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The Pleasant Plant, the Stinker and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By hughdbryant
April 13, 2025 //
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Sermon for Evensong on Palm Sunday 2025

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=611300034

Two vineyards. Two stories about vineyards at the start of Holy Week. You might think that we are being exposed to, talking about, another temptation involving wine, but that’s not it. The two vineyard stories in Isaiah and St Luke’s gospel.

Isaiah the prophet singing for his beloved concerning his vineyard – I’m not quite sure how the genders work – the beloved having done all that is necessary to create a fruitful vineyard on a very fertile hill; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded, according to our translation here, ‘wild grapes’: although apparently, according to one of the commentaries which I read, the word in Hebrew literally means ‘stinkers’. Heaven knows what a grape has to be like to be described as a stinker; anyway it was not a successful planting of a vineyard. Somehow the vineyard didn’t turn out as it was intended to be.

‘What I will do to my vineyard’ – it’s quite difficult to follow who’s who in this story – it’s somebody and his beloved who builds the vineyard and then it’s me, it’s my vineyard. And because the vineyard produces stinkers I’ll dismantle it and make it a wasteland so that it’s overgrown with briars and thorns. There isn’t really some boyfriend’s Château Musar somewhere which has suddenly stopped producing decent grapes.

Similarly Jesus talks about a man turning his vineyard over to tenants – literally, farmers – in the King James Bible, husbandmen. Where have all these good words gone? I like a world with husbandmen in it. And where are the handmaidens? I ask myself. The word here is γεωργος (Georgos, which is Greek for ‘farmer’). Like a lot of names, George is derived from the Greek, so if you are called George, in Greek you are a farmer. In Jesus’ story, they were tenant farmers of some kind. And he sent members of his staff – literally, his slaves – one at a time to try to collect the rent, or a share of the produce instead, which certainly seems still to be the way that it works in the south of France even today. A friend of mine had a house there including a vineyard. He let the local cooperative manage the vineyard, in return for which they harvested the grapes and gave my friend a share in the wine produced. He took his rent in bottles.

Here, however, the parable is about wicked tenants who didn’t pay their rent and instead, eventually, when the owner sent his own son, the tenants, having kicked out his servants one by one when they called on the farmers to hand over the rent, actually killed the son. So what did the owner of the vineyard do? Obviously he evicted the wicked tenants and passed the vineyard over to other managers to manage.

Again, this is not an actual story about something that actually happened. It’s a parable and it’s very relevant to Easter. Jesus is forecasting what is going to happen, and the scribes and the chief priests, hearing him, get angry because they realise that what he is saying is directed against them, Jesus suggests that if they do behave like the wicked tenants then ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, and that stone will trip people up fatally, and it may fall on other people, with similar devastating consequences.

If they, the Pharisees and scribes, are builders, and if they reject a stone while they are building something, if they reject Jesus, then He will become a stumbling block for them, or even fall on them and obliterate them.

Ploughing up a vineyard. Fatal trips and falls. Being crushed by a massive boulder. I’m not sure whether, when we read these lessons in the Bible, even in the context of Lent and even as we look forward to the commemoration of the amazing events of the first Easter, even so, I’m not sure that these lessons really grab us in the way that some of the language used indicates that they are meant to.

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. And Isaiah’s friend’s vineyard producing ‘stinkers’ instead of the sweet juicy grapes that he might reasonably have expected and so getting dug up and bulldozed. These are two parables, two stories that are not meant to be taken literally, but which colourfully illustrate, dramatise, an idea or principle; and they have been chosen to be readings for Evensong today because they put you in mind of what we are going to commemorate at Easter.

Jesus is the son who is sent to the vineyard, the vineyard being the human race, the only son, who gets rejected and killed by the people who are looking after his father’s property, the vineyard, the world that his father has created. The Israelites, the Jews, were the bad tenants who threw out the only son and killed him; or rather, they would be, because Jesus is telling the story before he gets crucified.

But so what? Look, there are only 43 of us here – although that’s a really good turn-out: there are only a few thousand, perhaps, in Evensong services all over the UK. Most people couldn’t care less. Most people are snoozing after Sunday lunch or maybe having a nice walk in the park.

Even if they are vaguely aware of Easter having more to it than just a lot of Easter eggs, nevertheless there is nothing vital or urgent about it so far as they are concerned. Even if they’re going to turn up on Easter Sunday, if they are in the habit of coming at Christmas and Easter, say, (which, incidentally, if they were in the Roman Catholic Church would count as regular attendance), but even if they are really rather sparing attenders at church, or if they never come, they presumably don’t feel any compulsion, any need or anything really vital for their life today about this teaching of Jesus or this prophecy of Isaiah.

