I've just returned from
a long overdue retreat, spending 3 nights doing my best to be
attentive to God in the hermitage at Launde. In case you thought of
asking, on the whole I didn't do too badly thank you. It always takes
me at least half a day to disengage from all the stuff that fills my
head, to silence the well nigh ceaseless chatter and to listen...but
almost always, I do reach that place when the egocentric fog clears
and I return to my primary identity as a child of God. That's such a
good place to be.
But why I wanted to
share my recent experience was not so much to encourage you to take a
retreat, though I certainly do, but to share with you what happened
when I went through a green painted door in a long brick wall. It was
a beautiful afternoon, filled with birdsong, and I had been wandering
the grounds, enjoying the last snowdrops and the first bluebells and
listening to that silence that we never really find in the city,
where the low growl of traffic is a ceaseless ostinato, so familiar
that we no longer notice it until it stops. And in that silence I
came to the door...There was a sign, but it read not, as I'd expected
"Staff only" but simply, "Please close the door".
So I opened it, and went through. Through into a huge
expanse of walled kitchen garden, with beds for herbs and vegetables,
a deep well,a greenhouse filled with enormous improbable cacti, alien
visitors from another place, who were clearly thriving where they'd
landed. It was the sort of garden Mr McGregor could only have dreamed
of, its beds laid out in orderly ranks, ready for the summer crops
that would feed guests in the house. And that protective wall stood
to contain it, giving shelter, keeping out rabbits and deer...making
sure that whatever was planted had the BEST chance to flourish, fruit
and grow. Everything was just as it should be. All we needed was a
crop.
That was Isaiah's
problem too.
My beloved had a
vineyard, prepared the ground, tended the soil, planted the choicest
Vine, the Vine he had brought specially from Egypt...a people to be
God's own, and to model God's way of living for all the world to see.
Yet this hand - picked people had let God down. For all the care
lavished on them, they could not, would not be fruitful. Instead of
an abundant harvest of fine grapes to share, they were producing only
the tiny, bitter inedible wild grapes..fruit to pucker your mouth and
set your teeth on edge.
What more was there to
do?..an question taken up across the centuries by the prophet Micah
, before finding its place in the agonising grief of the Good Friday
reproaches. How could God love us more? Give us more of God's self?
"O my people. What
have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me..."
For Isaiah, here and
now is the moment of truth. Looking at the vineyard, God finds no
fruit, no justice, no righteousness on this Vine that is God's
people, Israel. To be this Vine means to receive God's special care,
God's loving nurture...but it means, too, to come under God's
judgement.
And there is nothing to
show him. No harvest at all.
"He expected
justice but saw bloodshed, righteousness but heard a cry."
A well tended vineyard,
with not a single grape. It was a theme that was to become
heartbreakingly familiar.
So God spoke through
the prophets again and again..the story of God's care and our
neglect, God's cherishing and our indifference. As Jesus spoke to
that mixed crowd in the Temple, where priests,scribes and elders
mingled with disciples and the curious bystanders, everyone present
knew that the vineyard parable was about them, about God's people,
the Jewish nation. They knew too that the rejected messengers were
those prophets who had tried, again and again, to call God's people
back to themselves...and to their core relationship with God. Had
tried to no avail.
But what next? A Son
and heir. Now we are onto unfamiliar ground...we enter a new chapter.
A Son???.
Who knows if the
tenants in the parable actually had anything worth offering their
landlord. Maybe, rather than cheating him of his profits, they were
simply trying to hide their own fruitlessness. They knew his hopes
and expectations, but knew too their own complete failure.They had
nothing to offer, no matter how many messengers, prophets, sons were
sent. Israel, called to be a light to the nations, a people shaped
each moment by God's law of love, had become instead a people bound
and defined by other laws, a people intent on protecting themselves
not for the sake of the fruit they might give to the world but for
their own security, hanging on for dear life to an identity that had
lost its purpose.
This is not just bad
discipleship but bad viniculture too. An American nun, Sr Judith
Sutera OSB, who is also a master Vine dresser, writes thus
"Good vines
require cutting and more cutting. A mile of runners won't give you
one more grape, so get rid of the branches that don't bear fruit. Do
you want to keep everything? Then expect nothing. Cut and then cut
some more."
It seems that this is
the point we have reached, that even God has run out of patience,
that the guardians of fruitless tradition have signed their own death
warrant. We have reached the end of the story of Israel the Vine,
but now God begins a new project, replacing the Temple whose core
purpose has been lost with one where the rejected Jesus becomes the
missing piece, the corner stone to comlete the whole building. Now he
becomes the template, against which we will all be measured...
Does that sound
terrifying...something beyond our highest dearest aspiration? Are you, like me, left scrabbling for good news in the dirt of a vineyard that seems to be so much less fruitful than you'd hoped?
Then remember that
Jesus also said I AM the Vine...not simply the one in whom God's
fullest intention for Israel is made good, but the one whose runners
stretch even into those places of least fruitfulness, the one who is
inextricably involved with our barren hopes, our wasted efforts, our
inertia, greed and fear. Jesus the Vine is connected with us in those
places where we are furthest from God's will and God's
pleasure...Indeed he is here scrabbling with us in the dirt as we
look desperately for some harvest worthy of the name.
Today Holy Week begins
and as we walk again the way of the Cross, it is to discover for
ourselves that the whole story of humanity, of God's love and our
intransigence is focussed on the person of Christ as he moves towards
Calvary. If we follow closely, the sorrow and love that drops from
the crucified one will transform our barren vineyards, softening our
hard ground and harder hearts til we are fully human once more. A
shoot shall spring up from the stump of Jesse...the Vine shall be
renewed, its branches reaching everywhere, to bear fruits of
righteousness for there is nowhere beyond the reach of that self
giving love.
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