Sermons
“The Power of Nonviolence” based on Isaiah 5:1-7 and Matthew…
As
my paternal grandmother (Nana) aged, she needed increasing levels of
help. After she’d transitioned to assisted living, her beloved only
son (my father) would often take her out on shopping excursions. My
Nana was a woman who loved to shop, ok, she was a woman who lived to
shop. It regularly amused me to talk to both my father and my Nana
after said excursions. My Nana would relate the experiences this
way, “Your father is SO impatient! All I wanted to do was go to a
few stores, look at what they had, and enjoy being out. All he
wanted was to get out of there. It is like he doesn’t know how to
have any fun!” My father would relate the experiences this way,
“Your grandmother takes forever! I took her to the store, she
wanted me to push her down each of the the aisles, slowly, and then
when we were done she’d want to do it again!”
Their
two versions of shopping together always made me giggle because it
was so clear that they were relating the same story, just from two
different experiences. I’ve been thinking about their shopping
excursions this week because the Gospel does the opposite.
As
far as I can figure it out, what we have in the Gospel is one story
being used for two totally different purposes at the same time
(without changing perspectives). One of these stories is the
narrative that Jesus told and the other is the one that the early
Christian community told, and they told them for VERY different
reasons.
Since
we are are much more familiar with the one the early Christian
community told, and since it is the version we see in the Gospel
today, we’re going to start by looking at that one. It is
brilliantly done, poetically beautiful, and intended to insult the
Jews. SIGH. As the Jesus Seminar puts it, “This
parable was a favorite in early Christian circles because it could
easily be allegorized [to the story where] God’s favor was
transferred from its original recipients (Israel) to its new heirs
(Christians, principally gentiles).”1
This version intentionally reflections on Isaiah 5:1-7. They start
in parallel ways, with the description of the creation of the
vineyard: planting, enclosing, digging, building a watch tower. The
parallels in the beginning of the passages are intended to remind us
of the conclusion of the Isaiah reading, which says (in case you
forgot), “[God] expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness,
but heard a cry!” (Isaiah 5:7b, NRSV)
In
Isaiah the shock is that after all that work (and it takes years to
get grapes from the vineyard), the grapes were sour. The metaphor
indicates that God had invested in creating a just society with
Israel and is horrified that they didn’t become one. Matthew extends
this metaphor, indicating that he thinks the Jews failed to create a
just society, but that the Christians will succeed. In the
allegorical reading of the parable, God will kick out the tenants and
replace them. It seems that this reflects a time when Christians
were feeling disempowered and felt the need to tell stories that
empowered them. The problem is that for a whole lot of centuries
now, Christians have been the empowered and by continuing to tell
themselves this story they have disempowered Jewish people and
perpetuated antisemitism.
We
can be clear that the Matthew version is the creation of the
Christian community and not Jesus because it includes the detail
about the son being killed and cast off. Ched Myers writes, “The
son is killed and cast off (without proper burial, the ultimate
insult) Jesus too will be cast ‘outside’ the city of Jerusalem.”2
The
good news is that scholars think they can get a good guess at how the
original parable sounded, the one Jesus told. This is the other
version of the parable, and it wasn’t allegorical. William Herzog
points out the version in Matthew is quite different from others,
saying, “The parable begins with a description of a man creating a
vineyard yet neither Luke nor the Gospel of Thomas include these
details.”3
That means that the original parable wasn’t meant to be an extension
of Isaiah 5, and likely wasn’t intending to dismiss the Jews. The
Gospel of Thomas version is thought to be the closest to what Jesus
might actually have said:
“He
said, A […] person owned a vineyard and rented it to some
farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from
them. He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard’s
crop. They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the
slave returned and told his master. His master said, “Perhaps
he didn’t know them.” He sent another slave, and the farmers
beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said,
“Perhaps they’ll show my son some respect.” Because the
farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him
and killed him.”4
This
parable seems to describe something that might have actually happened
during Jesus life time. It reflects tensions that were present in
Galilee at that time. In the Social Science Commentary they write,
“If we may assume that at the earliest stage of the Gospel
tradition the story was not an allegory about God’s dealings with
Israel, as it is now, it may well have been a warning to absentee
landowners expropriating and exporting the produce of the land.”5
Another commentator concludes, “And however the vengeance of the
owner may be interpreted allegorically, it certainly reflects a
landowner’s wrath, which which the landless Palestinian was all too
familiar.”6
So
the problem in the parable according to Herzog is “the creation of
a vineyard would, on economic grounds alone, have disturbed the
hearers of the parable. Because land in Galilee was largely
accounted for and intensively cultivated, ‘a man’ could acquire the
land required to build a vineyard only by taking it from someone
else. The most likely way he would have added the land to his
holdings was through foreclosure on loans to free peasant farmers who
were unable to pay off the loans because of poor harvests.”7
This means that “building vineyards was a ‘speculative investment’
and therefore the prerogative of the rich.”8
So the parable reflects economic realities that were doing GREAT
harm in Galilee at the time of Jesus.
