They will respect my son – 3 October 2014

The Gospel reading for this Sunday, Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants (Matthew 21:33-46) is in all three synoptic gospels, and it is remarkably similar in all versions. The landowner built a vineyard and let it out to tenants who were supposed to farm it properly and productively.  But when the owner sent two successive emissaries to collect the produce the tenants beat up each one and threw him out.  So the owner sends his son.  They will respect my son.  But the son is murdered.  Then we have some puzzling, cryptic statements about the stone which the builders rejected, and so on.  But, says Jesus, the kingdom will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing its fruits. 

There are two compelling points here, it seems to me.  The first is that these people were tenants.  They never owned the place.  But they were treating it as their own.  That can’t be right.  The second is that, as Jesus sees things, the owner – that is God – remember, Jesus's parables are about the kingdom of God – then transfers his kingdom to others who, he says, will produce fruit. 

We don’t own the church.  It is not ours.  We are temporary tenants.  Wanting things to be in the church as we like them to be may be understandable.  Tenants generally arrange their furniture as they want.  But it is not their property to possess.  When we make rules of exclusion, or attempt to decide who is worthy or unworthy, when we perpetuate ancient divisions or start to put a fence around the Lord's Table, we are out of order. 

Neither do we own the world.  We are tenants here.  We are not at liberty to trash God's creation.  Neither may we live in it in ways that plunder natural resources, or that exploit other people, for our benefit.

In the contemplative life, possession in all its subtle forms is instinctively seen as hazardous.  Possession, ownership, which is so often good and necessary, a privilege and a responsibility, so easily mutates into possessiveness.  In God's kingdom then possession is something to be done thoughtfully and with accountability.  Contemplatives come to see possessiveness on the other hand as a burden to be recognised and shed.  All of this is clearly set out in Jesus's teaching, in parables and in what we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount. 

This parable has the desperate owner saying, They will respect my son...  Respect as a word suits the narrative of the parable, but it is a somewhat anaemic word to describe our relationship with Christ. The contemplative life is one of becoming conformed to (reformed by...informed by...) the way of Christ rather than the needs of the Ego, in our attitudes and reactions, in our approach to justice and compassion, in our use of nature and resources, in our treatment of each other and of human fallibility, vulnerability and mortality.  St Paul could say he is becoming conformed to Christ even in his death.