The Lynching Tree and the Welcome Table

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost, October 4, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

One of the ways to understand the difference Jesus makes in our lives is to look at the crucifixion through the lens of scapegoating violence. Scapegoating is as old as time. Indeed, theologian James Alison refers to Cain’s murder of his brother Abel as the “foundational murder”--the deluded notion that by expunging an apparent rival who is actually our brother from the face of the earth we can secure for ourselves the peace, abundance, and divine favor our hearts are literally made for. We think, in our upside-down, human-all-too-human way that the recognition of the gift of our belovedness--free, unmerited, and undeserved--can somehow be earned through casting out and exclusion. We think that the peace for which we are made, the original peaceableness of all things coming into being in a non-competitive and non-rivalrous way through Christ (through Him all things were made as the creed says) can be secured through heaping scapegoating violence on the backs of innocent victims. But the story of Holy Scripture tells us something different, doesn’t it?

One way to view the story of God’s people as told from Genesis to Revelation is as a story of the weaning from the scapegoating mechanism, from the deluded notion that through the sacrifice of an innocent victim or victims, peace can be achieved. In Genesis, we’ve seen that the story of Abraham can be read in such a way that it’s not God demanding Abraham sacrifice his only son, but Abraham’s unexamined and largely unconscious cultural conditioning that leads him to think that God would somehow desire the death of an innocent. The ram hanging by its horns is a symbol of the beginning of the end of sacrifice, as if God condescends (meets us in our weakness as Paul says) and provides an animal as a stand-in for the child Isaac until the people of God can understand that sacrifice of any kind other than as an inward disposition to the presence and action of God in our lives, is just wrongheaded. As Isaiah says, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats” (1:11). The much-celebrated faithfulness of Abraham is not his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but to his willingness to listen to a voice that dares him to go against the grain, to defy convention, his willingness to listen to the voice that stays his hand, the voice that calls, “Abraham! Abraham!” while his knife is raised. Abraham’s faithfulness consists of his willingness to listen to a voice other than the one he thinks is God--the voice of his cultural conditioning inherited from teachers, parents, nation, and religious institutions. Abraham’s projection of God is seen through, sacrificed if you will, so that a truer image of God--the God of goodness, mercy, and loving-kindness--might emerge from the ashes.

The Israelites themselves, led by Moses out of Egypt, through the walls of water at the Red Sea, and into the Wilderness are not immune to the scapegoating impulse. Just last week, when water is in short supply, they huddle up in the classic depiction of mob violence (the many against the one) and are ready to stone him. They think that by killing Moses, circling as mob against their perceived threat and extirpating him, they will somehow slake their thirst. But like drinking salt water, violence and casting out never quench our thirst. There might be a brief time when immediately after casting out our victim we taste peace, but it is illusory, transitory, as fleeting as morning dew as the sun climbs higher in the sky. Sooner or later, dis-ease arises, and the scapegoating mechanism kicks back in and we cast about for another victim to expel and the cycle begins again. Violence begets violence. Hate begets hate. Exclusion begets more exclusion and the meat-grinder grinds on.

That’s what’s behind the three commandments God gives to Israelites through Moses--“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.” The injunctions against having any Gods other than God, against making an idol of human-created ideas like sacrifice, and against using God’s name in the practice of sacrificing others are core to the creation of the beloved community, a community of love where no one is cast out, no one stepped over, no one scapegoated. Scapegoating is a form of idolatry at its most extreme and bloody. Scapegoating boils down to placing our human generated ideas of who and how God works onto God--baptising our deluded addiction to violence with God’s imprimatur. Killing God in the name of serving God (cue Saul of Tarsus).

