Jesus beyond the Pale: a sermon by Kenneth Padley

Jesus beyond the Pale: a sermon by Kenneth Padley

Readings: Isaiah 5.1-7; Luke 20.9-19

It is super to see the return of the Easter Garden outside the west end of the Cathedral. The Works Yard have prepared the ground, built a tomb and mounted three crosses on the adjacent wall. Garden designer Andy McIndoe has then filled the space with trees and plants which celebrate the colours and scents of the Holy Land.

Andy has given particular thought and care to his choice of flora so as to reference incidents and ideas from the Christian gospels. He has picked Ornithogalum umbellatum, said by legend to have grown from the Star of Bethlehem. And there are Lilies of the Field, simple wildflowers proclaimed by Jesus to be more glorious than King Solomon in all his splendour. There are palm bushes to echo this day when crowds spread branches before Jesus and his donkey – a triumph contrasted by a cercis siliquastrum, a Judas Tree, on which the betrayer of Christ purportedly hanged himself.

Most evocative for me is the olive. Through a quirk of supply at Andy’s stockist, we have ended up with a particularly large specimen this year. Its pot is so huge that Andy has ramped up plants and chippings around the edges. I see here an unintended trace of Gethsemane, that hillside olive grove where Jesus prayed so fervently on the night before he died.

The use of plants like this to symbolise ideas and values is as old as the Bible itself. Tonight, we heard Jesus tell a parable about a vineyard. And, as we also heard, it is a story which Jesus adapted from the prophecy of Isaiah written three quarters of a millennium earlier.

Ancient Jews usually associated flourishing vines, figs and olives with divine blessing. However, in the hands of Isaiah and Jesus, the imagery of the vineyard becomes a critique of self-satisfaction and religious complacency.

• Isaiah crafted his words as a song – a love-song no less – of God for his people. God had put so much into his vineyard: clearing it, digging it, planting it, guarding it. And yet this investment had seemingly failed. God’s people were fruitless. ‘He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!’ (v 7)
• In the mouth of Jesus, Isaiah’s metaphor becomes a critique of spiritual leaders – not of the vineyard itself but of the tenants charged with tending it. The divine landlord sends warning through a succession of agents, culminating in his own son. We see here both a striking assertion of Christ’s divinity (as son of the landlord) and the frustration of his earliest followers at their fellow Jews who didn’t get it. To the apostles, it felt as if God was giving over the vineyard to new tenants.

A particular expression of this early Christian frustration is hidden deep within the way that St Luke tells the story. Luke based his account of this parable on his major textual source, the gospel according to St Mark. In Mark 12.8, we read that the tenants seized the son, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. Luke 20.15 tweaks this to state that the tenants threw the son out of the vineyard and then killed him. This flip of events is notably repeated, entirely independently, in St Matthew’s version of Mark’s text. For Matthew as for Luke, the tenants evict the son before killing him because this aligns more closely with the events of Good Friday when Jesus was executed outside Jerusalem.

So, although on Palm Sunday we usually think of Jesus’ triumphal entry into the holy city, tonight’s reading asks us to reflect on the opposite movement and on the relevance of Christ’s suffering and death without the city wall. Two New Testament writers find particular theological significance in this movement and location.

• In a reworking of Isaiah chapter 63, Revelation 14.19-20 speaks of the vintage of the earth being reaped by angels and thrown into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And here’s the important bit – Revelation goes on to say that ‘the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.’ Friends, we are being reminded that the cross comes to us this Friday as judgement and as atonement.
• The Epistle to the Hebrews also comments on the extra-urban location of the crucifixion. One passage near the end of the Letter riffs off Exodus 19.17, in which Moses led the wandering Israelites outside their camp in order to meet God at mount Sinai. Hebrews links this to the story of Jesus – before encouraging Christians to stand up and be counted. Quote, Hebrews 13.12, ‘Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.’

There is a phrase in English which denigrates something as ‘beyond the Pale’. This saying refers to an object of activity which is socially unacceptable and ostracised. It comes to us from medieval Ireland in which the territorial limit of English rule around Dublin was marked by a fence of wooden stakes, a palisade. It is the teaching of Hebrews chapter 13 that Jesus is beyond the Pale – and that he wants us to join him there. Friends, we are being reminded that the cross comes to us this Friday as challenge and as exhortation.

Such overthrowing of received structures and expectations I think takes us very close to the heart of what God does for his vineyard in Holy Week. It is a story of radical paradox, about which twentieth-century poet Marie Post captures a glimpse as she reimagines ‘Palm Sunday’:

Astride the colt and claimed as King

That Sunday morning in the spring,

He passed a thornbush flowering red

That one would plait to crown his head.

He passed a vineyard where the wine

Was grown for men of royal line

And where the dregs were also brewed

Into a gall for Calvary’s rood.

A purple robe was cast his way,

Then caught and kept until that day

When, with its use, a trial would be

Profaned into a mockery.

His entourage was forced to wait

To let a timber through the gate,

A shaft that all there might have known

Would be an altar and a throne.[1]

As we ponder the Easter Garden, outside the Cathedral for all to enjoy – yet still within the imposing mile-long wall of the Close, we meet Christ on his path of transformative exclusion, overthrowing the tables in order to right the balances, suffering beyond the fortifications so as to turn Jerusalem inside out, that city which is the emblem of all human society, and each soul within it.

[1] The Lion Book of Christian Poetry, 221.