Nobody much today really thinks that because they might be descendants of the people who cast out the son and killed him, (in these terms), they should worry that a stone might be a stumbling block or that it might fall on them and crush them. It’s probably a metaphor too far, even if they do know a bit about Jesus, because the idea that Jesus would take some dreadful vengeance on people, crush them and grind them into dust, is not consistent with our picture of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, the suffering servant, who washed the disciples’ feet – as we will wash at least one of your feet, on Thursday at Holy Nativity.

What is our Lent reflection about this? I want to read you something which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian who was executed by the Nazis in the dying days of the Second World War because he was a member of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. The church remembered the 80th anniversary of his death last Wednesday. He wrote, from prison, what he called an ‘outline for a book’, in which he tackled the idea of a world in which people do not feel they need God any more. He speaks of a God in “religion” as a deus ex machina. Literally it means ‘god from the machinery’. That’s defined in the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary as a ‘power [or] event that comes in the nick of time to solve difficulty.’ The ‘machinery’ was what they had in ancient Greek theatres, to make the actors playing the part of gods fly through the air.

Bonhoeffer felt that religious people had been seeing God in a way as a magic fixer, that “[God] must be ‘there’ to provide answers and explanations beyond the point at which our understanding or our capabilities fail.” But as scientific knowledge has increased, so people have needed God less and less. They may well feel they can get along without needing God at all.

Bonhoeffer felt we ought to accept this, that this was a sign of the world ‘coming of age’. He wrote, ‘The only way to be honest is to recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur – even if God is not ‘there’. Like children outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home, in which ‘Daddy’ is always there in the background, God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him’.

He went on to set out a paradox at the heart of this, which I think leads very well into our reflections for Lent. Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘God allows himself to be edged out of the world, and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. … This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all [other] religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a deus ex machina. The Bible however [has] directed him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.’

“[Bonhoeffer wrote that he would explain in his book] the experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that Jesus is ‘there only for others.’ His ‘being there for others’ is the experience of transcendence. It is only this ‘being there for others’, maintained till death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.” Those are the essential characteristics of the divine, of God, of what he calls ‘transcendence’. He goes on: “Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection).” Those are the key things about Jesus: incarnation becoming human, the cross, and resurrection. According to Bonhoeffer,“Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence – but our relation to God is a new life in existence for others, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation.”

We need to think very carefully about this really big mystery. On the one hand we believe in God as a kind of omnipotent father figure, but on the other we read that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. God, Jesus, is in the needy people, the ill people, the homeless people, the naked people who have no clothes.

The sky has turned darker since the joyful procession this morning on a donkey. Donkeys are great, and Jesus was on that donkey. But what else was going on? That’s for us to ponder in this week to come.

Quotations are from ‘Outline for a Book’ in Bonhoeffer, D, (enlarged edition) 1971, ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’, London, SCM Press p.380f., and from Bonhoeffer as quoted in Robinson, J. A. T., 1963, ‘Honest to God’, p36f, ‘Must Christianity be Religious?’

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Divinely Ordained Brexit?

By hughdbryant
July 1, 2018 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the 5th Sunday after Trinity, 1st July 2018

Psalm 53, Jeremiah 11:1-14, Romans 13:1-10

‘…the powers that be are ordained of God.

Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God’ (Romans 1:1,2)

Wow! Is St Paul saying that all governments are ‘ordained by God’, and therefore right, therefore to be obeyed, in every case?

What about, obviously what about, President Trump? Are people supposed to regard his government as ‘ordained by God’? Separating little children brutally from their parents. Denouncing climate change treaties. Lying blatantly in public. How could God be behind that sort of thing?

But why pick on President Trump? We can immediately think of awful things that many governments, including our own, have done over the ages. Who invented concentration camps, for example? It wasn’t Adolf Hitler – it was us, in the Boer War. What about Victor Orban in Hungary putting up barriers against poor refugees that the EU, to which Hungary belongs, have agreed to take; or the ‘hostile environment’ for black people which our own government created, with such unjust and cruel consequences for the ‘Windrush Generation’, those West Indians who came at our invitation to drive our buses and be nurses in our hospitals? It doesn’t look at all plausible that all governments, at all times, reflect the will of God.

Think of the terrible controversy over ‘Brexit’. There is no love lost between the factions – and the government seems to be stuck. There’s no clear government policy which we could obey, even if we wanted to. But I’ll come back to that.

And what if you are ‘the powers that be’, if you are a member of the government? Can you claim to be ‘ordained by God’? President Trump might really go for that one, I’m sure.

This all looks pretty unsatisfactory. It looks as though St Paul was as unenlightened about obeying the government of the day as he looks to have been about the status and role of women.

But what about the rule of law? As a Jew, Paul was very conscious of the value of law – in their case, of the Jewish Law, the first five books of the Old Testament, called the Pentateuch. Jesus had said that he had not come to abolish the law – Matthew 5:17 – but to fulfil it. The rule of law looks less open to abuse than the power of rulers, almost by definition: ‘Be ye ever so high, the law is above you’, as Lord Denning said.

