In the Face of Violence

Matthew 21:33-46; Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

It’s been a rough week, hasn’t it?

The news has been hard to watch; the whole country has been thinking and praying. Maybe you’ve also spent the week struggling with the question of how to respond, faithfully, to unprovoked violence. Maybe you’ve come to some conclusions about how we should respond, how God should respond. Maybe you haven’t.

Either way, you’re in good company.

The question of how to respond faithfully to violence is vividly raised, and not fully resolved, in Jesus’ story today. A story in which a landlord sends out staff to collect rent, and those staff are brutally beaten and killed. By normal people, who seemed just like us. People who you would never guess would turn violent in a perfectly normal situation.

And it happens again. Same exact thing, except more people are beaten and killed.

And then again – tragedy upon tragedy – the heir of the vineyard is killed.

“Now when the owner of the vineyard comes,” Jesus asks, “what will he do to those tenants?”

What do you think, Jesus? The only fair thing: He’ll put those wretches to a miserable death, and give what they had to someone who deserves it.

Violence. Met with more violence.

Sure, it solves one problem, when the bad guys die. In the movies, in the allegories, it’s closure. And everyone is supposed to learn their lesson. Crime and violence doesn’t pay. You get what’s coming to you, so be good.

Matthew tells this Jesus story to make it clear to his original audience that if you keep on rejecting and killing the messengers of God, it’s not going to go well for you. “You’re the bad guys, you selfish religious authorities,” he’s implying, “so you’d better watch out.”

The “chief priests and the Pharisees” get that point pretty clearly.

So what do they do? Plot to kill Jesus.

Violence begets violence in this story. In the parable and outside the parable.

Violence feeds itself, and does not stop.

Is this for real?
Is this the gospel?

Is this really what Jesus came to teach? Why Jesus came to die, and rise?

Well, yes – sort of.

Jesus is serious about the fact that ignoring God has consequences. Miserable, even deadly consequences. Jesus is entirely serious that greed and selfishness – an attachment to our comforts, to our self-determination, or our preferred way of life,  which exceed our attachment to God’s commandments, God’s justice, or the kingdom of God – lead to loss and pain and even death.

That’s idolatry. It’s the first thing the people of God are told NOT to do.

But I don’t think Jesus is telling us that God endorses violence in return for violence; or that God habitually reaches out and smites bad tenants, or even murderers and thugs.

I could be wrong.

But I take a little comfort in the fact that it’s the error-prone human listeners who announce that the proper end of the story is for the landlord to murder the bad tenants and give their property to some good guys.  

It’s small comfort, but I will take what I can in a week like this one, a story like this one. A story, a week, in which violence plays the lead, and it seems pretty clear that violence is not going to miraculously yield to peace any time soon.

Commentators, satirists, and ordinary citizens have asked one another this week: What will we learn from this? Will we ever learn from this? Have we learned, simply, to shrug our shoulders as we grieve, accepting the sad fact that no one is going to stop the violence, and all we can do is weep, and pray, and expect it to happen again?

I do not know how this is going to unfold in our country and century.

I do know that despair and helplessness is not what Jesus taught.

I know that Jesus taught us to see “the other” as ourselves – to see the tax collector, the sinner,

to see both the Pharisee and the prostitute as ourselves, made in the image of God

I know that our failure to do that – in the parable, the gospel, our daily 21^st century lives – is an idolatry that is killing us.

It killed people in that parable, because the tenants saw the messengers as tools of the landlord, the son as an obstruction to their own needs and desires; while the landlord saw the tenants as tools of business. None saw fellow children of God, collaborators in the nurture and enjoyment of the fruits of the earth.

It’s killing people today, when self-protection and the need to trust in our own rightness prevent the political left and right from being able to see each other’s rightness and make common cause, instead of seeing ourselves in the other “side’s” proposals: fellow children of God, longing to shape our society to support our best selves.

It’s killing people today, when we find ways to write off any shooter as not like us, when we try to deny our own engagement with a culture that accepts violence, when we fall into the familiar and well-prepared trap of believing that someone else can fix this but won’t, rather than seeing our shared complicity and shared power.

This story can still end differently.

When Jesus asks us what happens next, can we imagine an ending in which the owner of the vineyard and the tenants all agree that the property and the fruit belong to God, and cannot be claimed by either human party?

Can we imagine both tenants and landlord so moved by the tragedy of the violent killings that they repent of their old assumptions and work to make peace across the land in new and creative ways?

It’s not easy – not easy to imagine or to do.  It’s never easy to break free of the divisive effects of violence, in stories or in our lives. But I believe that a future free of this division is the future God loves to imagine: for us, and for all God’s people.

I believe that if Jesus had gotten to tell the parable he wanted to tell, it would go more like this:
There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress and built a watchtower. Then he leased this well-equipped vineyard to tenants and went to another country.

When the harvest time had come, he sent messengers to collect his produce. But running ahead of them by another way, the landowner came first to the vineyard, and made for the tenants a great feast in thanksgiving for the harvest. And all ate, and were filled.

How can we learn to tell that story, in the face of all the violence in our world?

How can we learn to live the story of generosity, when the whole world counsels indifference and despair?
How can we, together, make this terrible week one in which we have fed others with God’s gifts, have seen one another as ourselves, have learned to see all creation as God’s not our own,

so truly that the cycle of violence simply cannot restart?

I do not know how it all ends, but it begins with the story we choose to tell.

So I will choose to tell the story of grace, and learn see others as myself; to trust “the other side”, until there are no sides at all.

What will you choose?