Featured Sunday reading: Isaiah 5
The vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his cherished plant… From a well-managed vineyard and field, God looked to see a crop of good grapes come forth, but what it yielded was wild grapes…. I will let you know what I mean to do with my vineyard: says The LORD. I will take away its hedge, give it to grazing, break through its wall, and let it be trampled! Yes, I will (let it fall to)… a ruin: it shall not be pruned or hoed, but overgrown with thorns and briers; I will command the clouds not to send rain upon it.
Last week I preached about how having a reluctant heart to God is not a good strategy of life. I also told you about its problems of leading the person to a worse level of a learned or habitual resistant heart. This is a deadly strategy of life to oppose God. Resistance is futile. God will win every time. Why be an enemy and so proud? So we have a way to choose: Is it for virtue or vice? Our reading of Isaiah today answers the question: “Why would the Lord get very upset by a resistant heart from a person (or persons) against Him?” Answer: Because God is upset with people working so (damned) hard to not let Him save them from their perishing situation.
Back in the Civil War, near the end of it, Union soldiers came to the South bringing some Black American troops in their ranks. There were Southerners to take prisoner who not only regretted losing the war, but because of their Rebel racism, they also despised seeing the Black troops in the Blue army. A southern Dixie officer was in arrest and with arms tied up in the back; he tripped and fell into a river, and started to drown. A black Union soldier reached down and caught the officer’s legs, as so to lift him out, but the drowning soldier saw his savior was not a white man, and thus he violently kicked his helper away, in big resistance. That Dixie soldier died, as a result. Too proud for his own good.
If you’ve noticed it—we have a whole world of people who are perishing and well….it’s, in fact, all of them. Yes, the world’s people have been perishing for a long history of time. Yet come among us is the One God Who saves. In Jesus He has reached down to pull us needy people up. But He needs cooperation from our side. He can’t save the utterly resistant person. He IS a Life Saver. Yet the people He’s trying to help often so proudly resist His Hand.
There was a song in the ‘70’s that I liked and would sing along to on the radio. Its lyrics were:
“Put your hand in the Hand of the Man Who stilled the water. Put your hand in the Hand of the Man Who calmed the sea…Put your hand in the Hand of the Man from Galilee. (Cause) My momma taught me how to pray before I reached the age of seven—“When you’re down on your knees—that’s when you’re closest to heaven.” Daddy lived his life, two kids and a wifeWell you do what you must do–But he showed me enough of what it takes to get me through! Put your hand in the Hand of the Man Who stilled the water. Put your hand in the Hand of the Man Who calmed the sea…Put your hand in the hand of the Man from Galilee.” [That would be Jesus.]
Yet, too, the Eternal Son and Word was speaking in the Old Testament times, and using prophets to deliver His message. Today’s Word was how God did not abide well in resistant people.
Isaiah the prophet shared about how God so wants to reap or save souls of the lost human race. We hear it about how Judah and its capital Jerusalem resisted and rebelled versus The Lord God. They did not want to even cooperate with God—to take His Hand, if you will. Most of them did not seem to take notice of all that God had done for people Israel and their land. Their pride had them miss the tender heart of God. Isaiah’s first verse in our Word today says: “The vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his cherished plant…”Isn’t it something to hear that God had a cherished plant in them? I don’t know if you have ever done special gardening with heirloom cultivations but there are those such people who do know what a cherished plant or flower is—it’s one that holds special emotional, cultural, historical, or personal value for the gardener — often because it has been passed down through generations, and carries a meaningful story, or symbolizes love and connection for them. In giving such a cherished plant or flowers, a dear communication can be made that perhaps words could never tell. God says that He had this heart for them, but He’s leaving them to their demise now. ‘Sad!!
God called Judah a cherished people and land. The people really ruined it and took no good care of their relationship with God. While God was patient for years and decades with them, this passage tells of the time when God gave them up. Did you hear Isaiah 5’s haunting lines: “I will now let it fall to a ruin… I will command the clouds not to send rain upon Judah.”[In other words—God is pretty upset in them.]
