks that if souls are worth saving, they’re worth saving at a profit. The most popular understanding of the event recorded in today’s Gospel portrays Jesus as a reformer, chasing out the merchants who have commercialized the Jerusalem Temple. This is built into the traditional label of the event: the cleansing of the Temple. N. T. Wright derisively refers to this as, “the idea that Jesus launches the equivalent of a tourist’s protest against the sale of religious trinkets in Westminster Abbey” (JVG, 406). It’s an interpretation that doesn’t hold up. Jesus isn’t in the cleaning business; he’s talking about destruction -- death and resurrection -- not reform.

The Temple where Jesus carried out his act of vandalism was famous all over the Mediterranean world. This magnificent structure, which the Herodians had been building for decades, was a destination for tourists and for pilgrims, both from the Jewish Diaspora and Gentiles seeking the God of Israel. Yet it was a monument to paradox. Gentiles were drawn to it from all over the world, but they were ultimately excluded. Carved into its stone the inscription threatened: “Let no Gentile enter within the balustrade and enclosure about the holy place and whosoever is caught shall be responsible to himself because death follows.” Roman respect for Jewish sensitivities were such that more than one overly curious Roman soldier was executed for straying into its forbidden inner courts. Yet this splendid, dazzling marble and gold Temple, occupying Jerusalem’s highest point, was in Israel’s prophetic tradition the joy of the whole earth, the center of the world, the place where the God who needs no dwelling place graciously made himself available to everyone. Here God honored weak and tiny Israel as the people through whom he would make his salvation known to all peoples.

A few years ago Karen and I were camping in the Utah Rockies and spent some time in Salt Lake. We visited Temple Square, saw the famous Temple from the outside, were accosted by smiling, clean-cut young Mormon missionaries, and toured the museum. Karen asked so many questions about the Temple and the Mormons’ ideas about Old Testament sacrifices and so forth and we were invited on a private tour. She went on it and saw some things that the general run of tourists don’t get to see. But even Karen, who by this time was looking like a hot prospect to the Mormon evangelists, wasn’t allowed into the Temple itself. That privilege is reserved strictly for the true people of God; we ‘gentiles’ were firmly excluded. This didn’t bother me; I had had more than enough and while Karen went off with her tour guide I escaped across the street to the Utah State of Museum of Science where a banner advertised an exhibit in honor of Carl Sagan – I know where I belong. But I can imagine feeling hurt and frustrated if I was an excluded seeker, inclined toward thinking it might be by way of the good people of the Beehive State that God has chosen to reveal himself to the world.

There were provisions made for the Gentiles to worship in the Jerusalem Temple complex. The area occupied by the merchants Jesus attacked, the outer court -- as opposed to the forbidden inner courts where only Jews were allowed -- was know as the court of the Gentiles. Here those from all over the Roman Empire questing for God came to worship Him but they couldn’t; they were blocked by the animal sellers and moneychangers. This, it seems, is what provoked Jesus’ wrath. The provocation was not that someone was selling sacrificial offerings to Jews coming for Passover; that’s what was supposed to happen. What incites Jesus is where they’re doing it. John doesn’t include the whole saying, but the synoptic Gospels portray Jesus exclaiming, “My house shall be a house of prayer for all people, but you have made it a den of robbers!” It helps to know that the term translated robbers is probably better translated as bandits or brigands, and that its connotation in the mid-first century would have been not greed, fraud and deceit but armed insurrection against Rome. Jesus’ imprecation would have been aimed at those who sought Israel’s identity in hatred and exclusion of non-Jews and its strength in military prowess, rather than in God’s desire to make his people a light to the nations. What infuriates Jesus is not the commercial transactions in the religious precincts but the exclusion of the peoples of the world from access to God.

If this were the whole story we could still think of Jesus as a reformer, intent on forcing the Temple to clean up its act, insisting that it be the Temple of an Israel in tune with God’s real aims. This would leave us with Jesus ultimately endorsing the Temple, not proclaiming its destruction. The reaction of those who witnessed Jesus’ violent act shows that they see it for what it is. They don’t see him as a moral or religious reformer, even an overzealous one; it’s obvious to them that Jesus is making a symbolic statement, enacting a parable and thus putting himself forward as a prophet, presuming to speak with the authority of God and entitled to pass judgment on Israel’s religious existence. They realize that nothing else could possibly justify his outrageous words and deeds. They ask, “what sign can you show us for doing this?” Only a clear proof of divine sanction, some miraculous demonstration of God’s approval, could establish the requisite prophetic credentials. Jesus’ response to this entirely appropriate query is outrageous. The sign from God that legitimates his action, Jesus claims, is the destruction of the Temple itself.