The Parable of the Wicked Tenants places the whole scapegoating mechanism and the morass of cyclical violence squarely before us. It’s clear that Jesus--speaking as he is to the authorities and directly on the heels of last week’s indictment of the Sadducees for their faithlessness in being unwilling to recognize John’s and Jesus’ authority--is condemning the leaders of the nation of Israel and predicting with eerie clarity his own death as a scapegoated innocent victim. This parable is purely diagnostic, in a sense. It holds before us the utterly predictable, utterly tragic, and utterly logical consequences of a vineyard run in the thrall of violence. It’s interesting to see that the whole process begins with taking something that never belonged to them in the first place. The vineyard (an ancient symbol of the nation of Israel) always belonged to the landowner. The harvest was rightly his. But the tenants want the fruit of the land for themselves. They put themselves in the place of the landowner, in the place of God, and things immediately go downhill from there. They commit the primal sin of idolatry by putting their wants and desires at the center of everything. 

Since we’re entering the stewardship season--where we reflect upon how the use of our time, talent, and treasure reflects our core values and what it means to live and give sacrificially in the spirit of self-offering love--it’s worth noting that nothing, literally nothing, we “have” is really ours. Everything comes to us as sheer gift. And when we claim something as private treasure that truly belongs only to God, bad things happen. Giving, sharing, welcoming, and forgiving are what reflect most closely the true nature of life in God. The opposite--holding on, hoarding up, excluding, and exacting revenge--ignore the giftedness that is our true situation and put the craven pursuit power, prestige, and possessions in the place that properly belongs to God and God alone.

One of the savvy things that Matthew does in his version of this parable is that he puts the answer to Jesus’ question-- “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”-- in the mouths of the crowd, the authorities. In Mark and Luke, Jesus is the one who replies that the landowner will put those miserable wretches to death.” But in Matthew, the answer comes from the crowd. It shows us powerfully, how trapped the authorities are in the rabbit warren of cyclical violence. They can’t conceive of a landowner, a king, a God who could do anything other than exact revenge and get his pound of flesh. But that is exactly what Jesus does. That is the difference--the history-pivoting difference--that Jesus makes. He shows us that there is another way to be than to just meet violence with violence and kill those who killed you. Jesus forgives on the way to cross (forgive them Lord they are so caught up in scapegoating violence that they know not what they do!). Jesus comes back bearing the wounds of his own scapegoating execution outside the city walls on a tree planted on a garbage heap and breathes peace on the disciples. He enters the fear-locked upper room where the disciples are cowering and breathes forgiveness and reconciling love. 

To get a real sense of what this looks like in the context of our parable imagine that the landowner called the Wicked Tenants to his house after they had killed his son. They would be expecting an armed guard at the very least. They would be expecting the landowner to incensed and breathing threats of violence. They would be expecting the dead body of the landowner’s son to be lying in state. Instead, they are greeted with open arms. The landowner invites them to a sumptuous feast. The armed guards are nowhere to be found and in their expected place are musicians. More surprising is the presence of the son himself... alive, but still bearing the marks of their murderous violence. More surprising still, the son comes out to greet them, wraps his arms about the perpetrators and says, “I love you. I forgive you. Lay down your burden and come and eat with me at my father’s table. There is more than enough for everyone! But first, let me wash your feet.”

The son in this alternate ending--Jesus--breaks the cycle of violence. The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus--who breathes peace and eats with the disciples on the shore--are the Gospel-shaped ending to the story. We, the Church, are called to be the Gospel-shaped ending to the parable. Violence and vengeance don’t have the last word. In Jesus the scapegoating violence is revealed once-for-all as the Satanic dead-end it truly is. And the community around Jesus, the people called to have the same mind in them that was in Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:5), are called be instruments of that same peace Jesus breathes. Jesus shows us in stark, bloody, lamb-to-the-slaughter  relief the dead-end nature scapegoating mechanism carried to its extreme--we kill God. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He shows us another way to be, he shows us the road, the path, the Royal Way of Love towards welcome table and away from the lynching tree. He shows us what it means to be weaned of sacrifice and born anew in a loving, liberating, and life-giving relation with God, each other and all of creation. That’s the vineyard without walls, without watch towers, waiting to be born, with God’s help, right here and right now. Take and eat.