Called to Christ's vineyard

 Isaiah 55:6-9: ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts.’

Philippians 1:20-27: ‘For to me to live is Christ.’

Matthew 20:1-16: ‘Do you begrudge my generosity?’

 

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Moving into the Vicarage here in Walsingham last month I spent more time than I would care to on the phone - ‘on hold’ - to a national broadband supplier, who I won’t identify from the pulpit.

Aside from the dreadful tinny music, the experience of being left waiting ‘on hold’ is a weirdly frustrating one.

Even being told you’re first in the queue, next in line, doesn’t really help, especially when the answer is not very helpful.

None of us likes to be left hanging around, loitering or rudderless.

The contemporary human experience seems to be one of purposeless that leads increasingly to despair.

The ideas and accoutrements of modern living that were meant to make us so happy and liberate us have proved to be empty and increase the frustrations and not assuage them.

And, as has been observed, human beings are meaning making creatures, and so we want a sense of purpose, purpose that is informed by hope, the setting of our sights on something beyond us and higher than our experience.

The prophet Isaiah captures this in ancient and enduring wisdom.

He reveals purpose and meaning in seeking the Lord, in calling upon him and walking in his paths.

Contrary to therapeutic methods, that focus on self, we find that our meaning as persons is found by looking outside ourselves and beyond our imagining:

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

That puts us in our proper place; not oppressively, but raising our sights to God our maker and redeemer, the Lord who is always beyond us, greater than us.

When we understand the divine-human order, then we can see that human dignity is found in the One who stooped down to us, to raise us up: Christ, born of the Blessed Virgin, humbles himself to share our humanity to raise us up to His divinity.

As Christians we live in and between the realities of heaven and earth.

St Paul captures it in the passage from his letter to the Philippians we heard today.

He savours what the Lord gives him to do in this world, sharing the apostolic faith, but at the same time yearns ‘to depart and be with Christ’.

St Paul lives life in the end times now.

The Lord has not put him ‘on hold’ but reveals through him the Christian calling, both to savour life in this world and to look to the life of the world to come.

We say it in the Creed:

I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

We look forward with hope, that Christ will be honoured in our bodies, whether by life or by death.

Either way, Paul says, ‘Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ.’

This takes us to the Gospel today, which we must first put in context within St Matthew’s gospel.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard is the last one Jesus tells before entering Jerusalem.

He knows what awaits him there.

No sooner has he finished telling the parable than he says: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed and condemned to death.”

Notice that: the parable points to the mystery of the cross. 

On the cross the Lord says he will draw all people to himself.

Christ came to seek the lost, the rudderless, the loiterers.

The master of the vineyard is uncannily Christlike because he goes seeking precisely those people.

This parable reveals the gratuity, the grace, of God in drawing us back to the vineyard from which we were expelled through sin.

That ‘vineyard’ was Eden, the garden of creation.

The Lord, like the master in the parable, now seeks those who will labour for his kingdom, not reject life in the kingdom as Adam did.

That is the grace that goes out searching, to which we are invited to respond.

Grace is not a currency, it’s not wages or reward; it is unmerited, it’s boundless, it is all sufficient.

Yet the characters in the parable try to turn it into a debate about workers and shirkers, about labour rights and working conditions.

They miss the point.

And so will we if we think God’s grace is a reward, or that more is given to some people than others: remember, grace is unmerited, boundless, all sufficient.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.

The master – Christ - goes out to seek the wanderer, the lost, the misguided, the ones wrapped up in themselves, to invite them into the kingdom of heaven.

He goes out relentlessly: at the third, sixth and ninth hour, and again at the eleventh.

That echoes the Cross.

At the third hour, in St Mark’s Gospel, the crucifixion begins.

It’s the time of that the morning sacrificial lamb was offered on Israel’s behalf.

At the sixth hour, the middle of the day, the brightest time, darkness fell.

At the ninth hour Christ breathed his last: the time of the slaughter of the evening Passover lamb in the Temple.

The eleventh hour is dusk, when Christ’s dead body is laid in the tomb.

From the cross – his Passion and death - Christ opens the gates, not of a return to Eden but to a renewed creation, born from the blood and water flowing from his pierced side.

At the third, sixth, ninth, eleventh hour, the Lord will seek out those who are ‘on hold’ in lives without him.

On the day of resurrection he will reveal himself - in the garden - to Mary Magdalene, who mistakes him, actually correctly identifies him, as the one who tends the garden of the renewed creation.

His mercy abounds; this parable is not a spreadsheet of the payroll department of the kingdom of heaven: it is grace, it is an invitation, and one you and I are called to pass on, as we join Christ in the market-place inviting the idlers, the rudderless those without hope into the garden of his kingdom and into his Church.

For the householder’s vineyard is a picture of the Church.

Come to the vineyard, where the grapes are produced that fill the cup of salvation and point forward to the ‘new wine’ we will drink with Christ in the Father’s kingdom (Matthew 26:29).

That invitation is not ‘on hold’ it is here, it is now.

Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb.