Mark 16:1-8 (Matins)
1 Corinthians 16:13-24
Matthew 21:33-42

The Vineyard Within

There was a certain landowner who planted a vineyard ....

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The story of the Holy Scriptures reads as a history of gardens, a succession of vineyards, for the vineyard signifies the good life with God Who is goodness. Conversely, wild life creeping into the garden, ruining the vineyard, represents the loss of Divine harmony on earth.

We do not know the chronicles of Eden, nor can we number its years. The Fathers speculated that Adam and Eve had not yet matured, that their sin was impatience. For in the fullness of years, they would, indeed, have become like God. But they seized what was not yet theirs to have. Wild life crept into the garden, and man descended into his feral nature.

Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great
in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of
his heart was only evil continually. (Gen 6:5)

So the Lord God cleansed the earth and began Creation again with the generation of Noah. When many waters had subsided,

.... Noah began to be a farmer, and he planted a vineyard. (Gen 9-20)

Thus, the second Eden begins. But this cultivation of harmony would not last. Sadly, the Scriptures record a lengthy succession of cleansings and new gardens planted. As we read in Isaiah,

And it shall come to pass that he who is left in Zion ....
will be called holy .... When the Lord has washed away the
filth of the daughters of Zion ....

In that day the Branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious;
And the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and appealing .... (Isa 4:2-4)

For these favored ones God plants a vineyard:

On a very fruitful hill.
He dug it up and cleared out its stones,
And planted it with the choicest vine.
He built a tower in its midst,
And also made a wine press in it;
So He expected it to bring forth good grapes ... (Isa 5:1-2)

Unruly life is pushed out and good life fenced in: orderly, cleared of stones, planted with the choicest vine, and set apart, signified by the watchtower. For what lies outside the vineyard bears watching.

At the Creation God established goodness in the earth, and He made His human creatures to be essentially good and free to remain so. Here, sweet grapes come into our hands plentifully. They grow safely within the protecting hedge He has set. The wild world with its contagion of wrong thoughts and unwholesome acts will not intrude. Always already, original Eden hovers above and around us: the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden.

Within the embrace of God's sovereignty, the outside world can never enter. Despoiling must always come from within. From the treachery of Eve and her weak husband's acquiescence, to the kiss of Judas in another garden, Gethsemane, the worm and canker are fruits of human rebellion. A breach is opened in the garden wall. The hedge is ruptured. Disease invades God's goodness and contaminates His soil.

Returning to Isaiah's vision,

So He expected it to bring forth good grapes,
But it brought forth wild grapes.

"And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem ....
What more could have been done to My vineyard
That I have not done in it?
Why then, when I expected it to bring forth good grapes,
Did it bring forth wild grapes?
And now, please let Me tell you what I will do to My vineyard:
I will take away its hedge, and it shall be burned;
And break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.
I will lay it waste;
It shall not be pruned or dug,
But there shall come up briers and thorns.
I will also command the clouds
That they rain no rain on it." (Isa 5:2-6)

The verdant garden becomes an arid wasteland. By our own hand, sweet concord sours becoming grapes of wrath. And God will know of its bitterness:

"I have trodden the wine press alone,
    and from the peoples no one was with Me;
I trod them in My anger
    and trampled them in My wrath;
their lifeblood is sprinkled upon My garments,
    and I have stained all My raiment."  (Isa 63:3)

The curse which Isaiah relates looks back to the curse in First Eden and to the curse in Second Eden. For no sooner has Noah entered the cleansed world and new vineyard than he has polluted it:

And Noah began to be a farmer, and he planted a vineyard.
Then he drank of the wine and was drunk, and became uncovered
in his tent. .... And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness
of his father ....

So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had
done to him. Then he said: "Cursed be Canaan" .... (Gen 9:20-25)

"To uncover nakedness" is an ancient Hebrew euphemism for having sexual intercourse. As Deuteronomy 23:1 and 27:20 suggest, having intercourse with one's mother is expressed as "uncovering one's father's skirt." The scene set before us is one of drunkenness in the vineyard — a wild and blind debauchery rendering Noah unconscious and landing his wife in the arms of her son. Canaan is understood to be the illicit child of this incestuous union (Bergsma and Hahn). And like Cain whose generation is marked for evil, the descent of Ham and Canaan go forward in this new world bearing not blessing but curse. Truly, Ham and his son, who is also his brother, have turned out to be "wild grapes." Their moral descendants include Lot who also fell into drunken debauchery and incest (Gen 19:31) and Sodom and Gomorrah, the house of moral betrayal.

