Astonishing Redemption for Reject Bricks - Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on October 8, 2023, the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

After Palm Sunday and the triumphal entry of the king who enters the city not riding a warhorse but in a farcical parody of world power comes riding in on a donkey, and before the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday when Jesus sets his own self-offering at the center of religious worship, undoing the human obsession with ritual cleanliness and uncleanliness that cuts across faith traditions as he says, “Try it my way—this is my sacrifice, this is my body and my blood”—what happens in the time in between? On those early weekdays of Holy Week, Holy Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, in the lead up to the arrest and the trial and crucifixion, those days in-between are the occasion for some of Jesus’s final teaching, including confrontation and argument with the religious leaders and crowds who eventually come after him. Jesus tells today’s Parable of the Wicked Tenants right as this conflict in Jerusalem is winding to its highest pitch, in this space before the Last Supper yet after Palm Sunday. It’s one of the final parables, soaked in the atmosphere of impending violence. This helps us to understand something of the overtones of despair and determination lacing the parable. 

Jesus has come to Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets. For love of human beings, he knowingly set his face toward this confrontation and his inevitable death. He laments over this city, longing for the people to repent and choose life. He isn’t coming as the militant, conquering hero Messiah many of his people have been awaiting. This Messiah is one acquainted with grief, a suffering servant. God made flesh has come to be with God’s people in all our muck and mess, joining his divinity to our suffering humanity. Emptying himself, as we heard in the kenotic hymn last week, the song of Christ’s self-emptying in the second chapter of Philippians, emptying himself, not grasping onto power or divinity even but pouring himself out into our human life, Christ became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. His death is the mustard seed from which a great tree will spring. It starts as one utterly lost and despised, and this point of failure of human effort is the one fixed point, the one sturdy place in a world of changes and chances, in a world of contingency. The Paschal mystery is the singularity toward which all condenses, from which everything radiates. Every absence and failure and grief and despair and death in our lives overlaps with his death. He condescends to share in a death like ours so that we can share in his resurrection to new life.

The great irony of this parable of course, is that the vicious tenants of the vineyard are after the inheritance. These custodians of the vineyard are, like ourselves, filled with rage and envy and greed. They refuse to render the fruits of the vineyard to the landowner in the harvest season. The hour has come—the landowner sends his own son to them: surely they will respect my son! But they say, let’s kill him and take his inheritance. The thing is, they could have had it for free. Jesus wants nothing more than to give us his inheritance! Jesus, the divine Word of the Father, appears in the flesh to offer us everything the Father has given him: that is, life in God, discovering our heart abiding in the heart of the Holy One as “partakers of the divine nature,” beating in time with the loving heartbeat of all creation. Jesus is dying to give us this treasure in heaven, and to share with us his breathtaking perception that the kingdom of heaven has come near, is already here. This is what Christian tradition calls theosis, or divinization and as adopted children of God it is our birthright. It’s a much higher calling than simple moralism. We were created for union and communion with the living God, called to share the intimacy Jesus shares with his Father. We “become by grace what Christ is by nature,” as St. Athanasius of Alexandria taught.

Jesus wants to share his inheritance with us. He is sharing his inheritance with us: his self-giving love, poured out for each of us, draws us even now into the love of God in the Spirit. This undercurrent of love, love that is strong and unswerving, love that can’t be earned but is simply given, always and ahead of time, this divine love is the firm foundation, an immovable, unshatterable rock. In the crucified Jesus we see the human rejection and betrayal of this can’t-earn-it, can’t-lose-it love, and we also see the sign of God’s unbreakable faithfulness to us in the face of our betrayals. Rowan Williams writes: “Jesus crucified is God crucified, so we believe. Jesus is the total and final embodiment in history of God's loving mercy; and so this cross is a unique, terrible, extreme act of violence—a summary of all sin. It represents the human rejection of love. And not even that can destroy God: with the wounds of the cross still disfiguring his body, he returns out of hell to his disciples and wishes them peace ... whatever the deficiency and the drying-up of human capacity to love, the killing of love by pain, there is still, at the heart of everything, a love that cannot be killed by pain.”

Or, as Jesus quotes from Psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes.” God chooses to make Jesus’s shameful and ignominious death the center of gravity of our salvation. Despised and rejected, condemned by Jewish and Roman leaders alike (both church and state), Jesus is taken outside of the city, exiled and executed on Golgotha the garbage heap. A stony obstacle that would be rejected by any thinking builder. Yet this is the Lord’s doing, this is how God has chosen to effect the salvation of the whole world, and it is marvelous in our eyes. Better translation here might be, it is shocking to our eyes, it is astonishing, a scandal. The cross defies any of our usual sense of propriety. But Jesus’s sharing of his inheritance doesn’t depend on any of these usual measures of success or worthiness we measure the world by, not even the religious ones. 

Jesus is inviting us to offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. In the vineyard of the Lord, the fruits we offer to the one who planted and built and dug and tended are no less than our whole lives, just as we are, nothing held back. We offer our widow’s mite: our failures, our littleness, our limitations, all those places where our life most closely overlaps with Jesus’ death. God wants nothing more than our trust, and this is what we have to give. Faith. Not anything we can do, not a righteousness of our own doing that depends on hitting an external target, but the righteousness from God based on faith, as Paul writes to the Philippians. Paul is speaking as someone who has experienced the full range of human violence. He has lived through the persecution and attack on both sides. The cross sticks a spoke in the wheel of the machinery of death and despair. A very real part of that machinery of death and despair is the way we search for personal gain and use it to shore us up against loss. But all of Paul’s many fine accomplishments, his excellent pedigree, everything he once claimed as his own, he now counts it as loss, rubbish. He puts it on the garbage heap and places all his trust in the crucified Jesus who has made him his own. Who has made me and you his very own. Paul shows us we are saved in loss and death and failure and the end of all our efforts: this is the place where we can finally meet God with open hands. St. Mary’s, the Episcopal church in Provo, is a lovely little brick church built in 1907, and it was built using only donated seconds from the brickyard. So every brick in that church is a reject brick. And sitting in the pew you can see the flecks and variations in the bricks that caused the builders to throw them aside. But in the economy of God every point of weakness is extremely valuable. Here we learn to surrender our own effort to control and trust in God’s care and providence. Flawed and varied just as we are, we are God’s pleasant planting; we are being built into a house for God’s indwelling presence.

And when we slide back as we do into propriety and self-sufficiency and the scapegoating blame of the other, God will not put us to a miserable death. God is interested in breaking our human-created cycle of violence, not perpetuating it. Notice that in the account of this parable in Matthew the imagined violence and vengeance of the landowner is in the mouths of the hearers, presumably those who are simultaneously conspiring to put Jesus to a wretched and miserable death. We see the attribution of human vengeance and striving to God. So often we project our fears of retaliation onto the divine. The Bible is a record of ordinary people striving to know God. It is trustworthy in that it reliably opens onto the presence of our reliable Lord, who is steadfast and faithful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. But it’s a messy process, this struggle to know God and to tell about it in words. Holy Scripture is both God breathed and covered in human fingerprints. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit, yet embodied and embedded in the context of its human authors: the Word made flesh pleased to dwell among us.

And because he dwells among us, what’s true of Jesus will be true of us, too: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

Amen.