If you know the Old Testament, then you know the care that God did for Jerusalem and its Judah land. Beginning with Abraham and Sarah and sojourners being led to find this “fertile crescent.” Following to Kings David and Solomon to help them grow strong as a Hebrew people in the world. These kings had a royal city and a wonder of the world building in it made for God’s worship. But go forward a few centuries and to Isaiah’s day—Judah’s faith was an embarrassment.
Hear how God put it in His Word. I did a lot for this vineyard. I gave my friend a vineyard on a fertile hillside; spaded, cleared of stones, with the choicest vines put in, and protected well with a watchtower… and I hewed out a wine press to bring for you the juiciest fruits. But look at it now—you just got bad wild grapes there. That’s an Old Testament assessment of things, and we saw that God took Israel and Judah away from their land and from His favor. The Jews’ Exile Period would happen and eventually only a remnant people of good faith remained to tell of it, and get back home and to try to regain a faithful people to God in His Holy City, Jerusalem.
That story of a poor-in-spirit people recovery is told in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Zechariah and more—of the effort to become again God’s own. It’s to those rebuilders that Jesus came 2000 years ago, and brought the First Christmas to the world. As John 1:12 says, “to those that accepted Him, to them He gave right to become the children of God, even to those who’d believe in His Name.” He brought His Good News and Salvation to an open people of faith, ready for it, not to just a resistant bunch of rebels. That’s why you don’t hear of the Messiah coming from 900 b.c. up to 1 bc. to the Jews. God gave them up for a time. But the repentant of heart did receive Jesus ministry. They were there in Jesus’ ministry time. They also showed they were ready by their good response to John the Baptist’s calling. To repent and believe.
We have a Church story that unfortunately has had our own abuse of our heritage and heirlooms in our Catholic faith, with big falls into pride, too much like the Old Testament stories of people who had lost their treasure and heart for God. How did they lose it? The same way as the proud are losing it today: due to neglect, indifference, worldly lust, things, idols, dropping priorities. Then even worse! We lose salvation due to mockery of God, of having a daring spirit of God, and in living proud and independent from God. This is from the resistant spirit. In this attitude, you are messing with God and standing up to Him by claiming you’re better off on your own. It is utterly ungrateful in spirit, conceitedly self-boastful, and insanely risky, or foolishly death-defying. What happens when you get to the place of utter obstinance? You are committing blasphemy before God. It is called as the one unpardonable sin. [Told by Jesus in Matthew 12:31-32.] If one keeps this serious sin going to the finish of your life, then God gives you up. You do not get the prize of heaven, because you lived the motto “My will be done, on earth, and phooey on Heaven and God’s will there or here. You choose self over God, so you get your choice given to you in the finish. Separation from God. Hell. Bad going!
‘Talk about a garden of paradise ruined. We humans can get the garden we tilled in the kingdom of God building up that we did— or we can get the ruins.
I wrap it up with a story of some majestic gardens in history that got lost to ruin and never came back to its grandeur. You can only see China’s “Old Summer Palace” is it appears today– as in ruins. Yet back to the 18th and early 19th centuries, this palace and its imperial gardens of the Qianlong Emperor (and his successors) was celebrated as the “Garden of Gardens” with a concentration of 5000 years of treasures of Chinese civilization. It spread out over 860 acres, and featured palaces of amazing art, accompanied by gardens, lakes and walkways. Speaking again of the 1860’s in my homily, of another awful thing, “the Garden of Gardens” was completely destroyed by British and French troops on October 6th to 18th in 1860, during the Second Opium War. The destruction was massive: 4,000 men worked for days to burn and demolish the entire complex. It was never to be restored. Today, the site is marked by a memorial and is part of a National Park, but the original gardens and palaces are gone forever –maybe the worst cultural loss of human history. Certainly, China’s worse loss.
And yet! The loss of one human soul, and into the billions of human souls lost to Hell, all in defiance and resistance to God: This is a far worse tragedy. It is why you and I must shine the Light of Jesus as people’s One Savior. God needs to save souls. Show your trust in Jesus alone as what is your bottom line of living, Your salvation. In Christ the Lord. This is to be an era of evangelization of the Good News and Deliverance time into the Life of Christ.