We can’t forget the main business of the Temple: animal sacrifice. As beautiful as it may have been, it was in essence a huge abattoir where upwards of 20,000 sheep, as well as many thousands of other animals, would be slaughtered on a single day.

Jesus makes his whip and attacks the people and animals cluttering the Temple’s outer court to enact his conviction that this system of relating to God is finished. Keep in mind that Jesus does not just disrupt the commercial activities going on in the Temple. He interferes with the perfectly legitimate attempts of ordinary Jews to do what they were supposed to do to be right with God. Indeed, it was the Israel’s peasants, too poor to afford a more valuable animal, who would buy doves from those at whom Jesus shouted “Take these things out of here!” Jesus affronts not only the rich and powerful who control the Temple and profit from it, but the whole nation, insofar as it’s committed to the sacrificial system.

The idea that God was on the verge of doing a new thing, and that the system of Temple sacrifice was up for replacement, was in the air in the first century. The prophets had tried all along to make it clear that unlike the bogus gods of paganism the true God did not really desire the blood of animals. The Essenes rejected the Temple as irredeemably corrupt and taught that it was in their holy community that God now made himself present. Although it is not clear how much of this was articulated explicitly prior to the Romans’ destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, the Pharisees were at this time developing the idea that the close study of Torah and behavior faithfully regulated in accord with it could take the place of Temple worship. Jesus shares the belief that the Temple system has come to its end, but he connects the demise of the Temple with his own death, its doom with an impending sacrifice: his own.

Pagan visitors banned from the mysterious religious observances going on in the Temple interior probably would have been disappointed if they had managed to get in. The sacrificial system operating in the Jerusalem Temple on its surface would have looked a lot like what went on in temples all over the pagan world. There, animals were killed and offered to the gods in the hope of earning their favor and to appease them for offenses against them. The scheme of sacrifices set out in the Hebrew Scriptures is complex, and the meaning and purpose of the various kinds of sacrifice is not completely clear, but there is one respect in which it crucially differed from what went on in other ancient religions. The ‘sin offering’ was not a gift people gave God as a means of placating Him and earning His favor. When people who sinned cut themselves off from God; they turned their backs on him and chose death, alienating themselves from the source of all life. The point of the sacrifice was that God took the life of the animal and gave it to the sinner, restoring his or her life, restoring the sinner to fellowship with God and God’s people. We have nothing to give God. In the sacrifice for sin it is God who gives life and sinful, dying humans who receive the gift of new life from him.

Jesus not only prophesized the end of the Temple; he offered himself as its replacement. “He was speaking of the temple of his body.” On that Passover he presents himself, the Passover Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. He dies, and his Spirit is poured out on the whole world. He is resurrected, and his everlasting life is given freely

to all.

Again and again, Jesus acted out the extravagant love of God, eating and drinking with sinners, accepting the outcasts and sharing his life with them. To encounter Jesus now, as it was then, is to meet the self-sacrificing, self-giving life of God Himself. God’s love in Jesus triumphs over human hate. God’s humility in Jesus overcomes human arrogance. God in Christ assumes wretchedness and poverty, shame and guilt to defeat the trust we so readily put in our own worth and power. The all-including salvation of God in Christ breaks our barriers and scandalizes our purities. At the Cross God’s judgment befalls the world; nothing survives that judges, condemns and excludes from God’s love. Our Lenten task is to be inquiring into the roots of our lives, the grounds of our self-approval, asking what in us is old and dead, rejecting, angry, hopeless, fearful and unforgiving, and looking in faith for the new life we share with God because of Jesus.

Amen.

4th Sunday in Lent

25 March 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church

LeMars, Iowa

Luke 15.11-32

No Deal

Jesus’ parable of the loving father and his two lost sons is such a perfect story that it needs no explanation. It’s aimed with precision at its audience: the tax collectors and ‘sinners’, and the Pharisees who are indignant toward Jesus for consorting with these tax collectors and ‘sinners’. Like every truly great story it is in a way utterly simple but has depths we cannot fathom. Like the story of the Good Shepherd and the Lost Sheep that it follows in Luke’s gospel, it is sweetly appealing: who isn’t moved by the picture of the old father running to hug and kiss the wayward son? Still, this story resists being made conventional and sentimental. It’s prickly, complicated and hard. It’s designed to stick in the craw of anyone who tries to make what Jesus says about God something we can easily swallow.

