It Just Doesn’t Work (3rd Sunday in Lent; Mark 12:1-12; February 28, 2016)

It Just Doesn’t Work

3rd Sunday in Lent 
Mark 12:1-12 
February 28, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD 
First United Methodist Church 
Decorah, Iowa

Some of the kids in the after-school program have talked about what they are giving up for Lent. A common choice seems to be to give up candy.

Good for them. Good for us. Better yet, we might give up something in a way that does good for someone else. Maybe we could take the money that we would have spent on the candy that we've given up and donate it to a good cause instead. Maybe we could find a program that provides free dental care to those who can't afford it.

Doing ourselves good by giving up a bad habit is challenging. Changing our patterns of behavior to do someone else good is more challenging.

But deep change, the kind that qualifies as repentance, as a change of inner orientation, may be the hardest kind of all. Deep change involves changing our ways of thinking about the world and our place in it. Often, when we set out to do that, we discover that our old ways of thinking, our old ways of understanding the world, our old ways of living in the world, are structured by the myths that we hold. Or more accurately by the myths that hold us.

There are of course many myths that are a part of the shared wisdom of humankind. But when I think of myths I mean something a little different. A myth, you have heard me say, is a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. We do the telling. We do the listening. The story is about us. We are the ones who need explaining. And we are the ones we are trying to satisfy with our explanation. A myth is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves.

American life is dominated by a few myths, but the one that we tell the most is what Walter Wink calls "The Myth of Redemptive Violence." The Myth of Redemptive Violence tells us that the world is divided between good people (that's us) and bad people. The bad people do bad things. In the course of the unfolding plot of the story the good people will have to use violence against the bad people. That violence is good because it redeems and restores the world. The violence that bad people use is bad, but the violence that good people use is good, redemptive, and holy.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence supplies the plot line for much of our entertainment. A very example of the Myth is the criminal investigation drama. A body is discovered, and it turns out that someone has been murdered. The good people investigate and discover who the bad person or persons are who committed the crime. The bad people are killed or defeated with violence. With that the social world of the drama is restored and redeemed.

If entertainment were only entertainment that wouldn't be so bad, but entertainment is never just entertainment. And the Myth doesn't stop there. It invades and colonizes real life. It has a million variations. It is endlessly fascinating.

Our nation is currently in the grip of this myth. You can see this clearly in our entertainment, our criminal justice system, our foreign policy, and our debates over gun control. When a nation is possessed by this myth, as we now are, its thinking becomes rigid, ethics becomes nearly impossible, and body counts rise. War crimes like carpet bombing and torture seem reasonable, prudent, and even heroic.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence is powerful. In fact it's so powerful that it has the power to take over other stories and force them to tell its story instead. In the Scripture lesson for today I see a place where this has happened with deadly results both because of what the story should have been and the deaths that would have been prevented and because of what the story has become and the deaths it has caused.

The story is a parable.  Parables are stories drawn from ordinary life, from situations or actions that would have been familiar to Jesus' listeners, with an odd element introduced that would have encouraged his listeners to see the world in a new way.

I disagree with the traditional interpretations of parables. I do not believe that they are allegories. That is, when a parable says that "A man planted a vineyard", the parable is about a man who planted a vineyard. I believe that trying to understand the parable by assuming that the man is really God and the vineyard is really the promise of the covenant is not only wrong intellectually but also wrong morally.

Those are strong words and some of you may balk. You may do that. I will hear you out after the service. All I ask is that you hear me out now.

The parable as I said, is about a man who planted a vineyard. He did all of the things the vineyards needed to be productive. It is clear from the story that he never intended to run the vineyard himself. Instead, he leased the vineyard to tenants who would pay him a percentage share of the harvest.

Parables are drawn from situations in ordinary life. The situation in this parable was common enough in the Galilee of Jesus' day. Galilee was a client kingdom in the Roman Empire. The Romans were not interested in Galilee for its own sake but for the profit that it could generate. During Jesus' lifetime the Galilean landscape was changing. In the past peasants had had small land holdings on which they grazed a few sheep or goats, produced grain, and grew some olives and grapes, enough for their own use, plus a little to sell to buy the things they could not produce. More and more peasants were being forced to borrow money to pay taxes, more money than they could hope to repay by selling their surpluses. Peasants were being forced off their land and their land was being bought up by estate owners. Fields were joined together, unprofitable grain and livestock production were being replaced with cash crops like olives and grapes.

The peasants who had been forced off their land either moved into the less fertile, less productive uplands, or they were hired as workers or even tenant farmers on the very land which they had lost. I suspect how they felt about the situation. Instead of being landed peasants on farms they had worked for generations, they were now disposable laborers or contractors. They had no security, no dignity, and very few rights. They had come down in the world and they had come down hard. There were enough of these folks that it would be fair to say that resentment simmered just below the surface everywhere in Galilee and that resentment was focused on the wealthy and absent landowners.

