Br. David Vryhof

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15C)

Isaiah 5:1-7

The message of Christianity is a message of love. We declare that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16) and that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” to rescue us from death and grant us new life (Jn 3:16). We believe that Jesus, the Son of God, “became flesh and lived among us” (Jn 1:14) to reveal to us the God of love, the God he knew and loved intimately from before all time, and that he summoned us to live in loving union with God and with one another, serving and caring for one another with genuine affection. In Christianity, the message is all about love.

The Scriptures that are at the heart of our faith have a lot to say about love, but the love of which they speak is not always a warm, cuddly love. Love, when it is rooted in truth, doesn’t always wrap us in its arms and protect us. Sometimes it does the opposite: it exposes us, confronts us, and makes us uncomfortable. Jesus spoke the truth in love – to his disciples, to the religious and secular leaders of his day, and even to his enemies – and it wasn’t always pretty.

We see that “tough love” at work in our first lesson today. Isaiah 5 begins as a love song – not about Isaiah’s love for God, but about God’s love for his as-yet-unidentified “vineyard.” We are told that God (the “beloved”) showered his love upon this vineyard: selecting a fertile hillside, cultivating the soil and clearing the land, planting the very best vines, building hedges and a watch tower to protect it from human and animal invaders, and digging a winepress where the grapes could be processed into wine and stored for future use. In creating this vineyard, the beloved spared no effort or expense; he did everything possible to guarantee a fruitful crop.

But here the love song turns sour. After all that loving attention and hard labor, God expected his vineyard to yield abundant and flavorful grapes – but he finds instead that it has produced wild grapes – sour, inedible, “stinking” grapes.

In his disappointment, he asks, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” (v. 3). There’s no good answer to that question, no good reason why the object of God’s love would yield repulsive, stinking fruit.

It seems the only thing to be done is to destroy it and this, it seems, is what God intends to do. But this is a metaphor and now its meaning is made clear. “The vineyard is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting” (v. 7). In other words, YOU – Israel and Judah, God’s chosen people – are the vineyard that produced these stinky grapes!

The rich and juicy grapes that God wanted were justice and righteousness; instead, what God discovered was the exact opposite. Instead of justice God found bloodshed; instead of righteousness he found the cries of the oppressed.

Seminary Professor Scott Hoezee describes the context in which Isaiah is writing:

“Israel had a form of justice, but it was justice for the few, the wealthy, the lucky “winners” of society. Most of what the upper crust had was ill-gotten gain; it was built upon the shed blood of the poor. Some of the people looked very righteous, very pious – they went to the Temple, observed the Sabbath, prayed now and again. Yet their ears were deaf to the cries of distress which God’s ears picked out very easily. Instead of being the locus of justice, the Temple became a shelter for the elite whose walls were used to keep them from hearing the cries of the needy.”[i]

This is a message of love that undoubtedly made its hearers uncomfortable, and that should make us just as uncomfortable. To what extent has the Church become “a shelter for the elite whose walls [are] used to keep [us] from hearing the cries of the needy”? What else – the pace of our lives? our obsession with technology? our consumerism and materialism? our political infighting? our decision to put ourselves and our needs first? – what else might be keeping us from “hearing the cries of the needy?”

What is the “justice and righteousness” that God was looking for? It is clear throughout the Hebrew Scriptures that justice involved far more than punishing criminals. Crimes carried punishments in ancient Israel, of course, but the “justice” that Isaiah and the prophets spoke about had to do with dealing fairly with others and protecting society’s most vulnerable members.

The “righteousness” that the prophets called for was not about pious behavior; it was about “doing right” towards the weakest members of society.

One phrase occurs again and again throughout the Scriptures: “the widow, the orphan and the alien.” Moses and the prophets made it abundantly clear that God was especially concerned with women who had lost their husbands, with children who had lost their parents, and with the “strangers within your gates,” immigrants and refugees who had lost their homes and their homelands. These people could easily fall through the cracks. The prophets insisted that God cared passionately about them and that it was the duty of the people of God to care for them and protect them.

In his prophecy Isaiah names several specific ways in which Judah perpetrated injustice: (1:23) they failed to defend the cause of the widow and orphan, (1:29) they coveted and stored up wealth for themselves, (3:14-15), they oppressed the poor, (5:23) they acquitted the guilty and deprived the innocent of their rights. These acts of injustice are the stinky fruit to which this parable refers.

The words of love here are sharp and direct. They pierce the conscience and expose the hidden depths of the soul. “I wanted you to produce the rich fruits of justice and righteousness on earth;” God says, “that is why I worked so hard on your behalf. But you failed to fulfill my purpose. You chose to live only for yourselves. You neglected the poor and the vulnerable. You turned your back on the stranger and ignored the cries of the needy.”

What then shall we do, as privileged as we are?

The first thing is to train ourselves to be mindful of the needs of the neglected. To consider their plight. To question and resist the forces that contribute to their oppression. To look for opportunities to align ourselves with their cause.

The great spiritual leader of India, Mahatma Gandhi, once suggested that when we consider any course of action we should first imagine a very poor person and ask ourselves, How will this action affect them?

In our community’s Rule of Life we admit that “the security we enjoy as a community makes us strangers to the precariousness and destitution that are the lot of the poor.” It goes on to suggest that because of this, “we must continually watch for signs that God is calling us to live and work with those who endure the hardships of material poverty. Even when our work among God’s poor is limited in scope we should be their allies in every way.” The Rule calls us to “ruthless self-examination as to our real solidarity with the poor.” It insists that “we are to commit ourselves to advocacy for the poor, and the struggle to restore to them their just share of power and the bounty of God.”[ii]

This, friends, is the standard by which we, too, will be judged. Recall the words of Jesus:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory… he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats… (T)he king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me…”

When the righteous ask when it was that they did this, the king will reply,

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Mt 25:31-46)

As we said at the beginning, “It’s all about love.”

[i] Scott Hoezee, Commentary on Isaiah 5:1-7; Center for Excellence in Preaching.

[ii] The Rule of the Society of St John the Evangelist, p.15.