As I heard this story growing up, the Sunday school teachers and preachers seemed to dwell more upon those revels with the loose women, and the importance of avoiding such doings, than the parable would actually seem to warrant. They also focused upon the son who sins against his father but finally repents, but I think they got it wrong when it came to when he repents. The younger son is sitting among the pigs, miserable and starving. As our text says, “he came to himself” and decides to return to his father: “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired servants.’” It’s a mistake to make much of this initial change of mind, to make of it the repentance that matters. He’s making a calculation, trying to come up with the best deal he can get from the father, now that he’s screwed up his life. As he rehearses these words about his sin and unworthiness they’re an expression of his hunger, his need, his desperate situation; they don’t express genuine repentance, an authentic turning of his heart and mind toward his father.

The son does not repent and then return. First he returns and only then does he truly repent. As he approaches home, his father sees him a long way off and comes running, grabs hold of him and kisses him. The son starts to say what he planned to say back there with the pigs, but the words have completely changed their meaning. Before, they were a chip he planned to put on the bargaining table as he bet on the father’s sense of familial obligation, figuring he’d have to let him come back as a suitably humbled son demoted to servant. Now these words are his response to the drastic and unexpected love of the father. Now, not before, they signal real repentance. The real repentance, the real conversion, is not something he brings to his father; it’s not something he can offer in exchange for being allowed back. It’s what happens when at last he sees that his father loves him and welcomes him back no matter what.

It’s the same with God. Repentance is not our side of a deal we make with God that puts things right between us and him. Repentance is not the prerequisite for forgiveness; it’s what we realize about ourselves and about God when it dawns on us that he forgives us without conditions, without need of negotiation.

There are no deals to be made with God, but the assumption that there must be is almost universal. The most natural attitude is: I’ll have to do this to make it OK between God and me. We see this, and feel its pull, at every level of sophistication. I once heard a fundamentalist missionary describing his work in the Brazilian rainforest. The gospel was preached to the people there, and they were offered baptism, but only if they first swore to give up liquor and cardplaying to prove they were really repentant. In Dodie Smith’s novel I Capture the Castle, the narrator Cassandra is miserable, having fallen hopelessly and gultily in love with her older sister’s fiancé. She says: “I did have the feeling that a person as wretched as I was ought to be able to get some sort of help from the Church. Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was feeling happy I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn’t. You can’t get insurance money without paying the premiums.” The words about grace bounce right off us. We want to be worthy, even if just the little bit we think we might be capable of. “I can’t actually pray to God right now, not when I’m being such a stinker. I’ll wait until I’m behaving myself.” We want to make a deal with God, to do something that holds up our end of the bargain. As I once read in a student’s paper: “Grace is a gift you have to work for your whole life.”

In its more subtle forms the idea that we must learn to negotiate this moral economy is the epitome of human wisdom. The great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s last masterpiece is The Sacrifice. He directed its production, in its final stages, from the hospital bed where he was dying of lung cancer at 54. He intended it as his final, uncompromising testimony on the human condition. Alexander is a retired Swedish professor; one summer’s evening his family is gathered at his vacation home on a remote island in the Baltic to celebrate his birthday. Horrifying word comes of the outbreak of the third world war. Jets roaring overhead; the china rattles in the cupboard. They listen to the Defense Minister telling the nation to keep calm; the transmission is interrupted, the power fails. The end of the world, the last judgment on human folly is at hand. Oppressive terror settles on the family as night falls. Alexander prays. He promises God that if he will reverse what is happening and return things to normal, he will give up everything he loves. He will sacrifice his family; he will never see his wife or even his beloved son again, if only God will save them and the world. He falls asleep. When he awakes, there is no war, everything is as it was. In dead earnest he sets out to keep his end of the bargain. He sets the summerhouse afire and feigns madness. As the film ends he is being carted off in an ambulance to the asylum, leaving his uncomprehending family forever.

This beautiful film testifies to this truth built deeply into our human way of seeing things: if we are to come to God we must pay the price. Justice must be served. God may be merciful but he will not, in the end, let anyone get away with anything.

