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.”
The lectures point out that in the decline of the spiritual narratives of understanding, especially, the Christian narratives, other ideologies rushed in to fill the void which both supplanted and assumed the Judeo-Christian and Islamic metaphysic at one and the same time. But they have themselves collapsed. The ideologies which he named, the remnants of which are still with us, are Marxism, the Social Anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Freudianism. In the face of their collapse there is what has come to be called ‘post-modernism’ perhaps best described by Francois Lyotard as an “incredulity about metanarratives.” This is a despair of any kind of overarching narrative of meaning. It leaves us, paradoxically, with a narrative of nihilism and as such is unlivable because unthinkable. Steiner is prescient if not altogether prophetic about what this collapse of the spiritual means. One of his Massey lectures is entitled “Little Green Men.”
There is nothing more gullible, even more superstitious, than our current world. It is awash with no end of conspiracy theories, exponentially increased now by virtue of social media. Umberto Eco, in his 2015 lecture at the La Milanesiana cultural festival, dissects and destroys with surgical precision and wit a number of contemporary conspiracy theories such as 9/11 which is almost hilarious in the way in which it plays on the number eleven, and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and its dependence on Leigh and Baigent’s The Holy Grail; conspiracies upon conspiracies. Eco undertakes an amusing parody of the Da Vinci Code by riffing on the number eleven, illustrating the way in which numerology can be pushed and pulled in any number of ways according to one’s preconceptions, an echo of his novel “Foucault’s Pendulum.” (I can only imagine what he would have to say about the ‘Oak Island Mystery’, perhaps like his novel, the mystery of a secret where there is no secret). But beyond exposing the absurdities in such things, Eco quotes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s astute observation that conspiracy theories free you “from the burden of having to face the truth” and thus excuse you from accountability and agency. You give up. It is all about others against you. It leads to passivity and despair with respect to thinking and doing by defaulting to fantasies and to nonsense upon nonsense.
My own experience is with students who are by no means stupid and yet are nonetheless adamant, for instance, that the 1968 moon landing is a hoax, to take but one rather minor if disquieting example. Why do they think this? If one presses a little deeper one may find some answers in a distrust or suspicion of politics and science, of authority in general as well as a kind of adolescent overconfidence allied to information overload without any critical awareness that might counter the naive acceptance of nonsense. Such things go to the deeper form of our contemporary malaise: the divorce between the ethical and the political, something which this Gospel story raises by going to the heart of the matter. What is that? Simply this. Justice, what is right, concerns more than our immediate assertions and opinions, and even more than our various assumptions about distributive justice. Justice, in its deeper meaning, is ultimately grounded in the concept of what is good for all, and even more, in the justitia dei, the justice of God without which all and every other form of justice is not only incomplete but actually a kind of injustice. Justice is more than calculated self-interest, more than economic reason.
This is ancient truth. The movement from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, which is an essential feature of the Epiphany season is only part of the story of what belongs to the real truth and dignity of our humanity. There is, in Plato’s terms, the necessity of going back into the cave, his famous image for our world where we mistake the shadows for reality. There is an important difference from being in the cave ignorantly and in returning to the cave after learning about truth and reality. Returning to the cave is essential to justice which must be for all and not for the few; contemplation cannot mean our isolation from the community.
In Christian terms, it is about our lives in the world, in the places in which we find ourselves, here imagined as a vineyard even in the miseries of February. Here is the place where the virtues of the soul have their play. The virtues are activities of the soul that counter our passivities. “Why stand ye here idle” In the Gesima Sundays what we see is the transformation of the natural virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice into the virtues of grace, of faith, hope, and charity. These are activities of the soul. Justice here is raised to a higher principle, to the principle of the Good; in short, to what is good for all rather than what benefits the few. The image is not the cave but a vineyard, itself a positive image of the created world and the place where we are to live for God and for one another; in short, for the good of all as grounded in the life of God.
Such is the radical meaning of our labouring in the vineyard. It is not about how long; it is not even about how much. It is about the radical truth of our lives as lived out in the vineyard of creation and in the redemption of that labour and vineyard suggested if not signalled in this Gospel. It means our longing for the righteousness and truth of God in our own souls and our acting upon what we have learned. God looks for righteousness, for the good for all. And so must we.
Go ye also into the vineyard
Fr. David Curry
Septuagesima, Feb. 9th 2020