The Path of Repentance from Hopelessness

A sermon on Mark 12:1–12

[For an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Logan Fischer on Unsplash.]

Like many of you, I woke up yesterday morning to the news of American bombs falling in Iran.

And my heart sank at the loss of civilian lives (including at least 85 students at a girl’s school in Tehran).

And my heart clenched with fear at how this violence could (some might say will, inevitably) escalate.

And my blood boiled with frustrated anger at the unilateral executive action behind this strike that undermines – yet again – the constitutional balance of power in this country.

AND, I am also horrified by the violent suppression of popular protests in Iran by the government there (all the more so because I no longer believe that would never happen here).

And I long for freedom and safety for Iran’s people, a chance to determine their own future.

And I wish I could believe that outside intervention could protect human rights there, although seemingly indiscriminate bombing is not the mechanism I would choose.

It’s easy for me to identify all of the things that I don’t want to be happening right now, in the Middle East and here in the U.S…. But it’s harder to articulate what I do want, or at least what actions I would propose to fix the current frightening, tragic, mess.

When the world is on fire, for what do we pray? It seems a flood might be the only way to extinguish the flames, but that option has other dire consequences, and God has promised not to do that again.

And then there is today’s parable.

Another story full of violence and the abuse of borrowed and/or stollen power – where the vulnerable are the ones to pay the price for others’ greed.

And even the promised retribution at the end of the lesson fails to heal the pain of the story.

It reassures us that the abusers will be destroyed at the end, but I cannot feed hope on a diet of vengeance.

There must be more than punishment for the evildoers involved in the justice of God’s reign?

And, of course, there is.

But to see it, we have to widen our view. To read the parable in context BOTH of its immediate telling and it’s part of the larger narrative… as part of the path to Palm Sunday that we are walking this Lent.

Jesus is telling this story to a particular audience, and I think we have to watch them to understand Jesus’s ultimate message in this teaching.

I gave some hints about that audience in the way I amplified the unspecified pronouns in my reading of today’s gospel, but to draw the contrast, I want to compare this telling to a much earlier parable… one that calls all the way back to Israel’s most beloved King.

In Second Samuel we read the account of David’s most horrifying sin.

He abuses his royal power to take his pleasure from a woman, Bathsheba, whose husband, Uriah, is fighting David’s war at the front.

When she finds that she is pregnant, David seeks to cover up his sin, first by calling Uriah back to make his parentage of the child at least plausible.

But when Uriah (a foreigner, by the way) proves himself committed to the cause of his adopted country and refuses to enjoy himself while other men are dying (as David has been doing, by the way), David sends him back to the front and ensures that he will be killed in the war.

David is a thief (in his patriarchal context), a conniver, and a murderer, just as the tenants of the vineyard in Jesus’s parable. So, God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David with his sin through a parable imagined just for him.

Nathan tells the king the story of a wealthy but heartless man, whose neighbor had only one beloved sheep who was like a daughter to him (2 Samuel 12:3).

But when the rich man found himself needing to entertain a guest with a meal, the host decided that rather than serving one of the animals from his own plentiful flocks, he would take his neighbors only ewe lamb and slaughter her.

David’s reaction to the story was immediate and (perhaps unsurprisingly) violent. “The man who has done this deserves to die” (2 Sam. 12:5).

In a way, his response echoes the ending of the parable of the tenants. Justice requires violence to be repaid with violence. When we see wrong in the world, we must punish the wrong-doers, right?

Well, as it turns out, retribution was not the point of Nathan’s parable.

As soon as David pronounces his judgment, Nathan makes the big reveal: “You are the man,” and he goes on to confront David not only with his crimes but also with the reminder that God had entrusted him with the power that he abused.

There is a promise of punishment included in the prophet’s message, I won’t pretend God takes it easy on David, but there is also something else in this story.

Repentance.

As soon as David was confronted by the truth that his abuse was no better than the action he had just condemned from his own mouth, David saw it, and he confessed.

That’s why I say that retribution was not the point of Nathan’s parable.

Because if his only purpose was to pronounce punishment on David, Nathan could have skipped the parable entirely. He could have called David out directly on his betrayal of God’s trust, and God’s law, and basic human morality and announced the judgment that David was going to face.

The only reason for the parable to be Nathan’s approach was for the purpose of generating David’s response of repentance.

And that truth is why I told this parable story as a contrast for the parable Jesus told in today’s gospel.

Because unlike many of Jesus’s parables, which seem to be general teachings, meant to be heard and applied across different contexts, this parable is directed to a particular group, just as Nathan’s parable was told specifically to David.

Jesus specifically speaks to the religious leaders in Jerusalem when he presents the parable of the wicked tenants.

And Mark tells us at the end of the parable proper that these leaders immediately recognized that Jesus had told this parable “against them.”

The parable of the tenants is not a general teaching about God’s reign.

It is a story that lifts up the particular sin of a particular group.

It is a teaching that shines a light on the trust they have been given by the “owner” of the vineyard – by God whose people have been given them to lead – and it unswervingly decries not only their failure as stewards… it names their affinity to violence and theft.

It confronts them with their greed, and their rejection of morality, and their refusal to recognize what they owe to God.

It is a bid for repentance.

But the leaders whom Jesus confronts do not repent.

They have chosen their allegiance and it is to power.

The only reason they do not immediately turn to violence is because of their fear of the crowd.

So, they strategically retreat and start to plot how to collude with empire to get rid of the one who tells the truth about their sin.

It is hardly a reassuring gospel to read on a day when we want to know what to do in the face of power choosing violence.

But it is a true story. This is how the world we live in operates.

Jesus knows that because he lived in the same world. I’m sure he was not surprised when his parable failed to generate repentance.

He knew the road he was walking on.

He knew that Palm Sunday would lead to Calvary.

But I don’t think Jesus would want us to let this parable or this truth of how power acts leave us in despair.

Because he knows that even a Palm Sunday Path that leads to Calvary does not end there.

It continues on to the empty tomb.

And that empty tomb leads to the commission for all who follow Jesus to tell the story of a way that does not conform to the path of power.

A way that does not see violence as the solution to every problem.

A way that knows the power of repentance to free us from the reign of violence.

Precisely because it is a different way.

And that way is defined by a willingness to repent… to turn away from the ways that we have been taught to function, the expectations we have been taught to just accept because power and violence always get their way…

And I think that the repentance we are called to is the willingness to turn away from the lure of hopelessness.

We do not operate in the ways of power and violence, and we can be tempted to think that means we will always be the victims or at least forced to stand in horror grieving the victims.

But the Palm Sunday Path is not the way of victims. It is the way that confronts evil, and sometimes suffers at its hands, but it is also the way of resurrection.

And hope can never be defeated when we know we are resurrection people.

Thanks be to God.