Jesus’ audacious parable subverts this entirely sensible idea of God. Jesus throws the foolishness of God in the face of all wisdom. The younger son, imprudent as he was at first, comes to his senses and shrewdly calculates: how can I appease my father; how can I get the best deal left me? In contrast, the father comes across as incapable of calculation. The old man is irresponsible, besotted with love, plain loony. Thoughts about right and wrong, about fair and unfair, about the consequences of love given too freely, concerns about ‘enabling’ the son, never enter his old head. The son demands his share of the inheritance and the father hands it over without an argument. When, at last, he sees his son approaching, he runs to meet him. For all he knows he’s just stopped by to ask for more money. He doesn’t wait for him to say anything; without a shred of dignity or proper self-respect he runs to him, embraces him, kisses him. The son blurts out the beginning of his prepared speech: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son...” He doesn’t let him finish. The son doesn’t get the chance to say the bit about being let back as a servant. That’s the sensible part. That would be the fair exchange: the son’s humility, some years of faithful servitude, preferably under the tutelage of the well-behaved older brother. That would have been a good deal, an edifying demonstration of wrongs put right, of injustice compensated, with the younger son, finally older and wiser, at last readmitted into the family circle, having paid the not too high price exacted by the merciful but wise and just father.

Instead, we hear the father call out “Quickly, bring out a robe – the best one…”

Why Quickly? What’s the rush? Shouldn’t he get him to a bath first? He’s filthy and sweaty and still smelling of the swine, hardly fit for the father’s house. Shouldn’t the father have sent for the elder brother right away; indeed, isn’t he really thoughtless, paying no heed to how handing over the best robe and the ring, symbols of honor and authority, to the younger son, would play in the moral imagination of the older son? As human behavior what the father does is ill considered on any number of fronts. But this is a portrayal of God’s love for us, not of reasonable human behavior. The father says “Quickly…” and means: “Quickly, before he changes his mind and takes off again!” He has no intention of giving the son a chance to reconsider. Note that at no point in the parable does he speak to the younger son; things are too urgent for words, for questions, for any discussion of the son’s status or of conditions for it. His being accepted into the family, into the father’s love, is immediate and unconditional. It’s in the wordless embrace, the kiss. The father really isn’t interested in whatever the son has to offer by way of explanation, confession, contrition. He’s not interested in making a deal. The son’s motives don’t count; all that matters is the fact that for whatever reason he’s got himself within reach of his father’s loving grasp. His one concern is that the boy might get away.

Our way of thinking is that our position with God is tentative, conditional on our getting things right, maybe in the last analysis pretty precarious…When in fact the danger isn’t that God will stop welcoming us, but that we’ll abandon him and go off on our own.

As it happens, there’s a version of the parable that, unlike Jesus’ version, makes all kinds of sense. It’s the Buddhist version, found in Saddharmapundrika [Sad-dharma-punda-rika] Sutra from around the end of the 2nd century AD. Here too, there’s a wayward son and a merciful father. But there’s no sudden restoration of the son upon his return. The son does work as a servant in the father’s house: in fact he works for 20 years as scavenger, removing piles of rubbish, before he even finds out it is his father he’s been working for and the father publicly acknowledges him as his son and presents him with his inheritance. The son goes through the hard work of cleaning out his self, ferreting out and killing his egoism, his lust, his pride and selfishness before he’s finally worthy of being the father’s son. Knowing as we do the intricate self-deceiving recesses, the evasiveness, the hidden pride and egoism of the human self, we can only respect this ancient technology of cleansing and salvation, this determined, disciplined effort to get ourselves right, to make ourselves worthy of God. Yet to follow Jesus is to accept his version of the story, the one with the father who will not make a deal, who refuses to count costs, but who simply loves and accepts us as the messes we are and are likely to remain for the foreseeable future. It is to abstain from the wisdom of the world in favor of the foolishness of the gospel.

I’ll conclude by wondering what that young man thought as he saw his father running toward him. Perhaps for an instant, he thought the old man was furious, coming at him to say “How dare you set foot on this property!?” Then he sees that loving face, he sees the arms reaching out in welcoming embrace. His cold and calculating heart breaks at last and he knows the father he never knew, the father who loves recklessly, without a care about the proper way of doing these things. This is the father who humiliates himself. To the world’s wisdom he’s a foolish, indulgent old man. No dignity; he’ll run to one son, plead with another; give without regard to who deserves and who doesn’t.

