Sermon for Septuagesima
Go ye also into the vineyard
In the bleak mid-winter, it must seem strange to be talking about vineyards. Yet, our province increasingly abounds with more and more vineyards, not to mention hops and craft beer! And while this seems to be a new phenomenon, we should remember that over a thousand years ago, the Maritime provinces, as we call them, were known by the Norse explorers as Vinland – Wine Land. The Medieval Labours of the Months tagged to the signs of the Zodiac sculpted on many a medieval cathedral portal or depicted in stained glass windows or painted in Books of Hours recall us to a profound connection to the land, a connection to the seasons and the human labours that attend them. February is often depicted as a time to sit by the fire while March is the time to tend the vines. Yet that labour too will vary across Europe in accord with climatic zones and climate changes. So perhaps the idea of going into the vineyard even in February is not so strange after all.
It is here an image for the spiritual life and for our reading in the vineyard of the text, the Scriptures. Reading nature in the Book of Nature, and reading the Scriptures means learning about God revealed and made known through both. It is not by accident that the Sunday and Daily Office readings begin today with our reading through Genesis. The point is the connection between land and God. In thinking about creation and about the land we are recalled to the Lord of the vineyard who is the Lord of our souls. Isaiah speaks about Israel as the Lord’s vineyard – something of God’s planting from which God seeks the fruit of righteousness and holiness. It is an image of the greatest intimacy; indeed, a love song. “My beloved had a vineyard … He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes … he looked for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” Isaiah explains the image. “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel … he looked for justice, but, behold, bloodshed.”
It is in that context that perhaps we can begin to appreciate the radical meaning of the Gospel for Septuagesima Sunday which inaugurates the season of pre-Lent. In so many ways, it marks the beginning of the struggle to internalize what we have been given to see about Christ in the fullness of his divinity and in the revelation of God’s will for our humanity. The Gospel of the labourers in the vineyard belongs to that task and challenge. It makes the point that the justice of God is far more and far greater than the justice of man and yet belongs to the divine good for our humanity, a greater form of goodness than what belongs to the limits of human justice.
Last Sunday marked the interesting conjunction between Candlemas and the end of the Epiphany season, thus pointing us towards Lent and Easter. Apart from that providential coincidence of considerations, it was also the day that one of the great men of letters, the Franco-American scholar, literary critic, writer and philosopher, George Steiner died. In 1974, he gave the Massey Lectures entitled “Nostalgia for the Absolute.”