It
also reflected a reality of violence at the time of Jesus. Herzog
continues, “If the peasants resorted to violence only when their
subsistence itself was threatened then the conversion of land from
farmland to a vineyard ([Mark] 12:1b, 2) would be an event that would
trigger such a response. The building of the vineyard and the
violence it generates also describes the conflict of two value
systems. Elites continually sought to expand their holdings and add
to their wealth at the expense of the peasants.”9
So, the creation of new vineyards was part of a system of wealth
transformation from the subsistence peasants to the very wealthy.
Herzog then seems this as step one in a spiral of violence that went
like this:
“The
spiral begins in the everyday oppression and exploitation of the poor
by the ruling class.This violence is often covert and sanctioned by
law, such as the hostile takeover of peasant land. More often than
not, peasants simply adjust and adapt to these incursions by the
elites in order to maintain their subsistence standard; but… even
peasants have a breaking point. When their very subsistence is
threatened, they will revolt. This is the second phrase of the
spiral of violence, and it is this phase that the parable depicts in
great detail. Inevitably, such rebellions or revolts are repressed
through the use of force, as the final question of the parable
suggests. This officially sanctioned violence defines the final
phase of the spiral of violence, which always occurs ‘under the
pretext of safeguarding public order [or] national security.”10
I
have, to this point, been following the commentaries of multiple
brilliant scholars: ones who differentiated the current form of the
parable from the one Jesus likely told, ones that explain the
economic factors of vineyards, ones that connect economic systems
with violence. However, first I’m going to draw my own conclusion,
one that none of them came around to.
To
get there, I want to go back to a seemingly simple point John Dominic
Crossan made while he was here. He mentioned that Jesus was killed
for being a non-violent revolutionary, and we know this because he
was killed alone instead of being killed with all of his followers
like he would have been if he’d led a violent revolt. John Dominic
Crossan is one of many scholars who think that Jesus was very
intentionally nonviolent, and that was a definitional characteristic
of his movement. I agree with them.
My
suspicion is that if Jesus told this story, he told it to talk about
violent resistance and nonviolent resistance. He would have told
this story to point out that violence tends to beget violence, and to
offer an alternative. The spiral of violence: taking away people’s
livelihoods, killing in self-defense, repressed rebellions was NOT
the vision Jesus had for the people. By naming how things tend to go
down in the world, by talking about how others were choosing to act,
he would have been differentiating his movement from theirs.
The
answer to Matthew’s question at the end of the parable, “Now when
the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
is that the owner would either kill them directly or displace them
without any resources to allow them to die slowly. In the
allegorical version of the story when God becomes the landowner,
that’s disgusting. However, if Jesus’ intention was to point out how
the world works and
offer an alternative,
it
is worth listening to.
This
week, it seems worth remembering that we are followers of a man who
lived in a time of violence, who choose nonviolence and invited
others to choose nonviolence with him. John Dominic Crossan invited
us to remember that there is power in nonviolence too, and that is a
power of the followers of Christ. The empire that perpetuated
violence in the of Jesus killed only him because they thought the
threat of violence would kill his movement, but it failed.
Nonviolent resistance could not be stopped so easily.
The
question for today is how we practice nonviolent resistance in the
ways that Jesus did: which were pointed, powerful, and effective in
caring for the vulnerable people of God. This week has felt
overwhelming: paying attention to yet another mass murder, learning
more and more about the ways that the people of Puerto Rico have been
systematically impoverished, and watching as another large swath of
people prepare for yet another hurricane. Nonviolent resistance
takes intentionality, focus, communication, collaboration,
creativity, and commitment. But it has brought justice to this world
time and time again. (If you need an example, the Civil Rights
Movement in this country is the most accessible, but the list is
really quite long). The next successful movements for justice will
be wise to follow the same method that Jesus used: nonviolent
resistance. For that I hope we can all say: Thanks be to God. Amen
1
Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five
Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA,
1993), pages 510.
2
Ched Myers, Binding
the Strong Man
( Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988, 2008), page 309.
3
William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech,
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), p. 101.
4Gospel
of Thomas 65:1-7, Scholars Version.
5
Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science
Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), p. 110.
6
Myers, 309.
7
Herzog, 102.
8
Herzog, 103.
9
Herzog, 107-108.
10
Herzog, 108-109, working with work from Helder Camara, 1971.
Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
October 8, 2018