Good Friday – Luke 20:1-15, Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24
Preached at Oakdale United Methodist Church, as part of West Boylston’s ecumenical Good Friday worship.
If we are involved regularly with the scriptures, we end up developing a sort of relationship with different texts in the Bible. There are the parts that we fall in love with, that we can’t hear enough. For me, Jeremiah 31 is one of them, a passage that speaks so clearly of the Gospel, God’s promise to write his Word on our hearts, and that we will be God’s people, and He will be our God. Then there are those bits that we’ve heard a billion times, and are confident we know well and understand. When the father of the prodigal son runs out to welcome him home, we can see the powerful way that God yearns for us to return to Him, that He runs out to greet us. And then there are the parts of scripture that are confusing, that no matter how often we read them, we just don’t quite get it. Like the parable in today’s Gospel story.
I get the way that it begins. The vineyard owner sends a servant to collect her earnings, and the tenants don’t want to give them to him, so they beat the servant and send him away. People are like that. Just this afternoon, I was sitting in a coffee shop underneath a set of apartments. One of the customers had parked in the place of a tenant. When the tenant arrived home, he deliberately parked behind her at an angle so she was trapped. People can behave in vicious, snotty, vindictive ways. And if you think the tenant was bad, you should have heard the customer’s response.
And I can see why the landlord would try more than once. But why keep sending individual slaves? After the second try, I think I’d have the police over there, arresting those tenants and dragging them off to court. Theft of goods, breach of lease agreement, assault and battery. But no, she sends a third slave, and this one they also wounded and threw out.
At this point, any intelligent, logical, thoughtful landlord, even if she’s not yet willing to take action against the tenants, has got to know that if she sends someone else, they’re going to get, what? Beaten and sent away. And it’s clear, as the story goes on, that the landlord has got to be in the place of God in this parable. We’d certainly like to think that God thinks things through before acting. So what does the landlord do? She sends her son.
What is the landlord thinking? We cannot possibly be surprised when we hear that the tenants drag him out of the vineyard and kill him. No, we have to be surprised that the landlord would think that, somehow, the tenants would respect her son more than the servants.
Begging and pleading with the tenants, persistently asking for her share of the land’s produce, doesn’t seem to work. And yet she keeps trying it. Again. And again. And again. The rest of us seem to know when to stop, when to throw our hands up in exasperation and admit defeat.
And that’s true even in the most important places in our lives. I once knew a woman who had a son who was Out. Of. Control. I don’t mean like, noisy kid in a restaurant peering over the seat and screaming that he wants his ketchup next to his fries instead of on top of them. (I was that kid, actually. My dad and I had a fight about a kit kat bar once. It wasn’t pretty.) I mean screaming kicking punching causing actual physical injury to his mother out of control. By the time he was nine, she was ready to give up. Perhaps there was a time, she admitted, that she could have done things differently. But by then it was too late; habits had formed, and her relationship with this child, the son she loved, was broken. She eventually had to give him up for foster care, a decision that broke her heart, but that she knew was the best for him.
That is how people operate. It is a sensible, logical, thoughtful way to operate. It is the best way we can operate. And if this parable is any indication, it’s not how God operates.
Because the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion, says my soul;
Therefore I will hope in him.
God’s steadfast faithfulness and love is so never-ending that it borders on the insane. That’s the story of the whole salvation history, isn’t it? God creates Eve and Adam in the garden, and they prove they cannot stay there, so God makes a way for them in the wilderness beyond the garden, a new, harder way, but a way nonetheless. People turn so far away from God that the slate has to be wiped clean, the waters of the flood come and wash everything away, and yet Noah and his family are saved because God can’t give up altogether on his people. God’s chosen family does it’s worst, sells one of its own into slavery, and God uses that Joseph to bring safety and help to them in their time of greatest need. They complain about God in the desert of Sinai and he still brings them to the promised land, makes a nation out of them, makes them his very own people! In their faithlessness they beg God for a king and so he gives them one, and when things don’t go well with King Saul, God doesn’t just sit back and say, “I told you so;” God sends them a new one. God is with them in prophets, God is with them in teachers, God is with us in rulers, God is with us in scribes in the midst of exile, God is with us whether we end up in the belly of a fish or in the valley of dry bones and in the furnace of blazing fire.
And finally, when any intelligent, logical, thoughtful God would rightly throw his hands up in exasperation and admit defeat, God sends his own son into the vineyard of our lives. “Surely they will respect him,” God says. “Surely when they see Jesus, they will know I am with them, they will come back to me, they will love me the way I love them.” And when we see the son, what do we do, but discuss it among ourselves and say, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours.’ And we have prepared a cross for our savior.
* * *
Then they took charge of Jesus, and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them. Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.”
When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” This was to fulfill what the scripture says, “They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.” And that is what the soldiers did.
Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
* * *
Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us.
It’s mad, to go that far for our sake. To love us so much that he’d die on a cross for us. And madder still is that not even death could finally end this. Any intelligent, logical, thoughtful God would know that it’s time to stop. To get rid of this vicious, snotty, vindictive, violent people. But God is crazy. God comes back. For not even death can hold back his love for us.