St. Paul in today’s epistle tells us that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.” Telling the parable, Jesus is talking about himself. In Jesus God comes to us, running and pleading, trying to get us to come to him no matter our condition. It’s in him we see God’s loving human face. It’s in his outstretched arms we see God reaching out to us. In his words we hear God calling us home.

Contrary to what most everyone -- including you and I -- thinks most of the time, God’s grace cannot be earned. Still, it can be avoided. The younger son for a while did a good job of avoiding it but his hunger and need pushed him just far enough out of his avoidance to be snagged by the ever watchful, ever waiting father. The older son has also been avoiding the gracious love of his father. His brother’s return makes this clear. The story leaves us forever wondering whether his father’s pleas break through his stubborn, self-righteous pride to bring him out from sulking in the darkness into the joy of the everlasting party. Let our prayer be that we will hear God calling to us, that we will see his loving hands moving toward us, and that like the younger son, we will receive his embrace.

Amen.

Fifth Sunday of Lent

28 March 2004

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 20.9-19

God Forbid!

Parables can have a superficial simplicity but a second look reveals that Jesus tells stories that thrust us into a world where things make no sense. Take the landlord in today’s parable of the wicked tenants. What kind of landlord is he? What sort of naiveté leads him to say: “I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him”? For years my mother-in-law owned an apartment building in a once good, but slowly deteriorating, neighborhood in Newark. The tenants became increasingly lax about paying the rent and eventually stopped altogether, blowing off entreaties, legal threats, and eviction notices. Yet, even after many unsuccessful attempts to get them to pay, Karen’s mother never got the bright idea of sending her eldest daughter to collect. The landlord in Jesus’ story is obtuse, implausibly patient, blind to what bad actors his tenants are, recklessly optimistic about them…until they do their worst.

Nor are the tenants plausible: why on earth would they think that they can inherit the vineyard by knocking off the landlord’s son? They seem as stupid as they are wicked. What will happen is obvious to everybody but them: they won’t wind up owning anything; they’re going to get wiped out!

And then there are t

he people, presumably Israel’s religious leaders, Jerusalem’s priests, scribes and elders, who hear and react to the parable. As Luke relates it in today’s lesson, the way they respond seems no more sensible than the behavior of the characters in it. Jesus asks, “What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them?” but it’s a rhetorical question, one to which he supplies the answer: “He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” The parable appears in the other synoptic Gospels, but Matthew tells it differently; Jesus poses the question but it’s his audience, not Jesus, that answers: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Mark’s version is like Luke’s: Jesus answers his own rhetorical question. But only Luke adds this one odd bit: right after he has Jesus answer his own question, saying “He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others,” he writes that “When they heard this, they said, ‘Heaven Forbid!’” (20.16). They’re objecting to the answer that, in Matthew’s version, they give themselves. Why does Luke add this exclamation? It’s a strange thing for them to say; after all, the landlord coming to punish the wicked tenants is exactly what’s expected. They’re just getting what they deserve. So why should Luke portray the religious leaders so vehemently objecting to what they approve of in the other versions?

The accounts in Mark and Matthew suggest that the religious authorities don’t get it at first; that it’s only later, after he refers to himself as the rejected stone that will destroy and replace the beloved Temple of which they’re the guardians, that Jesus makes it obvious to them that they are the wicked tenants ripe for being removed. Luke’s addition of their “God forbid!” points to the fact that it’s not the harsh, but just, retribution on the part of the vineyard’s owner that they object to, but the story’s premises. It’s not that Jesus describes Israel as an unproductive vineyard full of wicked characters ready for divine judgment, but that he describes it as being not in the hands of genuine heirs, but of mere tenants.

Jesus in this parable alludes to the fifth chapter of Isaiah, where the prophet describes Israel as a vineyard planted by God. But it has produced nothing but worthless fruit, nothing but greed and injustice, oppression and bloodshed. Because of this God will remove his protection; he will allow the gentiles to conquer Israel, to carry her people off into exile. But even this dreadful judgment stands within the promise of ultimate deliverance. Israel will suffer, Israel will be purged, but a faithful remnant, the true Israel, will remain. God will vindicate them and restore them to peace and prosperity in the land. Isaiah’s song of the unfruitful vineyard begins “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard…” (Is. 5.1). No matter how good a landlord you have, even if he shows up in the middle of the night to fix the toilet, you’re not likely to call him your beloved! As bad as things may be between God and Israel, Israel remains the people of God, the true and rightful heir, not one nation among others, but God’s relentlessly loved elect. Israel is no tenant, dispensable, replaceable, living in the land contingently. Israel is no renter but God’s beloved son.

