Sermon: Not disappointed in our hope

My father told me a story about when he was a boy.  He and a friend decided to go on a cycling holiday together.  For weeks they planned their journey, pored over maps, speculated about the weather, chose youth hostels to stay in.  At last, the day arrived.  The friend would call at six in the morning so they could set off early.  My father was ready by five.  Six came, and then seven and eight.  By ten, worried that something had gone wrong, my father cycled round to his friend.  He opened the front door in his slippers, surprised to see him.  ‘But what about our cycling trip?' my father asked.  ‘O that' said his friend, ‘I thought it was just a game of make-believe.'

That experience of disappointment was indelibly burned on his memory, and I knew as a boy of the same age that I would never forget it either.  When friendship fails, or trust is abused, we never forget it.  ‘It is not an open enemy that hath done me this dishonour, for then I could have borne it.... But it was even thou, my companion: my guide and mine own familiar friend' says the Psalm.  We all have people who have let us down or betrayed our trust, though perhaps we should think first of those whom we ourselves have disappointed or betrayed in our lifetimes.   

There is an undertow of disappointment in today's readings.  Both are about a vineyard that is the focus of unrealised, perhaps unrealistic, hope.  Vinea mea elacta.  Isaiah tells of how the owner of the vineyard looked for it to produce grapes, but it yielded only ‘wild grapes' that were shrivelled up and bad, no good for food or wine. God looked to Israel his vineyard to produce the good fruits of justice and mercy, but in vain.  In Jesus' parable the problem is not the vineyard but its tenants to whom the landowner has given the care of his property.  When he sends slaves to collect his produce they beat and abuse them; and when he sends his beloved son, they murder him.  In both stories, the theme is God's disappointment in his people who have turned away from him with indifference and contempt.  As then, so now, says Jesus in this powerful echo of Isaiah's bitter parable.  And the people know it.  ‘When the scribes and chief priests realised that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour.'   God's disappointment has a long history.

But perhaps Jesus was a disappointment to some of those who first followed him.  Maybe they wanted him to be the warrior who would hurl himself on the wheel of history and wrench it from the Romans - a new Joshua or David or Judas Maccabaeus.  ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!' shouts the crowd echoing a royal victory song in the Psalms.  That was an era of seething messianic expectation and it's hard to think that the excited crowd that lined the way to the Mount of Olives were innocent of it: here at last, in this man on the colt, is the one we have waited for down the ages.  This is one way of reading the career of Judas Iscariot, the disappointed zealot who no doubt loved Jesus to begin with, who of all the disciples perhaps had the highest hopes of him. 

So at one level the passion is a huge disappointment, an inexplicable failure. Jesus came to proclaim a kingdom and make friends with humanity.  When this message was refused, perhaps there was even then the hope that the death of this innocent martyr would somehow turn events round and deliver the kingdom to God.  I think this lies behind the crowd's clamour for Jesus to save himself from the cross ‘if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!', not derision only, but still hoping against hope as the minutes ebb away.  We can understand why the disciples on the road to Emmaus felt so bereft, for everything they had lived for in this man had come to nothing.  The world was as it had always been; human beings in chains; the cruel victorious; the poor victim trodden into the ground.  It would be hard not to feel that the cross was a tree that had borne wild grapes when all that remained of Jesus were memories. 

But on the other side of Easter the cross begins to look very different.  It is not disappointment but a strangely wonderful work that is completed.  When the owner of the vineyard sends his own son to the tenants and they put him to death, it changes everything.  That death brings the landlord himself into the vineyard to redress injustice and right wrongs.  And according to the Christian way of celebrating the cross, it is God here among us affirming that he intends what is just and true and merciful.  Our Palm Sunday hosannas, remembered from the other side of the passion where we now are take on a different hue: not the hollow cry that is destined to be stifled by the dust of death, his death and ours, but our glad recognition of who this is who passes on his way, our risen, eternal King of glory.  It is the anticipation of disappointment transfigured, of hope emptied in delight. 

Today, Palm Sunday, is the Sunday of the passion.  On this day we praise the Christ whose glory is to be crucified, whose cross is his throne of splendour.  In a moment we shall sing ‘Glory be to Jesus', one of the few Italian hymns to have made it into the English canon.  Its characteristic 19^th century devotion to the precious blood of Christ is perhaps a little cloying to our taste, and the poetry is not the greatest.  But there is an honest simplicity about it; and our spirits lift as we get towards the end:

Oft as earth exulting / wafts its praise on high,

Hell with terror trembles, heaven is filled with joy.

Lift ye then your voices; swell the mighty flood;

Louder still and louder, praise the precious Blood. 

The cross as the focus of our praise: that is the theme; not defeat but victory, not disappointment but fulfilment.  We bring to the cross our failed hopes, our unfilled hungers and unmet longings.  At this wicket gate our burdens roll away.  We turn back to God and find that the cross spans the yawning gulf between despondency and hope.  At Golgotha where the beloved Son sheds his blood the inheritance becomes ours.  In this springtime of divine love the vines blossom abundantly; the new wine is the best that can be had.  We know what mercy is.  We worship the Prince of Glory, and learn to be his people once again.