September 29, 2005
Greed
Pentecost 20/22A
This is the third Sunday in a row that the gospel could as well have begun with something like, “Meanwhile, back at the vineyard… ” (Mt 21.33-43) For those New Testament times, the vineyard was as good a living metaphor as any. Trouble is, in our times we’ve not a lot of familiarity with vineyards, only with their fruit, preferably and properly fermented.
But you know, the parable Jesus tells is really not about vineyards. It’s about greed, and being about greed, it’s inevitably about violence. And we’re all very familiar with those twin evils — not only in his time, but for sure in ours, for they go hand in hand.
The householder sends his servants twice to check with his sharecroppers about the status of his grapes. They not only don’t report, they throw out his emissaries and kill them. So he sends his son. Out of their absurd overconfidence and misjudgment, they kill the son in the strange reasoning that this way, they can take possession of the entire inheritance.
It doesn’t take a lot of reflection to see how this story is an omen that parallels the whole sweep of how God first sent the prophets into the world and then sent her son, only to have him killed. But as powerful as is that, we can’t just leave it there.
Today, it may be more like this. Remember the scene in the l987 movie “Wall Street” where the protagonist Michael Gekko, CEO of a major brokerage house, is addressing the board and stockholders of a large paper company. After berating them at some length about their careless and malicious management of money, he concludes:
“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
“Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save (your paper company), but (as well) that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
It is a shocking scene. The suspense is palpable, even in the theatre audience. It is as if the character Gekko has actually turned and indicted us. Perhaps it is the last place we’d ever expect to feel like we’d encountered an Old Testament prophet face to face. For not a one of us has not experienced at least a moment of greed or been the victim of someone else’s greed. Of the seven deadly sins, greed has a most impressive staying power and is not easily forgot.
It’s not an unfamiliar pattern. But it’s no longer grapes. It’s oil. It’s not vineyards. It’s refineries and SUVs and road rage. It’s not farming. It’s international chaos and poverty and genocide and corporate welfare resenting care for the poor. But at the seat of it all, it’s still greed, greed issuing in violence and what is more so often in some politicized cover-up.
George Orwell talked about this in his famous essay on “Politics and the English Language.” He spoke of how we use language to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Perhaps it might be something like this:
An invasion is engineered on false pretenses, hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, no one is safe in the streets. It’s called “collateral damage.” Homes, hospitals, and mosques are blown up. Water, electricity, and other services are cut off. Civil society is destroyed. Half the population is left without any means of livelihood. Detainees are tortured and humiliated. Prisons are filled with people picked up off the streets. Cities are targeted and destroyed. And the insurgency is blamed on outside elements. All this is called “bringing democracy to Iraq.”
“Political language,” Orwell said, ” — and with variations this is true of all political parties — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”
And so here we are. In the midst of all these givens that are in their way embarrassingly true of the church as well as the state. Somehow, we’re to find a way to contend with and incarnate the covenant we made at our baptism. It has never been easy to be a follower of that Way — the Way, that lovely word the early disciples of Jesus used to describe themselves. After all, greed for power coupled with violence crucified their Lord and likely could easily crucify them. He made that very clear for them and for us, for as we are signed with the cross do we take up the cross.
Let us recover Jesus’ metaphor of the vineyard for a moment. I confess it would be difficult to find a better one. For the irony of our time is that we are the sharecroppers and also the servants sent by the householder. And we are the his heir. We not only bear the Christ, but are asked to seek and serve the Christ in others. Meanwhile, back at the vineyard.
Note: Thanks to George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary for an idea or two herein.
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