Sour grapes

Today's readings: Isaiah 5, 1-7; Philippians 4, 6-9; Matthew 21, 33-43.

The parable of the vineyard today should be an eye-opener for us to understand what's happening in our vineyard. God's caring love for His people and their hard-headedness are central features in today's readings. With us, it's the same story. There is so much blindness or alienation that make it difficult for us all to let God's peace guard our hearts and our thoughts, as Paul writes to the Philippians.

With Israel, God's vineyard ended up being devastated with tragic consequences for the people. In Isaiah and in the Gospel, Israel is portrayed as God's vineyard. Despite all the efforts God expended on the vineyard, "it yielded sour grapes". Isaiah's account goes back hundreds of years before the Jesus story and refers to the exilic experience in Babylon. "I will take away the hedge around it, break down the wall that protects it, and let wild animals eat it and trample it down." This was the exile of Israel.

This should be revealing on our exiles today. Matthew constructs the parable in a way that the chief priests and Pharisees could easily perceive that what Jesus was saying was applicable to them. They rejected the stone that was meant to be the keystone of the entire building. Towards the end of the parable, Jesus asks, "Have you never read in the scriptures?" It is a sort of illiteracy charge on the part of Jesus that serves as a metaphor for blindness.

This is also our clear and present danger. Israel's story and behaviour convey very strong messages on history as it is unfolding before our eyes. Faith is a gift. It is never to be deemed a heritage which we possess. It can easily be taken from us. Jesus warned the people of his time that "the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruits".

In this same sense, today's parable is about the drama Western humanity has witnessed and is still going through. In the West we have renounced to what actually has given shape to our culture, values, beliefs, and identity. And we seem all along to persist in not wanting to see and not wanting to examine what's happening in our vineyard.

History has produced ideologies with their respective Gulags, the 'sour grapes' in our vineyard in times of a promising modernity. There is still so much injustice around and the cries of the oppressed are still going unheard. Our daily headlines alternate placidly from Wall Street news to poverty lines reaching broader sections of our society. We proceed blindly, not heeding to any warning whatsoever, be it from God's Word or even from the red lights showing in the way our societies are struggling to cope.

God was once declared dead. Many believe He is irrelevant. Our challenge in what is termed a post-Christian era is that we live in a culture and in a time where the traditional frame of mind and our way of thinking seem to have lost their relevance, potency and meaning. We need a fresh way of understanding what is really happening. And this is becoming somewhat urgent, given that what is at stake is precisely our own fractured selves and a fractured society.

The more we become complacent with what otherwise should bother us, the more we threaten and continue to throw out of our vineyards the prophets and whistle-blowers. This was Israel's story. For us it is the writing on the wall, if we care to look.