ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Wicked Husbandmen

Bishop Basil of Amphipolis

Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, Bristol

26 August 2007

Mt 21:33-42; 1 Cor 16:13-24

In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning we have heard the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen. This is a very rich text, capable of being interpreted in different ways and on different levels. Let me begin at the beginning, with the first words Christ says as he introduces the parable: ‘There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country.’

The first thing to notice is that as this verse is normally printed in our Bibles, the reader cannot tell that much of it is a loose quotation from Isaiah 5:1-2, where the prophet is speaking about Israel and about Jerusalem. We should never forget that when Jesus began his public ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth, he chose a passage from the Book of Isaiah to announce that he was the Messiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor …’(Lk 4:18). We should assume, therefore, that Christ, when reading about the vineyard of the Lord in Isaiah, applied this passage to himself as well, and then went on at a later stage to develop it in this parable.

The householder is the Father, and the vineyard is Israel. The servants who are sent to collect the fruits of the vineyard are the prophets and all those who have been calling upon Israel to turn to God. The son who is finally sent is Christ himself, who is cast out of the vineyard as a blasphemer and slain, with the result that the householder appears himself and destroys the wicked husbandmen and turns the vineyard over to others ‘which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.’ These ‘others’ are of course the gentiles, who with the death of the Son are invited to tend the vineyard properly, that is, to become members of the Church, the True Israel.

When we have gone this far, however, we can see that the vineyard, which is at first identified with the earthly Jerusalem, with the ‘tower’ built in it representing the Jerusalem Temple, and the ‘wall’ that will be broken and trodden down (Is 5:5) by the Romans, is also an image of the heavenly Jerusalem, the ‘kingdom of God’, as Christ says, with the ‘wine press’ pointing to the presence of Wisdom in the city (cf. Prov 9:2ff.) and to the Eucharist as its source of life.

And having gone this far, we can now, in turn, link this parable with words you heard earlier in the service, when during the singing of the Trisagion the bishop comes out from the sanctuary and blesses the people, having first said the prayer: ‘O God, look down from heaven and see, and visit this vineyard and establish it, which thy right hand hath planted.’ This quotation from Psalm 79(80):15 treats the gathered community as the New Israel, the heir to vineyard of Isaiah as Christ has foreseen.

We hear today of ‘church planting’, a process whereby a group of parishioners from a successful parish is ‘hived off’ and goes elsewhere to establish another community. The psalm tells us, however, that we do not plant parishes. It is the’ right hand’ of God, Christ himself, who plants parishes and establishes them. And when we ask God to ‘visit this vineyard and establish it (katartisai auten)’, we are really asking God to ‘make it ready’, to ‘prepare it’. But for what? For the coming of God himself.

All that we do looks forward to the End. The invocation and descent of the Spirit on the Holy Gifts at the time of their consecration takes them – and us – closer to the coming consummation of all things. All the sacraments and sacramental blessings are the same. Our calling upon God to ‘visit’ the vineyard that is the community is an invitation to God to take us forward along the path that he has marked out for us and for the world.

And at this point we join with the Apostle Paul and the last words of the First Epistle to the Corinthians that we heard before the Gospel. Having dealt as best he could with the problems facing the community in Corinth and encouraging them to ‘greet one another with a holy kiss’, he ends by saying ‘Marana tha’, ‘Our Lord, come!’

We are the vineyard of the Lord, planted by God through Christ, the heirs of the promises given to the people of Israel and led by the Shepherd of Israel towards the End. Let us learn to invite the Lord to visit us and to prepare us and strengthen us, both as individuals and as a community, until we can say from the bottom of our hears those words that, echoing St Paul, appear at the very end of the New Testament: ‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus.’  Amen.