May 11 2015
At the end of April, I caught a train from Edinburgh to Forres to visit congregations in the Presbytery of Moray and to speak to the presbytery on May 5 – my wife Vivien’s birthday, as it happens. Below is the sermon I preached in St Laurence Church, Forres, on May 3.
I would like to thank everyone I met for the warmth of their welome and in particular to thank Alasdair and Gillian Morton, who put me up (and put up with me) admirably.
On a very fertile hill
5th Sunday of Easter, May 3 2015
Isaiah 5.1-7; Psalm 22.25-31; 1 John 4.7-21; John 15.1-8
St Laurence Church of Scotland, Forres
“My friend had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug the soil and cleared it of stones; he planted the finest vines. He built a tower to guard them, dug a pit for treading the grapes. He waited for the grapes to ripen.”
This is eight centuries before Jesus Christ, and Isaiah of Jerusalem – my Jerusalem – is tearing a strip off his people, the people of the kingdom of Judah.
Isaiah’s friend – in other translations, Isaiah’s beloved – is God, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; and the vineyard is a metaphor for God’s people:
“Israel is the vineyard of the Lord Almighty; the people of Judah are the vines he planted.”
But the vineyard yields a poor harvest. After all his hard work, God was disappointed. The grapes were sour, unfit for use. They stank to high heaven.
This too is a metaphor, a metaphor for the rulers of Judah:
“He expected them to do what was good, but instead they committed murder. He expected them to do what was right, but their victims cried out for justice.”
Read the opening chapters of the book of Isaiah, and it is easy to see what Isaiah is talking about. Those who ran Judah governed in their own interest. They did not defend orphans in court or listen when widows presented their case, they coveted and stored up wealth for themselves, they oppressed the poor and deprived the innocent of their rights. It wasn’t government of the people, by the people, for the people. It was government by the 1% for the 1%, and never mind the people.
If some of this sounds familiar, it is because the world in which we live today is not very different.
*
Let me fast forward to today’s world and talk, not about Scotland, where I understand there is a particularly significant election this week – I leave that to you – but about the land from whence I come, the modern state of Israel. Israel is now the fourth land in which I have lived; and it is, for obvious reasons, the land today that is most on my heart.
Martin Fletcher is a veteran television correspondent, born in London. For years, he reported for NBC on the conflict in Israel/Palestine. Seven years ago, he got tired of covering atrocities and took two weeks off to walk the coast of Israel, from the Lebanon border in the north to the tip of the Gaza strip in the south. Not long ago, I came across the quirky book he wrote about these two weeks: Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation.
The book never really gets away from the conflict: in Israel, it’s hard to do that. And ironically, it provides the best one-sentence definition of the conflict I’ve seen: “Building a country on land inhabited by another people was never going to be anything less than excruciating.”
If the people the ancient rulers of Judah treated badly were their own people, the people the modern state of Israel treats badly are another people, the Arabs of Palestine whose land they took by force in 1947-48 and again in 1967.
To be sure, the modern state of Israel is not good news even for its own people. Israel today faces deep crises in education, health and housing, and for a quarter of a century the gap between rich and poor has grown ever wider.
Last month, Israel commemorated the six million Jews who died in Hitler’s holocaust, and the newspapers in Jerusalem ran the story they run every year: how many of the elderly survivors of the Holocaust in Israel live in abject poverty, often forced to choose between food and medical care. The poor will eat as much as they want? Not so much.
But the people who suffer most are the Palestinian Arabs. Those who live in the state of Israel proper, who suffer from institutionalized discrimination. Much of the land of Israel is reserved for Jews: Palestinians cannot buy it or build on it, even though it was their land to begin with. Those who live under military law in the territories occupied in 1967: those in east Jerusalem and the West Bank whose land is frequently confiscated to build settlements or the separation wall, those in Gaza who are regularly bombed and shelled. And those who are largely forgotten: the millions of Palestinian refugees who live in exile. When ISIS recently overran a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, we didn’t ask what these elderly Palestinians were doing there: we take their exile for granted.
Most Palestinian Arabs are Muslim; but almost a million – more than 10% of the total – are Christian. If we don’t always notice that, it is because within Israel and the occupied territories, the percentages are much smaller. Most Palestinian Christians live outside their land, in exile or in the diaspora, and most of these are unable to return.
“Building a country on land inhabited by another people was never going to be anything less than excruciating.” Indeed. The land in which I live will never be a land of promise until the Jews of Israel learn how to share it with their neighbours.
*
But there is something else that must be said. For many years, the world gave the state of Israel a free pass. Not anymore.
Churches in Scotland, in Europe and elsewhere are increasingly critical of what Israel is and does. But it is difficult for us to criticize the state of Israel with integrity.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth asks, “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the log in your own eye? How dare you say to your brother, ‘Please, let me take that speck out of your eye,’ when you have a log in your own eye?”
When a woman is taken in adultery and the question is whether she should be stoned, Jesus rules that the one who is without sin should cast the first stone; and unsurprisingly, no stones are cast.
For centuries, Christian Europe treated its Jewish inhabitants abominably; and in the last century, Hitler killed six million of them. Before we criticize the state of Israel, we should first make sure we have repented – and are repenting – of our own sins, and that our criticisms, however justified, aren’t just another way of banging Jews on the head.
*
In our psalm we read: “The Lord is king, and he rules the nations. All proud people will bow down to him; all mortals will bow down before him. Future generations will serve him… People not yet born will be told: ‘The Lord saved his people.’”
How does God do that?
Isaiah asks: “Is there anything the Lord failed to do for his people?” For Isaiah this is a rhetorical question: God has done everything one might expect God to do. God has done all that is needed to produce a fruitful people.
But with Christian hindsight we can see that this is not so. For in the eighth century before Christ, God has not yet sent his Son.
The image of God’s people as God’s vineyard becomes a commonplace in the Old Testament, and Jesus of Nazareth can take it for granted. When Jesus tells his parables of the vineyard, he can rely on his hearers having this Old Testament background in mind: the kingdom of God which he speaks begins with the vineyard that is the new Israel, which is to say, the renewed Israel.
John can take it for granted too. It is against this background that in John’s gospel, Jesus says “I am the vine”.
In this “I am” saying, John says that Jesus is himself the new Israel, the unity of the new people of God, the centre of a new humanity. As James Quinn puts it in one of my favourite communion hymns:
I am the word that spoke and light was made
I am the seed that died to be reborn
I am the bread that comes from heaven above
I am the vine that fills your cup with joy.
He is the vine and we are the branches. Only when we are grafted into the vine that is Jesus can we bear fruit. Apart from him we can do nothing.
And so Jesus can say to us: Abide in me; remain in me; be my faithful followers, and walk in my ways.
These ways are the ways of love. They are a response to the love God has shown us in sending us his Son and giving him to die a death on a Roman cross. And they are eminently practical, as practical as farming, as practical as tending a vineyard – not, of course, that there are many of those in this part of the world. At least, not yet.
“No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. … Anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”
And the test of whether we love our brothers and our sisters is not whether we have warm feelings about them, but whether we ever do anything for them. As branches in the vine, we are to be a blessing to other people, so that the whole world may be blessed.
Sources
Ariel David, “Thousands of Israeli Holocaust survivors still living in poverty, fighting for recognition“, Haaretz, April 13 2015
Martin Fletcher, Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2010)
Herbert McCabe, The New Creation (London & New York: Continuum, 2010)
Sebastian Moore, God is a New Language (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967)
Sam Sokol, “Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors living here in poverty“, Jerusalem Post, April 13 2015
Wikipedia, “Palestinian Christians”
WorkingPreacher.org