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The Annunciation
We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts, that we who have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his cross and passion be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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The Annunciation
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 20:9-19
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
Luke 20:9-19
✛
The Cross: God's Glorious Necessity
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[Jesus] looked at them and said, “What then is this that is written: ‘The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner?’” St. Luke 20:9-19
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Each Sunday this Lent we have heard Saint Luke’s Gospel account of Jesus’ progress from Galilee to Jerusalem, the scene of his passion. Today, having made a triumphal entry in the Holy City before large and enthusiastic crowds, Jesus tells his parable of the vineyard and the wicked tenants, which is in fact meant by Jesus and taken by his enemies to be a descriptive allegory of what is actually happening.
The parable of the vineyard is straightforward. The vineyard is Israel, the people of God; this is a time-honored image for Israel that Jesus uses. The tenants are Israel’s leaders. The owner of the vineyard looking for his just returns of fruit and proceeds is the Lord God; the servants he sends whom his tenants abuse are the prophets; his beloved Son, whom the tenants kill and cast out is the very teller of the parable. Finally, the punishment of the tenants by the owner and the transfer of the vineyard to other tenants are what Jesus foresees – and Saint Luke narrates – of the events following his death: his resurrection and ascension, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples, and the new authority conferred by Jesus and the Spirit upon the apostolic leadership of the Church, the renewed, international vineyard of Jesus Christ our Lord.¹ The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.
The scenes around Jesus which this parable reflects are noteworthy. While the crowds listen to Jesus’ teaching with wrapt attention, many of the leaders, filled with envy and malice, conspire to kill him. They challenge and deny his authority to teach; they try to trap him in his talk; they ask disingenuous questions. While they fear the people (who think Jesus is a true prophet, a worker of miracles, perhaps the Messiah), the leaders line up false witnesses to accuse Jesus of sins against the Law and arrange a betrayal for the opportune time and place to apprehend him. In other words, we are set for Holy Week, and Jesus is perfectly aware of it. “God forbid!” gasp the people at his parable, and we can understand their feelings.
Luke, of all the evangelists, will show us how the heartbreak of Holy Week reached right into the heart of the Church, not least Peter, first among the apostles. Peter will three times deny that he knows Jesus when asked, and Jesus will exchange looks with Peter over it, which moves Peter to go out into the dark and weep bitterly. Jesus’ enemies will press on to the end; and when they have their way and Jesus is crucified, the Lord will say, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”²
The wicked tenants in the parable certainly seem to know what they are doing. “This is the heir; let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours.” But they have missed something, as we often do, especially when we are in the grip of sins such as envy and malice. Greed and anger blind the tenants, blind Jesus’ enemies, from seeing who they themselves are and who it is who stands before them and speaks to them – they know not what they do.
The point of taking part in Lent and Holy Week is that we ourselves come to know who Jesus of Nazareth is, while not deceiving ourselves about who we are; and that our understanding deepens, helping us to live a more honest, faithful life. The teacher, the worker of signs and miracles, the healer of bodies, minds, and spirits, the prophet entering the Holy City to cleanse the temple and face the tenants of the vineyard of Israel: he is the heir, God’s beloved Son. As God’s beloved Son he is also the revealer of God as well as the one true Human Being in union with his Father. He shows us who God is what God is like. At the same time he shows us what it means to be a human being made in the image of God. But as Jesus teaches us these things, he teaches us some home truths about ourselves.
The hard, heartbreaking part of Jesus’ message is this: it was necessary for him to suffer and to undergo these things. It has always been necessary, from all eternity, since God, who is himself Love in Three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, made creatures (angels and mortals in a wonderful order) to be capable of love themselves. It was necessary, because of people like you and me. To be capable of love, we must be free; and therefore we are able to refuse to love, able to sin. On the 9/11 memorial are the words, “Grief is the price we pay for love.” Just so, the Passion of Christ is the price God pays for his love.
After Easter, we will enjoy the glorious Resurrection appearances of Jesus. But there is something very striking about these appearances. As Jesus appears alive to his disciples, he teaches them the necessity for Messiah’s death! We live in the time after Christ’s Resurrection. One of the essential points of the Church’s rites of Holy Week, and of this sermon, is to teach the necessity of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. If you want some reasons for that necessity in concrete human terms, don’t worry about looking around you for characters like the wicked tenants in the parable of the vineyard. They are there, but there is material closer to hand. Just take a look at yourself; look inside, in your heart. If we are honest with ourselves and with God, we will acknowledge and bewail a little something of what it is that made Christ’s death necessary.
The point of understanding the necessity of the cross, of realizing that not only is it a timeless, universal necessity but also it is an immediate, personal necessity in my case and yours, is not to make us feel bad (although genuine contrition is good for our soul). For the cross is the glorious necessity which reveals the breadth, the height and the depth of the love of God. The point is to be able to say, in the words of one of our great hymns, “O my Friend, my Friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend.”
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
__________
¹Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina series, pp. 307-309.
²St. Luke 22:54-62; 23:34
