Today’s parable comes from the final section of teaching material in Matthew’s gospel. It’s in a section that, had he used subtitles, Matthew might have called “Authority.” Jesus is already in Jerusalem, his triumphal entry on the donkey just happened and the religious leaders are doing everything they can to trap him and to diminish his authority in the sight of the people. It’s a plan that’s not going so well.
So Jesus tells a very pointed story. The owner of the vineyard can’t collect the rent. He sends not one, not two but three agents to collect it and the tenants beat each of them up, even killing one. So next he sends a small posse of agents, but the tenants are prepared and dispatch them quite quickly.
So the owner has a brainwave. What if I send my son? Surely they’ll acknowledge his authority. After all, the son is almost the same as the owner himself. But these tenants are a lawless and violent bunch and they kill the son too.
“What,” Jesus asks the crowd, do you think the owner will do to those tenants?” And they said to him, “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.”
It’s not rocket science to work out what Jesus was suggesting, The people whom God put in the vineyard to work the land and live according to God’s intent, have turned their back on God and rejected all the prophets of God. Now they are about to kill the Son too because they don’t respect God’s authority in him.
But Jesus doesn’t finish the story, he asks the crowd to do so. And the crowd is quite blood thirsty.
Jesus doesn’t contradict them because that’s not really the point of the parable. It’s not about what happens to people who deny God. It’s about the Son and what authority he has. The stone which the builders rejected is actually the most important one which, when placed at the top of the arch, holds everything together.
This is very difficult for us to understand.
The son whom the tenants reject, the stone which the masons reject, becomes in the curious world of the reign of God, that which is most important. It is in the very vulnerability of rejection that God’s power is made known. It is in the very vulnerability of rejection that God’s power is made known.
And I think that’s what Paul is talking about in his impassioned statement,
Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death…
Paul had social status. Paul had authority. But in the reign of God, these are so irrelevant that he regarded them as nothing, even as loss in comparison with the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus.
The only thing that matters to Paul is his relationship with Christ. Everything else falls away. He wants so much to know Christ and to be in Christ and to know the power of the resurrection that he’s willing to share in Christ’s suffering and become like him in his death. In order to know Christ he is willing to give up everything and to become entirely vulnerable.
As he lets go of all the things that he has valued; education, career, social status, possessions, abilities, Paul comes closer to Christ.
This is a very different understanding of the Gospel from the one which says that as we follow Jesus so we will be blessed in this world. The greatest distortion is of course the prosperity gospel which says that following Jesus will make you rich. But the more subtle distortion which most of us make, is that when things are going well God is blessing us and when they’re going really badly, God has turned God’s back on us.
Yes it was exciting when Jesus rode into Jerusalem with everyone cheering. But that wasn’t the big event. The big event was Jesus being nailed to a cross and dying an ignominious death, the death of a traitor. The death of a failure.
But somehow in that failure was the power that brings life. In the death of the one is new life to the body. Jesus the Christ stayed on the path of integrity and non-violence right to the bitter end of failure and so God raised him up, in so doing, showing us that the stone which the masons rejected became the capstone that holds all things in creation together.
Two weeks ago, in the mountains of British Columbia, I watched salmon making their way up river only to spawn and die. I watched salmon come to the surface in a death-defying attempt to get the breath to live. And I watched bears feasting on dead and dying salmon. Death is central to creation. The sun of this solar system is dying and in her death gives off the energy that gives us life. Without death there would be no life.
As the beloved of Christ, it is our job to be a people of hope and life in the midst of death and failure.
A week ago, 59 people died and over 500 were wounded in a senseless attack for no understandable reason. We want to make sense of it. We want to know why the gunman chose this course of action so that we can prevent it happening again. We want to know why some people died and others didn’t. We want to know what the victims could have done to get away. Somehow we feel that if we can understand it, we’ll be safer.
Yet we live at a time when the things we have held dear, the things that we have believed to be solid, are crumbling. There will be more mass shootings and bombings of innocent people, there will be more storms that flatten everything in their path. We have grown up in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, but that is changing.
How then are we to be a people of hope and life in the midst of death and mayhem?
At the heart of our sacred mystery lies the man who failed, the man who was abandoned by his friends and publicly executed in great shame but who resurrected not as an avatar but as the Cosmic Christ. At the heart of our mystery is the Cosmic Christ who is dying with the salmon, feasting with the bears, weeping with the bereaved and fainting with the injured. At the heart of our sacred mystery is the understanding that life comes from death and glory comes from the ignominious, not the other way around.
We are a people of hope and life because we know that resurrection comes. When we celebrate the eucharist we are holding up the cup of the life of the world with all its pain and its sorrow and at the same time the cup of the life of the Cosmic Christ with all its glory and grandeur. Because they are one and the same. The stone that the masons rejected because it wasn’t good enough is the same stone that caps the archway and holds the building up. The son whom the tenants killed is the same son who calls and welcomes all into the vineyard.
Our hope and our authority come not from the moments of triumph, but from the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our God. For his sake let us regard everything else as temporary and worthless, in order that we may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of our own but one that comes through faith in Christ.
Above all may we want to know Christ, the weakness of his suffering and the power of his resurrection.
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