So last Sunday I preached a sermon that included the parable that we read at today's Mass. The parable is a rousing condemnation of how badly Israel's leadership had dealt with God and His messengers, the prophets. But is there a larger context?
Well, maybe there is. Why were these miserable tenants so keen to keep the Lord, the God of Israel, out of the affairs of his children? We have two Old Testament readings today, the first being the very familiar Ten Commandments, the second being Isaiah 5.1-7, a very interesting poem about Israel and Judah being God's vineyard but yielding wild grapes instead of good grapes.
Just a note on wild grapes...they make for awful wine. The early American colonists found, to their delight, that the New World had wild grapes. At least, they were delighted until the first pressing. The kindest criticism called it 'foxy'. As one who has smelled a fox up close, that is NO compliment. So it is with Isaiah's criticism of Israel and Jesus' criticism of its leadership (and He probably had this passage from Isaiah in mind). Israel was God's vineyard to produce a wine that would be for a blessing for the world, based on the Covenant between Him and that nation. Sadly, due to horrible mismanagement, the output was not what was intended. Foxy wine indeed.
God's solution is simple, according to both Isaiah and Jesus: replant the vineyard and put in new management. This in the Christian tradition meant grafting in the Gentile to the vines and replacing the leadership with a new one, directly answerable to the Son of God.
It also should be a caution to us. Just as the old Israel produced men and women of great righteousness and faith, but still had to undergo a restructuring, the new Israel of the Church is under the same scrutiny. There have been times when the faithful over the past two millennia have gotten very lax, not just in morals but in mercy. That is where the far right and the far left both get it wrong. Yes, we're in a crisis, but not of just morals and not of just mercy and justice, but of both. I've been as guilty as any other. We've focused on one part of the Divine Law and ignored the other. Our wine has gone...foxy.
Fundamentalists I have met have accused the Church of this age being the lukewarm Church decried in Revelation. I counter that it is as it always has been, a mix of good cultivars of good grapes and wild cultivars of sour grapes. The resulting mishmash is creating some great bottles of wine (great men and women doing wondrous things for the Kingdom of God), some blah bottles of wine (lackluster men and women just coasting through life, kind of nice but making zero impact on the woes of this present age), and some truly vile vintages (men and women spewing poison, violence, hatred, and diabolical actions in the name of the Kingdom of God but having absolutely nothing to do with it).
In our lives we need to tend our vines. Are we exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit? Or are some of our actions the fruit of Sin and Death? We need to remember who our landlord is, and what He expects of us and get to pruning, you and me together. I've got some bad bunches to throw over the wall. Remember, the grapes aren't our churchmanship per se but what we do with it, how we interact with God and His children.
Snip snip.
