Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 21, 2010
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year C: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:8-14; Luke 20:9-19

Sometime in the early 1990s I visited Lincoln in northern England with friends. One night we had dinner in what was called “The Jew’s House Restaurant.” It’s still there. The house had been built in the year 1150 by a Jew in the then Jewish section of town. It says something that the house has been called that for a very long time, especially since Jewish people were expelled from England in the year 1290.[1]

It was on that trip I learned England was the first country in Europe to expel its Jewish population.[2] Anti-Semitism did not begin in England. Like a lot of things that go terribly wrong in human history and in individual human lives, origin is not always clear. But looking back, one can see moments where something has changed and things are for ever different.

In Luke, Jesus himself does not always know what will happen next – and neither does Saint Luke the Evangelist. In some ways, today’s gospel is the most straightforward of passages, but what it meant to those who first heard it and how it has been horribly understood, used, since Luke wrote is an entirely different thing. I do not think Luke was foreseeing a future in which an often violent anti-Semitism would become the default setting for Christendom and a future in which nineteen centuries later the greater part of Europe’s Jewish population would be sent to gas chambers.

“Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be they will respect him.’ But when the tenants saw him, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours.’ And they cast him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants, and give the vineyard to others.”[3]

Luke’s gospel is written for a Christian community about the year 80 A.D. – a decade after a Jewish revolt was suppressed with remarkable cruelty by the government of the Roman Empire. As Luke writes, the Roman legions have already demolished the Second Temple, crucified thousands, and sold thousands more into slavery.

In the wake of this revolt, Luke also knows the Jewish Christian community, the original Christian community, has been expelled from the synagogues. It’s been decided. You can’t be Christian and Jewish at the same time.

The last decades of the first century was a hard time to be Jewish or Christian in Israel. I don’t think Luke had any idea or premonition of what will envelope Western European and Middle Eastern peoples in the centuries to come.

What is called the first Jewish- Roman War, or the Great Revolt in 70 A.D., is by no means the only issue shaping Luke’s narrative as he writes. Luke is part of that second generation of Christians that is coming to terms with a sense that Jesus is not coming back as soon as they think he has promised to come. Matthew, Mark and Luke all quote Jesus as speaking to the crowd of his impending return.  In Luke the verse is this, “I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”[4] These words were too well remembered to be forgotten, but turned out not to be literally true.

New Testament scholar Raymond Brown wondered whether these words came to us in this form because Jesus himself “had no particular knowledge of when it would occur.”[5] Luke’s own response, or perhaps better, one would say Luke was led by the Holy Spirit to turn to mission, to the preaching Good News to all. Luke’s writings recount how part of the early Church leaves behind the ruins of Jerusalem for the mission to Rome and a wider world. The problem of the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people went with them.

How do you and I move forward through the mess and the goodness that is the world we have been given by God to share? How do you and I keep our hope and our hearts fresh for the days we are meeting now and the days we may meet in the future?

The readings that accompany our gospel today approach with different answers. Paul in his Letter to the Philippians has his eyes on the prize.[6] He’s in a race with life for eternal life.

The passage from what scholars normally call Second Isaiah, that part of that book that was written after the people of Jerusalem were in captivity in Babylon. They have been judged. They have been punished. Now God himself is using the captivity to bring forth Israel again into a land of promise.[7]

Second Isaiah says, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”[8]

Beginning with Adam and Eve hearing the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,[9] the biblical narrative wrestles with the mysterious presence of God to people and with people. In the oldest parts of the Bible, God is far above the heavens. Along the way, there is a vision of God making Zion, Jerusalem, his dwelling place. At the very end of the Christian scriptures, God is seen in the heavenly city, Jerusalem, where he dwells among his people, and his people dwell with him.

In 2006, the Notre Dame liturgist Nathan Mitchell wrote a series of articles for the journal Worship on the mystery of ‘presence.’ In one of these, he began by quoting from the work of a ninth century Byzantine abbot Theodore the Studite on the mystery of the incarnation.[10] In the background of Theodore’s writing is the great religious and political controversy over whether there can be icons in churches or not – remember we’re in the East. Theodore believes one who is beyond time and place is also the one who inhabits a manger and stands and sits.[11] When all is said and done, as another writer observed, one is faced with “the impossible fact of the Word made flesh.”[12]

This is at the heart of the gospel lesson for today; the Word has become flesh – to use Saint John’s phrase – so that we human beings can recover, remember, who we are and why we are. We are all God’s children, made for life, made to know that we dwell in him and that he dwells in us.

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