Sermon for Septuagesima
“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”
The kingdom of heaven is imaged as God’s vineyard – not the Ste. Famille vineyard, not the vineyards of Grand Pré, not your vineyard, not my vineyard but God’s vineyard. It is a nice thought, especially in the bleak, mid-winter, to think of the world, too, not as snow and ice, but as a fruitful vineyard that connects us to the kingdom of heaven. To do so means to exercise our theological imaginations.
The world is the vineyard of creation. To see the world in that way is to be reminded that it is God’s world, a world which reflects God’s will and purpose for our humanity. In a way, this parable is a strong reminder of that significant spiritual truth. In a way, too, this parable recalls us to the justice of the Creator in the good order of his creation. “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” Now, there’s a thought.
Can’t God just do whatever he likes? Whatever he wills? Such is a voluntarist conception of God which emphasizes the sovereign freedom of God at the expense of the sovereign justice of God. Yet, it is those two things that are joined together here, I think, in this Gospel story. What is being challenged is not God’s justice but our sense of human justice. What is being challenged is our propensity to measure God by our standards, by our wills and desires and expectations, if you will.
The Gospel returns us to a proper relation to God and to the nature of our lives in his vineyard. In a way, it is really all about grace. Grace is the free gift of God but that free gift perfects and does not destroy the created world. Grace corrects and counters but, ultimately, does not override and deny the character of the world and the creatures within it. That is the beauty and the truth of Redemption.
