“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.
The Epiphany season showed us the miracles of Christ to awaken us to the wonder of his divine presence with us and to the vision of redemption that he alone presents and provides. With Septuagesima Sunday, we embark upon a new programme with a new and different kind of emphasis. The pre-Lenten season of the ‘gesimas’ seeks to prepare us for the journey of Lent. It does so through the power of grace perfecting nature.
Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficiet. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. This is one of those marvelous medieval tags from Thomas Aquinas that reverberate and re-echo in our minds and souls. It makes us think about what it means to run the race and to obtain the prize, that “incorruptible crown” which also signifies the kingdom of heaven. The reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians speaks to us, I think, about the virtue of temperance. The word is there in the text. Temperance is one of the four classical or cardinal virtues. It is the virtue of self-control or self-mastery. But, as Paul indicates, what is involved in self-control or temperance is not something just for himself and his own self-interest. It is not a self-improvement exercise. No. Practising the virtue of temperance is for the sake of the community, for the sake of the Kingdom. He does not live simply for himself but for the good of others.
So, too, in relation to the Gospel. Our labours are not just for the sake of personal self-interest – how much is in it for me? What do I get out of it? It is primarily about the underlying grace of God without which there would be no world at all and no human community. Thus, to speak of the world as a vineyard is an incredibly powerful image. It recalls us to the justice of God’s creation.
And it suggests that the fruitfulness of the world and our lives in the world can only be according to divine justice, according to what is right. “Whatsoever is right, I will give you,” says the Master of the Vineyard. What God gives in creation and in redemption is right and just by definition.
We have made a mess of the vineyard through our sins and follies, to be sure. We do not need to count the ways! But this Gospel parable would recall us to the Master of the Vineyard who seeks precisely what is right for us according to his own righteousness. To be open to that is really our freedom.
An uncomfortable theme in the Scriptures, and one which we are reluctant to face, let alone consider, is “the wrath of God.” This is not about the projection heavenward of some sort of human emotion. Neither is it about some sort of divine irrationality and sheer willfulness on the part of God. That God can do whatever he likes is, of course, true but meaningless and trite if we leave out of the picture what we are shown about what he likes, namely, truth and justice, mercy and love; qualities that stretch us beyond ourselves because they are the measure of us and not the other way around.
And so with the concept of God’s wrath, too, we may say. God’s wrath is nothing less (and nothing more) than his love of his own righteousness for the sake of which he seeks what is right for his creation. For the human creation that means that God speaks to our hearts and minds, to our consciences. So often our view and vision is too limited and utterly incomplete. We “see,” as Paul will say at the end of the season of the ‘gesimas’, but only “in a glass darkly.”
Ultimately, the divine will which gives what is right is the love of God which seeks the perfection of our humanity, not its annihilation, not its destruction. Human justice is always incomplete and leads to envy and resentment – the very things we see in the Gospel story, the very things that arise out of the perversity of our sense of entitlement. The divine justice, which by definition gives what is right for us, perfects our wills especially in terms of our relationships with one another. It is a strong but necessary lesson.
We labour and, no doubt, there are struggles and complaints. There are those who have borne the burden and the heat of the day who grumble and murmur against the Johnny-come-latelies. But in so many ways, our labour as labourers in the vineyard of the Lord is simply our freedom.
When we think that we can earn our way into heaven, we deny the real meaning of heaven. It is only possible by the grace of God. To be open to that changes everything. This is what Luther saw so very clearly against a voluntarist and nominalist view of Christian life. Our works cannot be a means to gain God’s good grace. We cannot earn our way to heaven. We all fall far short and in so many, many ways. It is honesty to say so. No. Our labours, suggests Luther, need to be seen as faith-works, things done out of our faith and love of Jesus and not out of the calculating self-interest of our willfulness, as if we were entitled to heaven. As such faith-works are works of grace. They are about God’s grace at work in us.
We work and that is our freedom; all the more when we understand that we work only by the grace of God in the first place.
Temperance and justice are the two virtues that are set before us in our readings. But temperance and justice are seen as being perfected by the higher justice that is divine charity, the divine love which creates and redeems. It does not destroy. “We, who are justly punished for our offences,” as the Collect puts it, pray that we “may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness,” and all “for the glory of thy Name.”
“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”
Fr. David Curry
Septuagesima 2011