I don’t know how many of you have been watching the TV series “The Tudors” on Friday evenings. If you haven’t it’s too late for now because last Friday’s was the last episode of the present series, though I understand that there will be more. The series tells the story of Henry the Eighth and his Wives in a very powerful and raw way. It’s not a historical drama in the tradition of merchant Ivory films but a very contemporary telling of the story which makes clear that power and sex and politics were the driving forces of the very human people involved, and of the ultimate destructiveness not just for others but for all who are involved in the story. It’s a story of high ideals being used to disguise base motives and of the slow degeneration and disintegration of the people involved. As I watched the final episode on Friday what struck me most was pomposity and puffed up self importance of everyone who was involved, and the way in which they were trapped by their own decisions, and made captive by their own unwillingness to let go of that self importance.

It’s a familiar story and one that has been repeated again and again down through history. It is the kind of story that is the background to today’s gospel reading.

The setting for today’s passage from the Gospel according to St. Matthew is the last week of Jesus’ ministry before he is to die on the cross. Jesus has come to Jerusalem and confronts the religious and political authorities in that city with the challenge of his presence. That challenge is made explicit when he deliberately fulfils the prophecy of Zechariah by riding in Jerusalem on a donkey on the day we have come to call Palm Sunday and it continues as day by day through the following week he goes to the temple to teach those who will listen to him. Members of the temple priesthood and the ruling council listen to his words and in this context Matthew tells us Jesus proclaims the parable of the vineyard.

Our Old Testament lesson for today is essential reading if we are going to understand that parable. Isaiah many hundreds of years before Jesus walked this earth tells the story of God and his vineyard. God, says Isaiah, has a vineyard upon which he has lavished great care expecting that the vineyard would produce a rich harvest of grapes. But instead of sweet harvest God anticipates the vineyard produces a bitter harvest of wild grapes. God say, because of this, I will abandon the vineyard and let it fall into disrepair and become overgrown. God’s vineyard, he says, is Israel and Judah – a nation from which he sought a harvest of justice but which instead produced a harvest of violence and exploitation.

Isaiah’s story of the vineyard was written a few years before the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and exile of the Jewish people from their homeland. Like the vineyard in the story Jerusalem becomes an overgrown wasteland, as we read in the book of Lamentations:

The Lord has done what he purposed,
he has carried out his threat;
as he ordained long ago,
he has demolished without pity;
he has made the enemy rejoice over you,
and exalted the might of your foes.

The point to all this is that the destruction is not inevitable. If only people will change their ways then things can be different, but they can’t. They trapped by their decisions and helplessly follow the course that they have set.

Now Jesus knows this story from Isaiah and sees its applicability to the situation confronting the people of his day. He retells the story but changes it. The vineyard is still God’s Holy Land and particularly Jerusalem and the Temple. But now the vineyard has been entrusted to tenants. They are to care for the vineyard and bring the owner his share of the produce they bring from it. The vineyard itself is not at fault but rather those who are tasked with caring for it. They are negligent and fail in their duty. When the owner sends his servants to collect his share of the produce they beet and abuse those servants. When the owner sends his son, they kill him. Now however this parable was understood at its first telling it’s clear that for the early Christian community Jesus was seen as speaking about the prophets and about himself. The tenants of the vineyard are those entrusted with the oversight of God’s people, the political and religious authorities of the temple – and we need to remember that this is not two separate groups but a single ruling elite. This ruling elite has constantly rejected those who call them back to their mission and now they will express their rejection by turning Jesus over to be crucified. In consequence they will in the end be destroyed and cast out – and that is exactly what happens. Forty years after Jesus is put to death the Temple will again lie in ruins, never to be rebuilt up until this day, and a generation later the Romans will expel the Jews from Jerusalem beginning the long exile which ended only in 1948.

Now those in authority understand exactly what Jesus is saying. What is to follow is not inevitable. But they are trapped by their own inability to see a different path. Trapped by their own decisions on the path which leads to their destruction.

And yet things could be different. In the letter to the Philippians Paul tells of how proud he was of all the things that made him so important, but he came to realise that he had to let them go. All these things that made me so important, he says,’ I regard them as rubbish’. This is an example of the modern English translation being coy. The Authorized Version says, “do count them but dung” and even that is using a far milder word than Paul himself uses. Paul recognizes that no matter how valuable something is, if it gets in the way of us experiencing the life of God then it’s just – well, let’s be coy and say “rubbish”.

The events of the past few weeks have shown us that we live in a far more fragile world than many of us thought. We hope that the decision by the House of Representatives to support the bail-out plan will at least bring some stability in the present crisis. I’m not convinced that we have seen the end of the present danger and I am convinced, anyway, that this present crises is only one of a number of political, economic and social concerns which threaten to destabilize our comfortable western world. We are living, I believe, in interesting times and we need to assess our priorities in the light of that.

In these difficult times we must hear and proclaim anew the Good News of Jesus who shows us the way forward to true life; that together with St. Paul we may forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

As one author has written:

The onus is on us, as members of God's kingdom, to cherish what we have inherited and then to re-invest what we have received in those to whom we are called to minister and to plant richly and generously in the lives of those with whom we worship and witness. The onus is also on us to re-examine our call to discipleship and, in the light of the movement towards the end of the church year, to take stock and to prune our lives so that by taking this small responsibility we might in due time produce abiding fruit.