Sermon preached in St George's Cathedral, Jerusalem

Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, 8^th October 2017

Readings: Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Psalm 19: 7-14; Philippians 3: 4-14; Matthew 21: 33-45

It is a privilege to be called upon to preach in this Cathedral, and I thank the Dean for his most gracious invitation. This Cathedral, in a sense more than that in Canterbury, lies at the centre of the Anglican Communion; here in Jerusalem we are called upon to see beyond the distinctiveness of Anglicanism to the roots we share not only with other Christians, but with others who have worshipped God in this place for millennia.

The readings appointed for this Sunday remind us of our privileges and of our obligations as the people of God, and also of the perils which beset the human quest to be faithful to God. The apostle Paul is brutally honest about this. His faithfulness to the God who had revealed to Moses the Law, of which the portion we have heard read this morning is commonly taken as a digest, had clearly led him to great achievements in piety and godliness. “The Law of the Lord is perfect”, says the Psalmist, and the praises of God and devotion to the Law in worship, and in the theory and practice of daily life, profoundly shaped Paul’s life. In the portion of his letter to the church in Philippi, Paul dismisses his devotion and his accomplishments as a jurist with a degree of vulgarity which is, perhaps fortunately, lost in translation. Paul discovered, perhaps rather late in the day, that the God who had revealed the Law to Moses was demanding of him a faithfulness which not merely altered the course of his life, but so violated the way of life and the values in which he had been nurtured and in which he had excelled, that he struggled over years to reconcile his heritage with his calling to proclaim the Gospel of Christ to the nations: to people, like him, created in the divine image, and called to live on this earth as God’s beloved children and heirs to God’s promises to Abraham, but not called to the way of life and the cultural observances which distinguished Israel from other nations. Today’s reading might tempt us to think that Paul had easily discarded his heritage as a Pharisee in favour of something better, but the letters to the Galatian and the Roman churches reflect a long and costly struggle to discern God’s purposes, and to accept the cost of faithfulness to his vocation as an apostle of Christ.

It is not difficult to prefer the security of established traditions and institutions, and of status and authority within them, so that these become an end in themselves, to be protected at all costs from real or perceived threats, rather than to be the means through which God’s love is communicated and God’s grace experienced in new ways, and extended to the marginalised and the afflicted.

The Gospel reading appointed for this Sunday is set in a very specific time and space. Jesus and his disciples are in the outer court of the temple, the place where sacred and profane meet, and the closest gentiles were permitted to approach God’s presence. Jesus and his disciples had travelled to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, the solemn and joyful commemoration of God’s delivery of their forebears from slavery in Egypt, the time at which some Jews expected the messiah to appear in the temple. Jesus had entered the temple precincts the previous day, overthrown the tables of the money changers and the vendors in sacrificial animals, and healed the blind and the lame – marginalised and afflicted people whose physical defects barred them from access to God’s presence, according to the law of Moses.

The questioning to which Jesus is subjected by various Jewish luminaries is neither innocent nor academic, but rather an attempt to build a case which could be mounted against him before the Roman prefect: By what authority are you doing these things? Jesus declined to answer the question, but tells a series of stories to which he invites the chief priests and elders to provide the verdict. The parable of the vineyard, so central to the Gospel of today, was also central to the case mounted against Jesus before the high priest, where he would be accused of claiming the power to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. The vineyard, protected with a hedge and provided with a winepress, is a well-established metaphor of Israel, abundantly provided by God with the means to prosper. The watchtower represents the temple, the shelter and the vantage point of those who tend the vineyard.

What is surprising about the parable is that the vineyard is let out to tenants. Those who watch over Israel, and reap the harvest of the vineyard, are not the owners, nor stewards or expert viticulturists, nor even peasant farmers employed by the owner, but tenants; people with no previous or enduring ties to the land, but who tend the property and reap its harvest at the pleasure of the owner. Whatever we may think of an economic system which enriches absentee landlords and exploits those who work the land, the message is nonetheless clear: before God those who rule Israel in and from the temple are no more than landless peasants, of whom there were many in Palestine of the day. Contrary to their presumptions, they enjoyed no inalienable rights before God or over the people, and could be evicted in favour of others.

The arrogance of not merely refusing to pay the owner his dues, but of subjecting the agents sent to collect it to violence and abuse, reflects the long history of persecution of the prophets sent to Israel over the centuries. Rejection of the prophets is contempt for the God who had sent them. This much was entirely familiar in the tradition. Elsewhere Jesus decries turning the graves of the prophets into shrines by the heirs of those who had persecuted them. The twist in the parable comes when Jesus suggests that God would not continue sending prophets, but would resolve the breakdown in his relationship with the tenants in another way. Sending his son to the place where his agents had been abused and violated may not make sense, and it in no way alters the legal relationship and the obligation to pay the owner his dues. But it does offer a moral appeal, a last opportunity to the tenants to restore the relationship by respecting the person and the rights of their landlord.

The response of the tenants was to presume that, if they killed the son, they could steal the land, making permanent what their refusal of payment over the years had implied. The chief priests and elders offer precisely what the owner of the vineyard would do in response: the tenants would be put to death, and replaced with other tenants. Jesus in turn responds to their self-condemnation: the kingdom of God will be taken from you, and given to a people producing the fruits of it.

It is very easy for us to identify ourselves with those to whom the vineyard is given, replacing the tenants who had abused the agents of the owner and killed his son. It is easy to point to where the temple once stood, and to deplore the perversion of Judaism into an increasingly virulent form of racial fascism – while ignoring the destructive power of perverted Christianity, on all continents, over many centuries. Making America, or any other country, great again, is not a Christian agenda, and neither has been the manipulation of Christian symbols and values in the cause of earthly power, which has visited indiscriminate slaughter upon this city, and countless other places, in the name of Christ. If, as Christians, we believe that it is through the life and ministry of Jesus that God is definitively revealed in the world, and through the death and resurrection of Jesus that humanity is redeemed, then our faithfulness to God must reflect this, in every aspect of our lives.

We need to remind ourselves that those whom Jesus trapped into self-condemnation were faithful, as Paul had been, to God’s covenant with Israel and the law revealed to Moses. Their faithfulness led them not to seeking the fulfilment of God’s promises to Abraham, but to jealousy of the institutions which defined Israel’s identity, and upon which their status and wealth depended. We need to come before God in humility, conscious that we could be the ones trapped into self-condemnation, that our faithfulness can be corrupted by self-interest. We are no more infallible than they were in their faithfulness, no more immune to the pressures to protect institutions perceived to be under threat, no less liable to the pitfalls of self-interest and conceit.

Our calling as a Church is to proclaim the Gospel of Christ, willingly and joyfully using the resources entrusted to us in the service of God. We need to be ever-heedful of the prophetic voice which calls us to repentance and renewal. We need to be aware that, whatever the work to which we are called, God’s purposes are greater. Our calling is not to protect ourselves, our institutions, and our privileges as ends in themselves, but to use them to extend God’s love to others, to make the Gospel of Christ known in the world, that, by God’s grace and in the power of God’s Spirit, not only we, but those whose lives we touch, may bear the fruit of God’s kingdom.