So here was the situation when it came to the people in the parable. The landowner who had not in fact done any of the actual work the parable describes was living in a villa somewhere, hanging out with other rich people, complaining about how hard it was to get good help, and drinking the wine that was produced by the hard work of the displaced peasants who had become contract farmers. The landowner's only involvement was to collect his share of the wine.

So he sent agents. How do you suppose the contract farmers felt about the agents and their demands for rent? Now, unlike in real life where they knew better, the contract farmers in this story imagined that if they refused to pay the rents and beat up the agent they would get to keep the whole harvest. It doesn't work that way, but they acted as if it did. They beat up the agent. They refused to pay.

The landowner sent another agent who was treated in a similar way, and another, and another. The parable says that the man finally decided to send his son "whom he loved dearly." In reality the son might well have been sent on his father's behalf. The son's first stop would have been the governor's office. There he would have presented his case against the contract farmers. The governor would have detached a unit of legionaries to the son who would have showed up at gates of the estates prepared to do whatever needed to be done to restore his father's property rights.

But Jesus is using the parable to play with us. In the

ble the son shows up alone, his father having decided that good will would be enough to win the day. The contract operators see the son and say to each other, "This is the heir. Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours."

This was the part of the story that stopped Jesus' hearers short. That is not how inheritance laws worked. Killing an heir does not make the murderer the new heir! No one would have been so stupid as to imagine that, if they killed the landlord's son, they would inherit the vineyard!

What then is Jesus trying to say? Well, given the resentment against the Romans, it would have been tempting to imagine that killing the agents of the Empire would somehow set them free and restore their land. In other words, the Myth of Redemptive Violence was singing its siren song. How easy to give in to their anger, to let their rage loose against their enemy and its agents! How strong they would feel, how in control of their own fate, how free!

But Jesus knew that strength, control, and freedom cannot be found in rebellious violence. In fact, as we understand perfectly well, rebellion would lead only to disaster. Remember, within two months, the Romans could have fifteen thousand legionaries anywhere in Galilee. "What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others."

That, I believe, is what the parable meant to those who heard it first. The parable was an argument against the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Violence would not redeem; it would simply be answered by even more destructive violence and nothing would change, except that those who had suffered most would suffer even more. There is no redemption through violence. It just doesn't work.

Now, this is not the parable as it has come to us. As it has come to us it has been set into the context of a dispute between Jesus and the of the Jewish people. As it has come to us, the story about the impossibility of violent opposition to the unjust system under which Galilee suffered has instead become an allegory about the destruction of Jerusalem. The rich landowner has become God. The tenants have become the Jewish leaders. The vineyard itself has become the covenant promise. In the allegorized parable the Jewish leaders have been destroyed by God (using the armies of Rome) and the covenant promise has been given to "others." Who are these others? It doesn't say, but Mark's readers would have understood that the vineyard is now being operated for God by Christians. The "bad" Jewish leaders have been destroyed by purifying, redeeming violence, the promises given to the non-Jewish followers of Jesus, and the world has been cleansed and restored.

A parable told by Jesus in order to lay bare the lie of the Myth of Redemptive Violence has become, in Mark's telling just a generation later a story that is structured by the very myth it originally opposed.

It's not just a story in the Bible. This parable in its present re-mythed form had a role in one of the worst on-going atrocities in human history. In its present setting, the parable says that Jews are the problem in the world and violence that removes them is not only justified but righteous and holy. Year after year in Christian Europe as they heard this and stories like it read during Lent, Christians went home from church and butchered their Jewish neighbors. There is a straight line between this parable of the Wicked--that is to say, Jewish--Tenants and the Holocaust. That is why I say that this way of reading the parable is not simply intellectually wrong, but is morally wrong as well.

What then, shall we do? We who have allowed our good news to be hijacked by the Myth of Redemptive Violence? We who all too often have believed it and acted on it ourselves?

After our history, after our repeated invocation of holy violence, I believe there is only one thing we can do. For the world's sake and for our own, we must renounce the Myth of Redemptive Violence, not just for Lent but forever. It is time for the Christian Church to say once again, as it did long ago, that violence does not redeem or cleanse, that there is no use of violence that makes the world better or safer. It is time for us and for all Christians to say, as the Christians closest in time to Jesus said, No matter how great the temptation, no matter what it costs us, we Christians will not kill. We will not kill each other. We will not kill Muslims or any other supposed enemies. We will not kill anyone. Killing does not redeem. Killing does not purify or cleanse. We will not kill. Not again. Not ever. It just doesn’t work.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.