Listen to another parable …
Many of you have watched the movie, The Princess Bride. The grandfather (Peter Faulk) comes to read a book of the same title to his grandson (a very young Fred Savage pictured to the right). Unsure that the story will interest him, the grandson needs a bit of convincing. The title itself seems unappealing, The Princess Bride. “Yech” he says, and then asks, “will there be kissing”?
However, once he begins to know the characters, experience the adventure, and get involved in the plot, he listens very carefully and is quite concerned for the outcome.
So, listen beloved to another parable …
Sorry to say, there is no kissing or princesses in this kingdom parable however there is death and the threat of eternal judgement involving a landowner, a vine press, a harvest of grapes, tenant workers and the terrifying treatment of the emissaries sent by the landowner.
Possibly the parable was told to indicate what Jesus expects will happen to him in a short while; a foreshadowing of his rejection and eventual death. An acknowledgement of his experience that the way of love is treated less than honorably. It makes me wonder; does it always have to be true? Is the way of love always rejected? Perhaps, and yet thankfully, we believe in redemption. But then we too have to be willing to get involved in the story …
Perhaps the distance between the landowner and the tenants is the very same separation, the very same distance I have felt, I can feel from God and God’s intention for me. And then, if I might extend that separation as the times and circumstances when I further deny God’s intention for God’s people.
No one wants to be separated. We all seek community and I believe it is God’s intention for us to be in community with each other, as the body of Christ, the very embodiment of God lived out. We talk in church about incarnation, the word of God, the image of God, made flesh. And yet how hard it is, how hard it has been, for us to live in community with each other. Even our families, friends, neighbors are so often at odds with each other, at enmity. In the larger world we are adept in registering our differences. They are catalogued and registered as bad or evil. Fences and walls are erected for protection and safety. Violence is justified for the same reasons.
Jesus came and church exists beloved, for this reason; to restore all people to God. Restore all people to the way of love, so that the fruit of the harvest might be delivered, might be returned to the God.
And yet so many of these intentions of God, for God’s people, are rejected? The design of God for God’s kingdom is that what is rejected becomes the chief cornerstone, becomes the key, the center, to all building. Reading history backwards, as we do as Christians, of course, we can see that is exactly what happened. Jesus, the despised, is now the cornerstone of our faith and worship.
We too often reject the things of God. We too reject the intentions of God for the people of God. We reject people created in the image of God. Maybe, not directly murdering them as they approach the vineyard. Of course not. But indirectly of course we do, that’s harder to deny. This rejection happens with people and even within us; ideas, thoughts, ways of thinking, we dismiss as unrealistic, not doable, too scary.
It’s a complicated story, this parable, without any kissing or princesses, and yet it does speak to human nature. Seeing the parable as an invitation for us to be on the lookout for those emissaries God sends our way. The people, the ideas, the interventions sent for the way of love.
Let’s try not kill the message or the messengers, in the world or in our hearts, before we hear the whole story. Maybe then we too can answer, as Wesley did to the princess Buttercup’s every demand ... as you wish … as you wish.
+Rev. Alison
