Sermon

Just for Believing

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

Most preachers -– perhaps I should speak for myself –- carry with us into the pulpit a small cluster of neurotic terrors. One of mine is that my text will mysteriously disappear from the lectern sometime between the early and late Masses.

A second is arriving on Sunday morning to hear the lector reading a set of lessons you’ve not prepared.  This rarely happens, but when it does, many preachers are able to do a bit of re-writing, or actually “re-speaking,” on the spot.  And often this is done with apparent ease and grace –- as did Fr. Biden some months ago.  Nonetheless, it’s always a cause of homiletic sweaty hands.

I will not bore you with a longer list of causes for preacher panic. But I will allow that my particular anxiety this morning is the Gospel.  I’ve never been quite sure what’s going on in these few verses.  So I have long avoided Matthew 21:23-32.  Luckily I’ve never had to preach it until now because it was not included in the lectionary cycle of in the Book of Common Prayer.  But it has crept its way into the Revised Common Lectionary and has landed on my preaching plate today.

I guess I could have gone to the lessons appointed from the Hebrew Bible, or the Philippians piece, and I did do a little work on those texts.  But in the end, I decided to take a stab at the riskier Matthew.  The truth is I’m still not sure I’ve got it all straight, but let’s take a stab at it anyway.  And let’s start directly with the parable.

“What do you think?  A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’  He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?”  They said, “The first.”

On the surface, this parable implies that the road to salvation is paved with the stones of good works.  That much seems obvious, and even the chief priests and the elders sit down on this reading of the text.  After all, the one son ultimately goes to the vineyard to do the father’s work and the second son does not.  But let me consider a slightly different take by rephrasing the critical question of Jesus in the form of a set of questions and answers that might touch on the meaning of the story.

Q:  On which of the two sons will judgment fall?
A:  On the second.

Q:  Why?
A:  Because he did not do the will of his father.

Q:  And what then is the father’s will?
A:  “This is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son” -–
[just sees Jesus standing there, and speaking there, and hanging there on the cross] – that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Those are actually the words of Jesus himself from John 6:40.  And do you see?  Whether or not you work the vineyard is not the main point.  The point it seems to me, given the passage from John, is that judgment falls adversely on the lack of faith alone.  To do the will of the father –- which the first son gets –- is nothing more and nothing less than believing in the Christ.

And it occurs to me that this conclusion is underscored by Jesus’ insistence that the tax collectors and the harlots will enter the kingdom first.  It is not that those disreputable types will be saved because they straightened up and flew right; it is that they will be saved just because they believe.  And it is not that the elders and the priests will run a poor second because they took a nosedive into evil works after a previously respectable flight pattern.  As matter of fact, the rulers had little moral turpitude to repent of.  They were good people.  And as far as the tax collectors and the harlots were concerned, they had more strikes against them than any mere reform could cancel:  but their belief gave them access to the kingdom.

All of this is convincingly present in the parable of the Two Sons, if you scratch the surface of the story.  The “repentance” of the one cannot possibly have removed the factual outrage of his original refusal to work.  And the disobedient shirking of the other cannot have removed the prior goodness of his prompt compliance.  The first son’s initial “no” to his father remains the insult it always was, and the second son’s initial “yes” stands as an irrevocable joy.  It is not that either the evils of the first are reformed away or that the goodness of the second are discarded.  There is nothing here that’s got anything to do with merit, one way or another.  It is just that the first son finally, and in living fact, takes his stand on trust in his father’s will while the other in fact repudiates it.

“I will distrust myself, I will trust in you,” said St. Augustine to God.  And like Augustine, the first son had the grace to distrust his own first formulation of what was actually going on between him and his father, turning his self-regarding “no” of work into an other-regarding “yes" of faith.  And that is the will of his father accomplished.

But the second son turned Augustine’s prayer around:  “I will trust myself, I will distrust you. I will sit with the meritorious work of my own devising.”  The second son kept score where his father kept none, books where his father had stopped making entries, and for that reliance on work, he aligns himself with the Jewish leaders of the story.

Now if you expand upon the parable, you get an instant application of it to the life of the church.  For no matter how much we give lip service to free grace and dying love, we do not like it.  It is just too…indiscriminate.  It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and common tarts into the kingdom, and it thumbs its nose at really good people.  And it does that, gallingly, for no more reason than the Gospel’s shabby exaltation of dumb trust over worthy works.

We will continue to sing “Amazing Grace” in church; but we will jolly well be judicious when it comes to explaining what it actually means to the riffraff.  We will assure them, of course, that God loves them and forgives them, but we will make it clear that we expect them to clean up their act   before we clasp them seriously to our bosom.  We do not want whores and chiselers thinking they can just barge in here and fraternize.

Do you see now?  We are second sons, respectable Pharisees, twelve-hour, all day laborers whose moral efforts were trampled by the Beautiful Feet Upon the Mountains.  Oh, yes, we say we believe.  But what we believe is a kind of ethical construct of our own devising.  A system in our heads that will make the world safe for democracy, and safe for thrifty, clean, and reverent ex-sinners like ourselves.  Like the second son, our only real trust is in our own devises.  Just trusting Jesus –- the friend of tax collectors and sinners, the one who dies for the ungodly —- it is not our idea of how to run a lifeline.

So it is with me, if I am honest.  And so it is with you.  The Father’s will -— his whole will, his entire plan of salvation —-  is that you believe in Jesus and nothing more.  He has already forgiven you, he has already reconciled you.  He has already raised you up together with Jesus and made you sit together in heavenly places with him.  And better yet, Jesus himself has already pronounced upon you the approving judgment of having done his Father’s will.

But if you do not believe him — if you insist on walking up to the bar of judgment on your own faithless feet and arguing a case he has already dismissed…well you will never hear the blessed silence over the infernal racket of your own voice.

“He who argues his own case has a fool for a lawyer” is true in any court.  But in this court you will be more than a fool if you try that trick. You will be an idiot just to walk in because you’ll discover that there is no case.  There is no evidence against you.

There is actually no courtroom to display your talents.  Its doors have been closed, and all that’s left is the fun of sharing an eternal drink with the Judge who has already redeemed you through the cross.  And all that’s left is to hoist your glass and say, “Yes, Judge.  Cheers.  Salute,  Bottoms up!”  The whole meritorious thing, you see, stands forever on its head:  the last shall be first -- just for believing.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral