God in the Vineyard: Vocation and Theology of the Cross

In the last week two things happened:
-50 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in a mind boggling, heart breaking act of wanton violence that once again reminds us that evil is real and most clearly felt between the offenses we perpetuate upon one another.
-I heard a sermon that grappled with the absence of God in this Sunday's upcoming parable, the parable of the wicked tenants from Matthew 21:33-46.

These seemingly separate threads of events have been interweaving in my brain. Precisely because the sermon wrestles with something people wrestle with in the face of total catastrophe and especially catastrophe at the hands of another. Inevitably the question of where was God, what good is God, etc. comes into play. Shortly after people religious and non alike bash the phrase "thoughts and prayers". An act, which while I understand why they lament it (namely, they want political action and see the phrase as a means to do nothing more) I fear the critique adds another layer whether intentional on the part of those who chastise it or not, namely, that prayer is inaction. Prayer does nothing.

Prayer only does nothing, of course, if God does nothing. And the critique intimates that God, if God is real, is absent and helpless in the face of turmoil. I despise the critique. To be clear, while I am not knowledgeable enough in the field of sociology and gun violence or the current laws and facts about guns and gun control to have a solution I too want something to be done, but I don't think to do so means we should equate prayer in general - or even the prayer of a politician - as ineffectual, inactive, or insincere. I think we should instead tell them to offer something with their thoughts and prayers. Maybe include in those prayers discernment in how to best respond.

All that is a round about way to say, like the preacher who wondered, "If God is the land-owner, then God is absent" our world looks at tragedy and comes to the same conclusion: God is absent.

Now in the sermon by my esteemed colleague, she concludes that perhaps the best way to grasp contemporary promise is not to allegorize this parable and make God the land-owner. She may be right in that there were other good promises, maybe more concrete outside the parable. And Luther himself of course was rather critical of allegory in biblical interpretation mainly as a response to the over-allegorization of scriptures in his day, in part a consequence of Origen's idea that every passage had a higher spiritual meaning. And modern scholars often point to how parables as a genre were typically not meant to be over-allegorized but to illustrate a single point. This parable, however, more than most lends occasion to allegory. As William Barclay puts it:

In interpreting a parable it is normally a first principle that every parable has only one point and that the details are not to be stressed. Normally to try to find a meaning for every detail is to make the mistake of treating the parable as an allegory. But in this case it is different. In this parable the details do have a meaning and the chief priests and the Pharisees well know what Jesus was meaning this parable to say to them.

In this case the tenants do stand for somebody (Jewish religious leaders). Likewise, the land-owner's son is a clear reference to Jesus himself. It therefore makes it easy (and I think fair) to make God out to be the landowner.

But if that is the case, then God is absent in the story. Now, I think the caution and task of my colleague is important (even if I disagree that we should not take the land-owner to be God) in that beyond the parable there is a clear witness to God's presence. But let's focus on the parable and stay with it and the problem of God's presence within it, because even if we can conclude from the wider voice of scripture in God's presence, sometimes - like this last week - our world gets stuck in a moment as easily as in a parable. And in that moment, God is like the land-owner: far off.

It is worth asking how can people experience God in times he is far off? And to that the parable does offer an answer - in his servants and most especially in his Son! While in the parable the servants most likely is a reference to the prophets (perhaps especially John the Baptist considering the previous conversation preceding the text includes John's ministry) it is wider also in our day today. God sends ambassadors, people who act as his will and presence.

When people in tragedy and turmoil look for God's presence, they usually first start to find it by pointing to the aid and love of fellow citizens of humanity. It is in God's envoys. In our world, our daily life, our vocations (or callings into life) are the ways people experience God's bestowal of daily bread.

And What is meant by daily bread? as our catechism asks: "everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body." In various ways and places, God has prepared places for us to go, "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." (Ephesians 2:10). This is actually why people have a right to be angry at their politicians: not for offering prayer but because they can do works of God that are outside the capacity of those not in office. Vocation is not just a title/job, it is an activity. It is a response to a calling. It is a way of understanding how each day we live out our Christian faith in the world.

