08/10/23 St Peter’s Trinity 18
Philippians 3:4b-14 Matthew 21:33-end
A few years ago the author Hilary Mantel was interviewed about Wolf Hall - her historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She said the tricky thing was keeping in mind that even though she knew the story’s ending the people involved didn’t. What to us seems inevitable is to them only one of several possibilities.
Anne Boleyn had great hopes for her future path but hadn’t realised Henry VIII was so fixated on having a son he was ready to sacrifice anything and anyone if he thought it would improve his chances. Anne Boleyn failed him as he saw it so the future she had expected was violently taken from her. Hilary Mantel creates an atmosphere where we encounter characters before their future is fixed, where everything still seems possible
This fluidity is something to remember when we read the bible. We hear a well known story and think how could it be otherwise but nothing was laid down for the people involved. They didn’t know how things would turn out
We’ll come back to that in a moment but first let’s look at our gospel.
A landowner sets up a vineyard, leases it out and goes abroad. Come harvest time he sends his people for his share. The tenants violently reject the landowner’s servants. He sends more, the same thing happens, so he sends his son. ‘Excellent’ think the tenants ‘if the son is dead we can hang on to his inheritance’ . So they kill him.
‘Now’ says Jesus, ‘when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
“He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” his hearers answered, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”
Jesus replies, ‘“Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.
Jesus has not been subtle in this parable. He’s given a potted history of God’s dealings with Israel and their failure to be the light to the nations they were supposed to be. Even when God sent his prophets and teachers and eventually his son to call them back they dealt badly with them. so their role in God’s plan is passed on to others. The chief priests and the Pharisees get the point, they know he is talking about them and it sharpens their sense that he is a threat.
We’ll come back to the parable too but now to the epistle -
When we think of Paul we think of the saint, the theologian, the person who did as much as any of the early followers of Jesus to shape the church - For us the shape his life took is inevitable and necessary, but he underwent such a change of direction I don’t suppose it ever felt like that to him.
Paul wrote his letters were sent before we had the gospels. Until then what Jesus said and did would have been kept alive by his followers telling and retelling what they remembered. After his conversion Paul would have soaked all this up so I’m sure he will have known this parable.
Just imagine what an impact it would have had on him when he first heard it.
Sometimes when we hear a bible story we have to think about where we might be in it - in the good samaritan are we the victim, are we the robber, are we the samaritan, are we the person who walks by, in the prodigal son are we the returning prodigal or are we the unwelcoming elder brother.
But Paul could have had no doubts in this one
‘But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.’
That was where Paul had been standing ‘a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. If anybody met the criteria of the unjust tenants it was Paul. He had rejected Jesus the cornerstone as zealously as anyone.
He must have thought, with all I had already done with all I intended to do how could I be forgiven, how could Jesus reach out to me? And yet he did and Paul’s life was turned upside down.
In our reading he begins by laying out all the religious reasons he had had for preening himself but goes onto say I so much prefer knowing Jesus to all the status I had before that it all seems rubbish. The standing I had in the community carried privileges but it was hollow. Now I know Jesus and the more I know him the better it is.
So this may not surprise us - passages like this are how we have built up our picture of Paul - but this is where we have to think like a historical novelist - nothing in his early life prepared him for this and if we think his future was inevitable we will miss his sense of wonder, of incredulity, about how things have turned out. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. And we will miss his gratitude - that was what fuelled his life after his meeting with Jesus on the Damascus road - his faith, his writings, his zeal, his readiness to suffer, his constant work so that the early church should be faithful in their following of Jesus, his letters, his missionary journeys are steeped in his gratitude that for all his past history Jesus still held out his hand to him. And now Paul wants nothing more than to know Jesus better.
Paul’s future was gloriously reshaped - rather than being an agent of destruction, by the grace of God he became an agent of life. And in that there is hope.
When we hear the news - climate crisis, war, hunger, social instability the temptation is to think the path is fixed, Paul shows us otherwise - even the most intractable circumstance, even the most difficult people can change.
How can we share Paul’s hope, how can we add it in to the world around us? Jesus said the kingdom of God will be given to a people who produce the fruit of the kingdom
What are these fruit?
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. - As we bear these fruit so will God’s kingdom grow - Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. This is the path we are given to give to be people of hope
As we try and nurture the Spirit’s fruit in our lives, it is quite possible that we will find ourselves in places we never expected to be, but if we keep in step with the Spirit however unlikely or even unwelcome the place we will not be there alone.
