Thanks To Fr Jim from St Paul's Anglican Parish Maryborough, for preaching the homily for Sunday the 2nd October at St Mary's Church.
Here is a copy of his sermon:
The Anglican Parish of Maryborough
Sermon preached by Fr Jim McPherson
at St Mary's Catholic Parish
2 October 2011
Isaiah 5.1-7; Matthew 21.33-43
I am delighted to be here! It was good to reaffirm our agreement in August at St Paul's, and we look forward to Fr Paul joining us for the Feast of Christ the King.
*****
We read the first reading, from what Christians call "the Old Testament", because it is part of our family history. These readings are addressed to us; the tangled family dramas of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph (Israel's founding family) are our story as well as Israel's. We do Jesus himself a disservice, and the Christian faith we profess a disservice, if we think it all started with Jesus as though he just landed on terra nullius and started from there.
The gospel reading makes this clear, when Jesus takes the vine/vineyard (one of the well-known symbols of the nation Israel) and one of the well-known prophetic rebukes to faithless Israel, and reworks it as a prophetic challenge to the religious authorities of his day, "the chief priests and the elders".
The story tells of God's persistent and determined efforts to get through to his wayward people; prophet after prophet sent, and ignored; eventually God sends his Son, whom they recognise as Son, and therefore kill – in hope of gaining the vineyard for themselves. (I understand this was a realistic strategy in Jesus' day; after a specified time, an inheritance left unclaimed could go to the first reasonable claimant; or occupation over several years would entitle to ownership.)
So now they won't have to worry about the previous absentee landlord, God ‑ or any of God's inconvenient requirements. And the Son joins the succession of murdered prophets.
The way Matthew's gospel tells it, the details of the Son's death correspond to the recorded realities of Jesus' death … and the "wretched end" probably describes Rome's invasion and defeat of Jerusalem (including the destruction of its Temple) in AD 70.
*****
This parable of Jesus taps into something really deep in the way our minds tick over.
We humans are all experts at smug. [1] That is, we are excessively proud of how good we are, what we have achieved, what nice people we are, etc; and therefore complacent about anyone challenging us to change. We are such nice people, bumping along satisfactorily (for the most part) with our lives, so that sort of criticism is not only unwelcome, it certainly does not apply to us …
Because of smug, we tend to overlook the gospel's concluding sentence: "I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit." Clearly that applies to "the chief priest and elders of the people", whom Jesus addresses directly. But we are nice people, we are Christians, we know better, we wouldn't do anything like this, especially rejecting the prophets and killing the Son ….
Here are two questions, to St Mary's, St Paul's, to the Christian communities in Maryborough:
- Is God an absentee landlord for you? As in Fiddler on the Roof, the blessing for the Tsar: "Lord, bless and keep the Tsar …… far away from us".
- As God surveys our vineyard, is the yield worthwhile? The fruits of the kingdom: justice, mercy, peace, righteousness … How's the yield?
- And if it's not up to the mark, what can we do about it?
© the Revd James M McPherson
Maryborough Qld 4650
www.anglicanmaryborough.org.au
[1] "having or showing an excessive pride in oneself or one's achievements: he was feeling smug after his win" ‑ http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/smug (visited 29 September 2011)
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