The first-century men listening to the parable of the wicked tenants, steeped in Scripture and constantly debating its meaning, would have been familiar with these echoes.

☦

In last Sunday's Gospel lesson, when the Ruler of the Universe referred to "a certain king," we heard irony. This week, when the Logos, Who created all the earth, refers to "a certain landowner," we hear that same irony. We recall Psalm 50,

"For the world is Mine, and all its fullness," [saith the Lord]. (Ps 50:12).

We hear significance in this "certain Landowner" who "went away to a Far Country." Then, reading ahead in the original Greek of St. Matthew's Gospel, we find that this Landowner's title is Κυριος (Kyrios) or King, which is the title used for YHWH-God in the Greek Hebrew Scriptures from which Jesus and His Disciples quoted.

Like the God of Creation, this Landowner has planted a vineyard. He has set a tower within it and dug a wine press. He has set it apart from the wild world with a hedge. And He has given it, in trust, to vinedressers. What will they do to requite this Divine trust? How will they respond to this empyreal gift? The theme is sounded throughout the Gospel of St. Matthew and especially in chapter 7:

"Therefore by their fruits you will know them." (Mt 7:20)

Each time the Lord God has planted a garden and set His human creatures within it, rebellion has followed. Eve seizes what is not hers to have. Ham takes liberties that represent the most forbidden fruit. The people Israel, set in a Land of Promise, bear not sweet grapes but wild ones. From the Flood of Noah to the universal baptism of John the Baptist, who is the "man of Eden," humankind must repeatedly be re-washed and renewed.

Until the Advent of God into human history, the vineyard has been expressed as an objective place — an enclosed garden of good soil and choice vines intimately tied to our inner reality, our moral reality. In the Person of Jesus, the outer and the inner become one and the same. His Mother is understood to be the hortus conclusus. We read in the Canticle of Canticles:

Hortus conclusus
soror mea, sponsa,
hortus conclusus,
fons signatus.

A garden enclosed
Is my sister, my spouse,
A spring shut up,
A fountain sealed. (Song of Solomon 4:12)

Thus, the man of Eden performs God's final cleansing of humankind (Mt 3:11, Lu 3:16, Jn 1:30-32, Acts 1:5). And as the Person of Jesus takes the place of the Temple, so He also becomes the Vineyard, the Interior Garden.

In our parable this morning and its telling, the inner spiritual world and the outer historical world collapse into one, for the Son and Heir stand before the wicked tenants and before everyone hearing the story. He accuses them (and us) of wickedness. The tenants exhibit Eve's twisted logic believing they can supplant God and His Heir. As Jesus prophesies, they will "cast Him out of the vineyard," which is Zion, "and kill Him" as Jesus will be crucified outside the city walls of Jerusalem.

In His first miracle the Lord Jesus turned water to wine. In His last He turned wine into His Precious Blood, reopening Eden. For the final time, humankind is cleansed (baptized by the man of Eden) and invited back into the Garden of God (by a certain Landowner). And this is our own estate: we are baptized in water receiving the Holy Spirit, and by that fact we are invited into the journey to Eden. We take up where Eve and Adam had stumbled. We commit ourselves to the good life and patiently attain maturity that we might come to the fullness of God after the example of His Son, the Heir.

We participate in the sweet wine of His Precious Blood worthily. We approach the Inner Vineyard reverently, offering to God our own good growth — an interweaving of branches with the true Vine. In this sense are we to dwell in Him and He in us. For He says,

"I Am the true Vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.
Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away;
and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear
more fruit. ....

"I Am the Vine, you are the branches .... By this My Father is glorified,
that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples. (Jn 15:1-8)

God has set the Vineyard within each of us, for He is our Exemplar and Guide. From its beginning and at our birth, it is good and fertile. He watches us mature into fullness set apart from the wild world by His hedges, which are His holy statutes and good influences of His angels.

The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden,
and there He put the man whom He had formed. (Gen 2:8)

Let us abide in this garden. Having a watchtower, let us be vigilant that no bad thing intrude. He expects good fruits in due season, so we labor day by day within its safe and fragrant bounds. Then, at harvest let us press grapes offering a cup having a sweet savor. For He has poured Himself out and has offered His cup to us. And on the night He was betrayed — opening the First Garden with a Holy Chalice and departing soon to another garden where He will be arrested — He issues a Divine command: "Do this!"

Abide in this garden. For it is the Garden of Life .... and Eternal Life.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.