Just as a prophet is sent by God to bear God's presence through a word to the people, just like a servant goes to the vineyard when sent by the landowner to be that landowner's presence (in the ancient world how you treated the messenger was to reflect the person whose message they bore), so also spouses are sent to one another, teachers to students, EMT's to those who are hurt, etc. all as means in which people can believe in good and by extension the ultimate Good - God. The parable reminds us of two distinct facts: we are sometimes the means by which people come into contact with God, and murder really does make God then feel absent. For when the good is trampled by death, when people are pulled from their vocations by violence and murder, the people around them experience an absence in what God has placed before them. When the sacred command to preserve life is violated, so is the experience of God. Is it any wonder that the Psalms often praised God's activity when they were rescued from death and when they feared danger and death they questioned if God had turned away from them forever? That is how we still experience God!

In short, if faithful living towards our various vocations can cause people to "see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:16), then violating God's laws breaks down vocation and makes people wonder "How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" (Psalm 13:1).

The second thing this has me go to is theology of the cross, namely, that ultimately all theology must be on or shaped by the cross of Christ. As a Lutheran, I find this particularly important. As Regin Prenter puts it, "Luther's God is the God who reveals himself in the cross of Christ, God hidden in suffering." In here, we find the one mode of God's presence when it is otherwise driven from the story: in the Son. When the landowner sends his Son, which pretty much all commentators note is foolishness by this point, he is determining to send his benevolent will to the wicked tenants (he could have, and by our standards as well as the standards of Jesus' contemporaries should have arrested them already). What is more though, is when we leave the parable, Jesus makes abundantly clear that the murder of the son does not banish the landowner's presence. Instead, when it comes to Jesus himself, the stone that the builders rejected becomes the corner stone! The final act to drive out the landowner's hand from under them becomes the greatest means in which he executes his will on this wicked humanity. Capon puts it this way:

Jesus is saying quite clearly, in other words, that not only is his own mild exousia unacceptable to their unfaith; it is also and nevertheless - in its very unacceptability - the cornerstone of their salvation, even though they will not trust it. The world is saved only by his passion, death, and resurrection, not by any of the devices that, in its unbelief, it thinks it can take refuge in. Furthermore, that same unacceptability will be the cornerstone of their judgement and of the world's...

The theology of the cross is unsettling because it is so unacceptable as Capon puts it. Precisely because the Almighty is veiled in the suffering humanity of Jesus, it becomes a paradox too great for us to naturally accept. In this way, however, the message of the Gospel can proclaim both salvation and the present action of God in the one place God seems driven away. Just when God is lost by the removal of our standard mode of knowing and experiencing God's goodness in each other, God's greatest act of compassion strikes us in the death of his Son. Just when murderous acts drive God from our world, the cross places him firmly at ground zero. As Gerhard Forde puts it: "The cross makes us part of its story. The cross becomes our story. That is what it means to say, as Luther did, 'The cross alone is our theology.'"

Now precisely because the cross is God hidden in suffering, revealed in the cross of Jesus in a way that unlocks the story of God's working among us, the cross also rarely looks desirable or good especially prior to the announcement of the Gospel. Even to the disciples, prior to Easter, Good Fridays looked anything but good. But the good news is God has not been lost or inactive. And in death, God opens the way of life. None of that is to glorify the violence of Jesus' persecutors or a gunman in Las Vegas, but to draw the person in the suffering violence brings to the one place where suffering has meaning: the cross. Paul regularly speaks of sufferings as sharing in the suffering of Christ. In your suffering then you are not alone. In fact, you are being driven to the fountain of life through faith in Christ.

Some will scoff at any notion of any kind of good news in suffering, especially since we have glorified the avoidance of suffering to the point that suffering often produces in people their greatest spiritual crisis. In the face of horror it will feel powerless, and yet the Gospel testifies to how it isn't powerless. Thus there is a word to believe here, and a word to share. This word is the word of Christ and the story of his reign. The parable reminds us to produce fruit: fruits of our vocations. And one of those vocations is to speak the peace of the cross in crisis. The peace of God that surpasses understanding. One of those vocations is to send aid to those in need. One of those vocations is to each day promote the life God gives, but also to remember that in the face of human sin, there are times the presence of God is all but lost, except for one light in the darkness, veiled in the same shroud that often casts God hidden before our eyes (violence), and yet still shining. Sometimes when all human efforts to bear the presence of God is not enough, we will find that all we have, is a rock. The type of rock builders reject when making the good things of this world, and yet by this rock we can build our entire faith.