Homily for the 18th Sunday after Trinity (27th Week of Ordinary Time)

The gospel presents us today with yet another parable about vineyards, but this time we finally get with it the passage from Isaiah 5 which stands behind all of these parables and sayings. In Isaiah, the vineyard is explicitly identified as God’s people, Israel. But the vineyard has been badly managed and left to grow sour wild grapes, resulting in God’s judgment.

The prophet’s initial describe of God the landowner as “my beloved” echoes the language of the Song of Songs, that great love song between God and his people. That book also uses constant vineyard and garden imagery, which in turn suggests the paradise of Eden. In fact the gates of the temple in Jerusalem were decorated with vines, and the interior of the temple contained visual references to Eden, so this series of metaphors — vineyards and temple, God and his love for his beloved people — is well established when Jesus evokes it in parable. His audience would have understood it quite well. And Matthew tells us directly that the priests and Pharisees likewise understood themselves as the subject of the prophetic judgment here, and this is something of a turning point in their story, where they determine not just to criticize Jesus but to trap and ultimately destroy him. Even apart from the direct attacks from Jerusalem’s spiritual authorities, most of the disciples would have understood intuitively the way that Isaiah’s prophecy has taken place before their eyes. In the first century, the Jewish nation was basically run by usurpers. King Herod was not even a Jew. He insinuated himself into Judah as a pseudo-Jewish puppet of Rome. For many of the Jews then, the temple itself, built by Herod, not by a son of David, was illegitimate. The chief priests of the temple were interlopers who were not of the proper priestly lineage; they had effectively seized power thanks to collaboration with Rome. This was of course part of the simmering conflict between them and the more conservative rabbis of the Pharisees who basically understood this but could do little about it.

I say this partly to emphasize, against a lingering tendency to antisemitic interpretations, that the villains of the story here are not the Jews qua Jews, but their leaders. The Jews are the vineyard. Eventually, of course, the Gentiles are, as St. Paul relates, “grafted on” to God’s beloved vineyard, and the new tenants are the apostles who welcomed the son of the landowner. Recall that, in John’s gospel, Jesus identifies himself as the true vine (15:1). He is very likely standing before the vine-covered gates of the temple when he says this! But the claim is that he is the definitive embodiment of Israel, God’s people, and that the nations are ultimately able to enter the vineyard through union with him.

It is also worth pointing out the incredible mercy and generosity on display in the parable. Not deterred by repeated rejection and violence, he keeps sending his messengers. Classically the four stages here represent the four ages of history: first the creation of the world, second the sending of the law and the prophets, third the sending of the divine Son himself, and finally the return of the owner and the final reckoning. Though the outcome is known, this doesn’t negate the real invitation to repentance. Jesus is angry at the leaders of the temple out of love: he does not simply desire their destruction, even if he knows that they desire his. Indeed St. Paul and the tradition see the defection of Israel’s leaders as a kind of “happy fault,” because God uses their failure to expand his kingdom further. Despite all appearances, his providence still reigns: as the Lord says, quoting Psalm 118, “this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

The central moral takeaway for us is to beware of falling into the same sin of the people in the past, whether kings or priests or ordinary men, who rejected Jesus; we are also guilty of rejecting the Lord’s anointed. On this parable, Rabanus says, “Morally; a vineyard has been let out to each of us to dress, when the mystery of baptism was given us, to be cultivated by action.”

Such a cultivation is difficult not because we are so utterly depraved as to be incapable of good work, but because the absence of the owner, who has gone “into another country” during these middle stages of salvation history where we find ourselves, reveals a certain immaturity in all of us. We are not the owners of anything, really, even ourselves: our own souls and bodies are in a sense under a stewardship, which is a paradoxical thing to say if there ever was one, but all the same true. We are, as human beings, true agents, real individual persons, but God’s own nature teaches us that personhood is what it is only in relation to another, above all in relation to God. The most enduring consequence of original sin is the possibility of what we came to call in the modern age the “secular,” the idea of a neutral human and natural space with a self-enclosed meaning apart from God. For secular man, whether today or two thousand years ago, God’s apparent absence from the scene can only reinforce this self-deception.

There’s a long history of reflection on God’s absence in the Hasidic tradition which is summed up by a Cistercian commentator: “The gist of the Hassidic answer is that God must be absent for man’s sake, that is, if man is ever to grow fully into his divine vocation of becoming the eyes and hands and Heart of God in this world, the very dwelling place of God’s glory and truth, and thus become the fountain of God’s wisdom and love in this world for every other creature.” You can infer a similar theme in the Lord’s high priestly prayer of John 17 in the Upper Room, and again in a new way after the Lord’s Ascension into heaven. St. Jerome says, “God, by whom all things are filled, cannot be absent from any place; but He seems to be absent from the vineyard, that He may leave the vine-dressers a freedom of acting.” Again we should be struck by the totally transcendent patience of God. We just want him to wave his hand and cultivate everything by magic. Or perhaps we would rather he stand over us and force us to efficient labor by a direct hand and with visible threats. That sounds easier too, sometimes. But he wants us to learn from hard experience how to truly be the image and likeness of his own creative goodness that he made us to be.