4 October 2020 - Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
Last week, walking back to the Deanery along the seafront, I found myself just behind two visitors to Portsmouth; close enough to hear their reaction to the statue of a famous admiral on Grand Parade: ‘Oh, so it’s not Nelson Mandela…’. Strange that I should have witnessed this just a few days before welcoming the South African High Commissioner to the Cathedral, as we did this morning. As it happens, she is the daughter of a close associate of Mandela, Oliver Tambo. The reason for her visit was the annual Seafarers Service, which amongst other things remembered the SS Mendi, a large cargo steamship that sank off the Isle of Wight in 1917. Most of the hundreds who died were black South African troops, here to take part in the war effort, but who never made it to the Western Front.
I wonder what Nelson, as in Admiral Horatio Nelson, would have made of this? We rightly celebrate him for his inspirational leadership, strategic brilliance, and decisive naval victories. But even in his own day he was a controversial figure, given a well-known extra-marital affair, and violent atrocities committed during the reoccupation of Naples. And in 2020 we have been made newly aware of a letter he wrote highly critical of Wilberforce and others seeking to abolish the slave trade.
None of this means we should stop celebrating Nelson’s achievements and significance, but neither should we see him as a kind of secular saint or moral exemplar. Like every human being, like all of us, Nelson had his flaws and weaknesses alongside his God-given gifts; like all of us, he shared in the cultural prejudices and blind spots of his own age.
Note the casual references to ‘slaves’ in this evening’s Gospel reading; treated with a violence and contempt that would have been familiar to many of the slaves of Nelson’s lifetime. In the context of Jesus’ parable, these slaves belong to a landowner who has leased a vineyard to tenants. They are the forerunners of the landowner’s son, who in his turn is mercilessly killed.
The obvious way to interpret this parable is to see the slaves as representing the prophets, and the son as representing Jesus himself. But rather than jumping straight into that kind of exegesis, let’s not miss a fundamental component of the drama: the way the tenants view those sent by the landowner. The slaves and the son are not seen as fellow human beings, worthy of welcome and respect. In the worldview of the tenants, there are priorities other and more important than human dignity, that lead them to act with such violence.
What the tenants seem to care about above all else is ownership: who owns the vineyard, and who owns its produce. About this, the parable is entirely clear. It is the landowner who plants, digs and builds, before ‘leasing’ to the tenants. The tenants are part of a lease agreement, and so accountable to the owner who has created the vineyard. But they seem to have forgotten all this, and behave as if they own the place, and work only for themselves.
This is an ancient parable, but with a modern ring. We are very aware, through the work of David Attenborough and many others, of the human tendency to forget we are guests in God’s creation, and to live as though we are management who can do what we like. But we are not the ‘owners’ of the natural world. It is God who has planted, dug and built; we have no right to destroy and despoil.
The whole slave trade was based on a similarly appalling worldview: that some human beings could have ‘ownership’ of others. And while that way of thinking has gone, it lives in the modern tendency to think something like this: ‘It’s my life to live. I make my own decisions, and choose my own obligations.’ As with the tenants in the vineyard, we are too quick to claim for ourselves what has only been entrusted to us.
In Jesus’ parable, he is clearly drawing on the vineyard imagery from our first reading, Isaiah chapter five. In Isaiah the vineyard is also planted and tended with great care. But here, when things go wrong, the owner quickly decides to destroy it. In the parable, however, the owner is absurdly patient, sending wave after wave of his emissaries, despite the violence that follows. This might speak to us of the astonishing mercy of God. But the parable speaks also of God’s invitation and expectation: that we should be producing the ‘fruits of the kingdom’. And if we’re going to be fruitful in the way that God intends, then we really need to be clearer on the question of ‘ownership’.
We do not own the natural world, nor other human beings, nor – and here it gets more challenging – anything else, not in absolute terms. For as the saying goes, ‘you can’t take it with you’. Human life is bounded by mortality, and we can only ever be temporary stewards and tenants of our financial and other resources. While we enjoy the gift of life, we are called to live lives of thankfulness for everything else we have been given, and generosity and respect in our relations with others, whoever they may be.
In those long-ago days when I used to attend meetings in London rather than on Zoom, I regularly walked past a statue on Parliament Square that is of Nelson Mandela. Gandhi is there too, and Millicent Fawcett, Winston Churchill and many others. They are all literally ‘on a pedestal’ for their fine achievements. But, like the other Nelson, and like us, all of them have their flaws and failings too. So let us give thanks for the astonishing mercy of God, who sent his only Son to show us that we are guests and lease holders, not owners; and that we are called by God to be part of something greater than our own ambitions, as followers of that same Son, ‘who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.’ AMEN