For Jesus’ listeners, the self-confident religious authorities, sure of their standing with God, the parable as Luke relates it is appalling from the start. They see themselves as the righteous remnant, the legitimate heirs to whom God will give the kingdom when at last the nations of the godless gentiles are smashed, ancient scores settled, justice done and Israel itself purified, its careless impure masses -- those who have just welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as king -- done away with. The religious establishment that Jesus confronts in Jerusalem expects God to chastise the wayward of Israel, but they see themselves, not some outsider, as the Israel loyal to God. They regard themselves as the defenders of orthodoxy, of purity and the Law, the ones who will be vindicated in the day of reckoning. They see themselves as deserving their place in God’s world, as standing in God’s favor by birth and by right. The idea that there’s someone else, someone that’s not them -- least of all this popular and clever but fundamentally disreputable character from Galilee -- who is the rightful heir, the true Israel, and that they’re all mere tenants that can be replaced…well, “God forbid!” No surprise that they’ve had enough of this Jesus. They’re ready to have him arrested right away and get rid of him for good.

Luke’s version of this parable speaks to us in our Lenten time. Can we find ourselves with the wicked tenants in Jesus’ parable? Can we find ourselves among the parable’s hearers, resisting the news that we’re not entitled? The news that we find ourselves in God’s favor not because we’re deserving, but because the truly entitled one, Jesus the beloved son and true heir, gives himself for us and to us with stunning disregard for what anyone’s entitled to. Lenten poking around in the heart’s darker corners might reveal that this is hard for us to take seriously. It might be hard especially if you are in fact pretty good and pretty smart, and even pretty humble about it. The fact that in the end we are, with absurd inappropriateness, made God’s heirs, not because of anything about us, good, bad or indifferent, but because he joins us in faith, love and hope to Jesus. It’s not a matter of a deity dedicated to justice replacing the undeserving with the deserving; it’s about sacrificing such considerations in favor of the grace of the unexpected and unmanageable God we meet in Jesus.

I hope there’s room in the seriousness of our Lenten observations for a sense of the high comical nature of all this, of the crazy incongruity of the likes of us landing a place in the good graces of God. There’s a poem by John Leax that appeared in last fall’s Image; it captures the spirit of God’s way of doing things. It’s called “Adoption Agency Sells Shaven Apes as Human Infants:”

It could not last long, the sweet innocence

of the slightly flattened face,

the pink cuddliness of the body

razor-nicked and dimpled.

Nor could the simian strength, the quick

dexterity of the fingers,

or the precocious mobility be hidden.

Too quickly the ape-child would grow.

Tucked into bed, it would not cry.

It would take, instead, the bright mobile

suspended to stimulate its eyes

in its hand and swing easily from

the crib’s confinement, drop to the floor,

break doors and locks to reach the warmth

of its mother’s body, and climb

to ring its arms about her neck.

What would her observing husband think

as she moved about the house, their

dearly bought darling growing darkly

hirsute at two months, grinning

from her shoulder, smacking his lips

anticipating pleasure?

Would he be charmed or terrified?

Would he, looking into the eyes

of his wife, find tears, a fear matching

his own that something was awfully wrong?

Or would neither see, their need

to love, greater than any disappointment,

make the ape-child beautiful,

speak to its nature and give it a soul?

Would they in the fullness of time

take it to a priest for baptism?

And if they did, would you, a congregant,

rise up like an unwanted guest

at a wedding to announce a reason

why ape and child cannot be joined?

Or would you sit quietly,

watch the priest pour water

over the head so that it splashed

into the font of every blessing?

And if it splashed, a sparkling droplet

landing like spittle on your eye,

might you be changed, blessed?

Like the mother, like the father?

Like the chimp passing for a human child, we find ourselves absurdly loved, preposterously out of our element; contrary to nature and all common sense declared true heirs when we’re at best tenants hopelessly behind on the rent. God forbid that we forget it!

Amen.