Proper 21, Year A
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32; Psalm 25:1-8; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32
O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in
showing mercy and pity: Grant us the fullness of your grace, that we,
running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly
treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
When my three
children were young teens and preteens, they had a list of Saturday chores.
They were supposed to share in the care for the household by taking turns
cleaning the bathrooms or dusting or vacuuming in the basement. Every Saturday
morning, this working single mom would trudge joylessly to the grocery store.
Passing through the den, where my pajama-clad kids were happily ensconced in
front of computer games and Saturday morning cartoons, I would intone, “OK,
while I’m gone, I want you to do your chores. I want them done before you do
anything else. I don’t want to still be nagging you about this on Sunday
afternoon!”
Every
Saturday, my headstrong elder son, who had learned to back-talk in squawks at
age seven months, would balk.
“Not now, Mom!” he would holler. “Why
do you always make us do chores? None of our friends have to do chores! You are
just a neat-freak! Everything is perfectly clean right now! Just leave us
alone!”
His younger siblings, in sweet
contrast, would always answer, eyes still glued to the TV, “Sure, Mommy! We’ll
do it. See ‘ya later!”
When I would come home from my
errands, though, it wasn’t unusual to find my elder son’s chores all finished,
while his younger siblings were still glued to the TV in their PJ’s.
As a parent, I
wanted to have authority over my children. I wanted them to obey me when I told
them to do something, for goodness’ sake. I wanted them to share my vision of a
clean house. My blood would boil when my elder son would refuse to do what I
asked, and then it would boil again when the younger ones would ignore me. How
I dreaded that Saturday power-struggle. Sure, I was tired and wanted help with
the cleaning, but I also wanted my kids to know that I was boss, that I was in
control of both the housecleaning and their actions.
When I hear
today’s parable, I tend to feel trapped. When it comes to Almighty God, it
isn’t often that we dare come out and say “NO!” But it is so easy to talk the
talk, yet wimp out on actually putting our Christian words into deeds. In general,
just think how much easier it is to “like” something on Facebook than to actually
join in the project yourself. When it comes to our Christian lives, it is even harder.
God is asking us to do such impossibly difficult things, like loving our enemy
and forgiving one another and following him to the Cross. Who is eager to go
into that vineyard?! When we concentrate
on the children in this parable, it is so easy to feel paralyzed by guilt over our
failures. How is this simple parable, then, Good News?
I think that we
need to take a serious look at the father. Is the father here a parent like I was,
anxiously obsessed over controlling his children? That’s often the view we have
of God, isn’t it? The God described in our first reading sounds more like that
kind of a parent: Caring but
powerful, a God who is in control of the lives of all of his children. If we
don’t follow through, the prophet warns, “iniquity will be our ruin.” Is it God
who wants to control us, I wonder? Or are we the ones who long for the security
of a controlling, judging God?
Our world, like Roman-occupied
Palestine in Jesus’ day, is a world where it’s easy for the strong take to
power over the weak. Power-plays are what we’re used to. Just recently, for example,
we’ve been hearing in the news about domestic and child abuse, due to the
recent arrests of two NFL players.[1]
We’ve been hearing, too, about the “militarization” of our police forces, after
the tragedies in Ferguson, Missouri. Police fortified with weapons and
riot-gear are agents of physical power and coercion. Angry football players can
loom over women and children with the physical force of their tackles and the
impunity of their status. They can make us obey, that’s for sure, whether we
want to or not. If I had been a more “powerful” and scarier
mom-with-a-big-stick, I would have gotten my kids to do their chores without a
peep, I bet.
In our lesson today, the religious
leaders don’t like it that Jesus is moving in on their territory. He is
interfering in Temple matters—chasing out the money-lenders—without their
authority. He is putting himself in God’s powerful place. He is messing with
the orderly universe in which they operate. In figuring out how to deal with Jesus,
they see a power-struggle. Jesus, however, is trying to shake them up. He turns
the religious leaders’ fretting about authority to his own ends in today’s
parable. Jesus isn’t interested in a power struggle. Authority, unlike power,
cannot force itself onto someone by violence. It can only be given.[2]
Sometimes, it is bestowed in order to achieve a certain end: A police officer
is given authority by the laws of the city, county, or state to make certain
arrests. But in many cases, authority must also be freely accepted by those
beneath the person in authority. Beating
a child might give you power over him, but not authority. Coming in with riot
gear might make you powerful, but it won’t give you authority over someone once
you take that gear off. That’s why efforts at community police work—officers
walking around a neighborhood every day, getting to know the neighbors and
helping people with their daily problems, building mutual respect, has often
led to successful outcomes in the communities where it has been tried.
Authority is different than power. When Jesus asks the religious leaders—and
us—“What do you think?” he is giving us a choice. We can accept his authority,
or we can turn away from it. No coercion, no threats, just an invitation: “What
do you think?”
God is not the one who wants to throw
around his power. As Paul points out, we are dealing with a Lord who willingly
takes the form of a slave. In Jesus, we are dealing with a God who bends down
into the lowliest of human flesh and even into the weakness of death on a cross
in order to raise the weak and the lost up with him in glory. The Lord that
Paul describes in today’s letter to the Philippians is as far from the powerful
violence of riot police and rampaging NFL players as you can get. This is a God
who waits for us to invite him, a God who gives us freedom to choose, over and
over and over again.
It is the very open-endedness of the
parable that is our Good News. The parable continues to ask, even today, “What
do you think?” Our forgiving God continues to invite us all. There is another
parable that begins with “a man had two sons.”[3]
Can you guess which one that is? Yes, the parable of the Prodigal Son, the
parable in which we are once again asked to choose between two sons, this time
an elder and a younger. While we usually identify with one or the other, the
Father in the parable does not have to make a choice between his children. The
Father loves both sons. The Father longs for nothing more than to have both sons with him always. Even Ezekiel,
whose language is full of the unfortunate “tit for tat” kind of divine justice,
allows God to plead with his wayward people: “For I have no pleasure in the
death of anyone …Turn, then, and live.”
Our loving God offers life to all of
his children, not chores and obligations. Our God doesn’t storm back in from
the grocery store wanting to show us who’s boss. Our God invites us, as many
times as is necessary, to get dressed in the borrowed robes of Jesus, to turn
our faces from the lifeless computer screen, and to join him freely and
joyfully in the deeds of love that will bring about his Kingdom. Just a little
hesitation, a tiny split-second crack of openness to the future, that’s all it
takes, and God will empty into us the ever out-pouring, ever in-gathering mind
of Christ. As St. Paul points out, with God at work in us, there’s no limit to
what we can do. In hindsight, I wonder how my children would have reacted if I had given them a joyful hug and a kiss as I walked out that door?
