Filled With Love

 My Heart Is Filled With Love

Isaiah 5 begins: Let me sing for my beloved, my love-song concerning his vineyard. Israel is the vineyard and the beloved. In review: YHWH rescued a disparate group of slaves out of Egypt; shaped them in the wilderness into a covenant people to create a community of justice and dignity for all people, especially the most vulnerable: widows, orphans and resident aliens, those without resources; provided them a land in which to live and prosper according to the covenant agreements; provided leaders in times of crisis. As to the land, each tribe, each clan and down to each family had specific regions and land holdings under their stewardship and care. Yet, injustice, idolatry, the few elites drinking and eating and seizing family landholdings to expand their own power and status, are among the injustices detailed in verses 8 and following. The land is the Lord’s, and everything therein (Ps24) – but we, his people, are exploiting it for our own selfish desires as if it is ours. The song considers this sin – which we have missed the mark, and abandoned our stewardship of the land and the people we are charged to care for.

 

Six hundred years later, not only have things not changed, but in addition to the seizing of family land holdings by Urban Elites, Caesar’s Rome has occupied the land, and has siphoned off more and more of the resources meant to sustain the neediest people to feed its own Imperial greed, lust, gluttony and pride – and those who resist feel the wrath of the Empire. Five of the seven deadly sins are evident throughout the land of YHWH’s Vineyard.

 

Admittedly, Storyteller Matthew presents this as a kind of intramural dispute between Jesus and the chief priests and elders by grouping it with the question of authority and parable of the two sons. But the core parable itself is a description, or codification, of what has been going wrong for centuries. Both Isaiah and Jesus address the core issue of the unfair consolidation of farms by Urban Elites who in turn create literal vineyards and orchards to export wine and oil to the Empire, thus depriving the peasant class of their means of family support, turning them into tenant farmers at best, and more often simply servant slaves.

 

There was known to be resistance on the part of the displaced peasants, and even revolts. In certain circumstances, if the tenant farmers could resist giving crops and tributes to the new owners of their land for three years, they could get the family farm returned. There were organized revolts against the unjust usurpers of the land, and against the Roman occupation, just as the people in Isaiah’s time resisted their capture and deportation to Babylon. And it is key to understand that by the time Matthew re-presents this parable of the vineyard, the first revolt against Rome has failed, and Jerusalem and its temple, the cultic center of all Israelite worship, lies in still smoldering ruins. The Vineyard has been trampled, devoured and laid waste.

 

We are mistaken to spend our energy trying to allegorize the parable assigning parts to God, Jesus, the prophets and others, rather than to look at the end of the story in the context of Jesus’s own life and actions. One might reasonably conclude that the story’s conclusion says that armed revolt against the Usurpers of the Land and against Rome is futile! Together they will crush you along with the grapes and olives! Remember, it is Holy Week. Jesus is in Jerusalem about to enter into his showdown with Pilate and the Roman legions who have coopted the Urban Elites and the chief priests and elders to maintain order, especially during the High Holy Days of Passover in Jerusalem.

 

Jesus has made himself known by his disturbance of the Temple marketplace, and the withering of a fig tree. He is perceived as a danger. Yet, the nature of the danger he represents is misunderstood. He is not there to lead a revolt – he is a messenger of God’s Love – he literally is the “my Beloved” in the song of Isaiah! Jesus’s ethic of Love, as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr would call it during the Civil Rights movement, is the alternative to meeting the violence of the Land Usurpers and the Empire with violence, and rather to seek and serve all persons with the Love of Christ, striving for justice and peace for all people – not some people, not a lot of people, but all people – and respecting the dignity of every human being. Pilate cannot grasp this at all. What is truth, he asks. The chief priests and elders cannot grasp this. By what authority do you do these things, they ask.

 

But many people did understand, and followed him. And although it took several hundred years, the Emperor and the Empire itself was changed – not without its own difficulties – but the Love of Christ became the coin of the Realm, and remains to this day a force for hope and for good.

 

The parable ought not be called the parable of the “wicked tenants,” but of the dishonest and unjust usurpers of the land, just as Isaiah had called out this injustice some six hundred years earlier. One need only ask family farmers throughout this great land of ours who are losing their farms to agribusiness whether or not this parable still has relevance in the world of today.

 

Violence, says Jesus, will never triumph over violence. Only a heart filled with love, with the love of God’s Beloved Son, can make a difference. Make the difference. When we each let our hearts be filled with love, a change will come as it did in the year 313 CE under the Emperor Constantine. The Song of the Vineyard is a song that calls each heart to be filled with love to transform an unjust society from being one of violence to becoming a society of peace, of God’s shalom, of justice and peace for all people that respects the dignity of every human being, sharing the resources of the land with all people. Amen. It is so. It is truth.

Joyce Andersen My Heart Is Filled With Love