16th Sunday after PentecostIsaiah 5:1-7Philippians 3:4b-14Matthew 21:33-46I call myself a gardener. I've even written how-to articles on growing things. But anyone who took a look at the burned-over mess in my front yard this year would have their doubts. Whatever my thoughts about myself, whatever a byline might state, this summer I failed to live up to that title. I failed, in my distractions and the particular demands of this drought season, to carry out the disciplines necessary to be a gardener. I was glad to claim the title “gardener” and not suffer the heat, time and sweat that would really make me one.
Because of this experience, I can understand some of what the Pharisees must have felt as they heard Jesus' parable—they were God's people, the rightful inhabitants of the promise-land, the keepers of the Law. “To be God's people”: that was how they defined themselves, particularly among their pagan neighbors and occupiers. But Jesus calls into question that identity. It is not the status of place or people that matter; it is the fruit, the outcomes, the actions. In this way Jesus is something of a pragmatist: what matters are not abstract realities or truths; we may call things true only when they actually make a difference.
The Pharisee's shouldn't have been so surprised by Jesus' parable. It’s a riff on Isaiah 5:1-7 in which God rejects a vineyard because of its lack of good fruit. Isaiah used that metaphor to call the people of Israel to repentance generations before and some certainly followed that call. But in Jesus' story the Pharisees do not receive the opportunity to repent. Instead they burn with the desire for murder, again demonstrating their lack of the fruit of the Kingdom.
One Pharisee who did repent, eventually, is Paul of Tarsus. In our reading from Philippians, chapter three, we see the hope and life that the pharisees could have embraced through repentance. Here Paul talks about his claims as a member of “God's chosen people”—the tenants, as it were. He calls himself “a Hebrew born of Hebrews...as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” But all of that Paul calls “loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
Paul switches his focus from the status that he might claim as an ethnic and religiously righteous Jew to the goal in Christ for which he strives. Speaking almost in terms of an endurance athlete he writes: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”
Paul moves in the short narrative of his life from the static identity of Jewishness to the dynamic and growing status of a disciple. In this he loses his claims to certainty, his claims to having grasped the prize, and talks rather of following, of striving, of “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.” As Stanley Hauerwas writes in his commentary on the parable of the wicked tenants, “Matthew makes clear that we cannot know the truth that is Christ without undergoing the training to be his disciple. Those undergoing such training have little time for speculative games concerning who is in and who is out.”
The other day I went out and began to pull some weeds. While working around my sweet potatoes I pushed my hand down in the earth and found a nice large tuber. A new season brings new hope. I've set a hoe by my door in an act of repentance. Who cares if I am a “gardener” or not—its time to get back to work, cultivating soil, giving plants what they need to grow. Hard, faithful work is what matters. Let others decide what we are.