My text for Sunday this week is Luke 20:9-19. This is a dramatic and important text that was not unfamiliar to me. Jesus revisits the great Isaiah 5 parable and applies it to himself and his authority to preach in the temple. As Jesus’ parables go this one is clearer than many. It is a parable against the chief priests, scribes and elders that challenged him in the previous passage. This is his answer following the non-answer to their challenge.

I again found Kenneth Bailey’s “Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes” to be wonderful on the passage. Many times when I’ve read the passage I implicitly focused on judgment, which is clearly there but Bailey notes the makrothymia (long suffering) of the master in the story. Many of us know that if you have a rental property you’d better take action at the first instance of non-payment. This master isn’t negligent, but rather patient to a fault. The first slave is thrashed and sent back empty. The second is thrashed AND dishonored. The third is wounded and cast out. There is clearly heightening going on here. There is also the cultural reality here of dishonoring the slave is to dishonor the one who sent him. Finally the master sends his beloved son hoping against all hope that his presence will shame them into yielding. This master not only extends generosity unwarranted by any objective measure to these vinedressers but does so to the point of irresponsibility. Anyone hearing this story will assert that sending his son is folly. The vinedressers have made their intentions abundantly clear.

The nightmare scenario for the master now happens. They take the beloved son outside of the vineyard (so as not to make it and its produce unclean) and kill him hoping to become owners of the vineyard.

There is a real posturing in this parable that should inform us about God and judgment. I’ve read a bunch this week about the old Calvinist/Arminian debate and the revival of that debate today. See http://evangelicalarminians.org/olson.What-The-Calvinism-I-Oppose-Is-and-Why and http://rachelheldevans.com/letter-to-young-calvinist-from-young-arminian and http://www.outofur.com/archives/2010/11/is_new_calvinis.html.

What I think really bothers people today is the puzzle of perdition. The message of “God is love” has gotten out there but we have issues culturally regarding love and judgment. We tend to define things by their opposites. We imagine freedom is the absence of constraint and love is the absence of refusal. We imagine love means never saying “no”.

The parable of the rebellious vinedressers is interesting because it is based on a notion of ownership. Is there such a thing as squatter’s rights when it comes to God and the universe? What if the master just said “well, they don’t seem to want to give up the grapes, why not just let them have it.”

That is in a sense exactly how our culture approaches the issue of God and forgiveness. “Why can’t God just simply forgive people everything and let bygones by bygones?” This is a kind of “aw shucks, don’t worry about it” theodicy.

For contemporary people this makes sense and seems validated by general revelation. People do horrible things and we don’t see thunderbolts coming out of the sky after them. Job was right, his friends were wrong.

As I’ve noted before, however, we’re very inconsistent with how we feel about this “aw shucks” theodicy. We want it in place if we are being judged by another, but when we find our sense of honor or our sense of priority violated or some damage done to someone we love, we want justice and we want it fast. We want the restaurant to shut that smoker down in the next booth. We want the movie theater to get the talker behind us to shut up. We want code enforcement to make our neighbor get those rusting cars out of the front yard before they bring down the property values.

I think we also understand that squatter’s rights on a cosmic scale isn’t good for the universe. Squatter’s rights as seen in this story really is simply an extension of “might makes right”. The power the rebellious vinedressers exert is just plain old violence. The hope of sending in the son, vulnerable and without the backing of an army was the last appeal to a shred of morality left in the vinedressers. How they would respond to the son himself would establish the definitive evidence of what kind of universe these vinedressers were capable of inhabiting.

In my other prep for this Sunday I have 1 Samuel 24 which is a comparable defining moment for young David. David’s men see Saul’s squatting in cave as a revelation of God’s desire that David should take the kingdom by force. A key word in that section in the KJV is to “smite”. There has been a lot of smiting and talk of smiting going on in Samuel so far and David’s men want David to walk up to the Saul who has got his robes up and his guard down and smite him. What gets smitten in that moment, however, is David’s heart (read the KJV) and he cuts off a piece of Saul’s robe instead.

The vinedressers don’t share David’s heart. Saul is a rebellious vinedresser. David when he leaves the cave and reveals himself to Saul is a beloved son.

What does this teach us about judgment? God is patient and long suffering and gives costly and irresponsible second chances to people that don’t deserve it. Hell is finally for those for whom there is simply no other option. God is patient, but will not, cannot wait forever nor can he really cede the universe to squatters who want to rule it by the sword. Hell is in a sense giving them their own universe where they can live forever under their own relational polarity of “your wellbeing at my expense.” If you like “dog eat dog”, hell is just the place for you. Problem is that there is always a bigger dog.

Is this story Calvinistic or Arminian? Calvinism or Arminianism isn’t really about choice I don’t think. Both positions assert that people damn themselves (read the Canons of Dort). Arminians assert that Calvinists are inconsistent when they make that claim because they assert that the logical outcome of the Calvinist position makes God the author of perdition rather than human rebellion being its author.

What Calvinism wishes to say is that “I don’t know why my own heart would smite me instead of me smiting Saul. I can’t take credit for that.”

Calvinists then return the favor on the Arminians and say “The logical conclusion of the rejection of unconditional election is that you are taking credit for your own goodness and THAT is salvation by works. You take credit for the good sense to chose rightly thus saying that you are better than everyone else who choses wrongly” and Arminians say “no we’re not!”

You know a fight is going no where when one side says “What you say really means THIS” and the other side says “no it doesn’t!” We can chase each other around this tree all day long.

Perdition like we see in the vinedressers makes no logical sense if you follow it all the way through. Rebellion against God is a form of insanity. God in this story is patient, but he cannot be patient forever because ultimately to leave the universe in the hands of these squatters is to condemn the entire universe to hell. At stake is the inheritance and God will not finally cede the universe to misery rather than to joy. It is against his joyful nature.