And come to think of it, Jesus himself said something very similar to what Paul said in his Letter to the Romans, when he said, ‘Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s’, holding up a Roman coin and asking whose head was on it (Mark 12:17, cf. Romans 13:7 – or in Luke 20:22). It seems rather odd, in the context that, at the time when Jesus and, later, Paul were telling people to obey the government, that government was the brutal occupying power of the Roman empire.

That is perhaps why the picture of the ruling authorities which Paul paints is so fierce:

But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil (Romans 13:4).

He carries a sword. He’s not Dixon of Dock Green. I have to say, in passing, that even today, I do feel rather uncomfortable when I see what our policemen and WPCs are wearing. No more policemen’s helmets and smart blue uniforms with silver buttons. Now they look like storm troopers from Mad Max 2, with ghastly baseball caps. I need one of our police members of St Mary’s please to explain! I must be missing something.

I think that, if we take into account the historical context of St Paul’s letter, we can understand that, for example, as the leading Pauline scholar James Dunn from Durham has said [Dunn, J.D.G., (1998) 2005, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, London, T & T Clark, pp 674f], this apparent ‘quietism’ in the face of what were often bad, oppressive governments was partly explained as being in accordance with the Jewish tradition that there was ‘wisdom’ in government and wisdom shown by rulers – the ‘Wisdom of Solomon’, for instance – but also that putting up with rulers was ‘the realism of the little people, of the powerless’. (Dunn p. 679).

The church, at this early stage, (Paul was writing within 20 years of the Crucifixion), was a series of secret ‘house churches’, cell groups. As such, they were more vulnerable than the Jews in their synagogues. The Romans knew what the Jews were, and tolerated them – indeed, they gave them some devolved, delegated authority, so day to day power was passed down to King Herod. But although Christianity started as a Jewish sect, St Paul had succeeded in widening it out so as to appeal also to non-Jews, ‘Gentiles’ as well. As such, the Romans might well have regarded the Christians as seditious, as revolutionaries like the Zealots. Indeed, one of the disciples, the other Simon, not Simon Peter, was indeed a ‘Zealot,’ according to Luke chapter 6.

So the early Christians would not have wanted to draw the authorities’ attention to themselves, in case they were pursued as being terrorists like the Zealots. But arguably the most important thing for St Paul was what he said about how obedience to the law – and he didn’t distinguish between the Jewish law and the law of the land – how obedience to the law, and therefore how obedience to the government – depends on Jesus’ great new commandment, to love one another. He says,

‘Leave no claim outstanding against you, except that of mutual love. He who loves his neighbour has satisfied every claim of the law.

For the commandments, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet’, and any other commandment there may be, are all summed up in the one rule,

Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Love cannot wrong a neighbour; therefore the whole law is fulfilled by love.’ (Romans 13:8-9, NEB)

I think that gives us another angle. There’s a hierarchy of authority under God here. Some ‘powers’ trump – sorry, bad word – some ‘powers’ have higher authority than that which the ‘powers that be’ have, albeit those powers are ordained by the Almighty. We are, after all, all children of God, some better than others. Think what tonight’s rather dystopian Psalm, Psalm 53, says.

God looked down from heaven upon the children of men

to see if there were any, that would understand, and seek after God.

But they are all gone out of the way, they are altogether become abominable

there is also none that doeth good, no not one.

So with other things that God has made. He may have made better things. We can still use our critical faculties to assess whether a given regime conforms with Jesus’ rule of love.

This chapter 13 in the Letter to the Romans comes just after a line in the previous chapter, which, I think, confirms the overall rationale. Paul says,

If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. (Romans 12:18)

His words are a strong echo of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Paul says:

Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.

Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.

Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

So what you have to do, Paul suggests, is not let yourself be sidetracked into sterile opposition against whichever politician it is you disapprove of, but overcome what you think they do wrong they do by putting good deeds up against it as far as you can, and ultimately turning the other cheek. Those are the marks of a true Christian.

Perhaps I can leave you with my own personal conundrum here. I would stress that it is only my personal view.

Our government is apparently committed, by what it calls ‘the will of the people’, expressed in a referendum in which 37% voted in favour, to leave the EU. I personally believe that unless this ‘Brexit’ is stopped, our country faces catastrophe. I acknowledge that many other people don’t agree with me.

Does St Paul have anything to say here? I just do not believe that what he says means that Christians have to support our government. I think that it is much more believable that our system of government, in which a loyal opposition plays a vital part, could indeed have been ‘ordained by God’. A Christian must obey the system, the apparatus of government: but they can still choose to support either the government or the opposition.

And I do hope and pray that everyone on each side of the Brexit issue will eventually rise above it and become friends again. But first, I think we have to find a way, indeed perhaps by prayer, to avoid a catastrophe.

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