Year: 2011

“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”

The gospel which orders our understanding on this day is the parable of the sower and the seed. It focuses our thoughts on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. The cultivation of the ground, however, immediately recalls us to the story of the Fall in this morning’s first lesson. The ground is cursed. Adam, who signifies our humanity collectively and individually speaking, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God (pun intended). The ground of creation becomes the place of our alienation from God.

In a delightful image, the Lord God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence in the fearful beginnings of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.

The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe but in the disobedience of our humanity. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to us – it is only to humans that a commandment can be given – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.

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“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.

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