Entering the Vineyard’s Gate

Comparative commentary by Kimberly J. Vrudny

Cite Share
Read by Ben Quash

Believers make choices everyday about the God they will follow—the One who calls us to our better angels, or the One who endorses our worst. Isaiah 5, written in the form of a love song, aspires to our better angels insofar as it affirms that God desires justice for the poor and oppressed, and to our worst, insofar as it suggests that God acts through instruments of war to punish people for moral failure.

According to the song written by the one whom scholars refer to as ‘First Isaiah’, the Lord of history allowed the Assyrians to destroy Israel because it had ‘despised the word of the Holy One of Israel’ (5:24). Written during a period when the Northern Kingdom was under threat by the Assyrians who ultimately swept in and conquered it, the prophet attributed YHWH's approval of Israel’s destruction to the people’s sinfulness. This is the episode memorialized in the Assyrian relief, which celebrates its nation’s military prowess with ceremony and pageantry. To the victor goes the spoil.

But unlike the Assyrians who celebrated their victory, Israel, the conquered ones, wondered whether God had abandoned them. To this question, the prophet’s answer was a resounding no. God had not abandoned them. Rather, God had handed them over to their destruction because they had not maintained their covenant with him by practising justice. In Isaiah 5, Isaiah situates all of this in the allegorical language of a vineyard that fails to bear fruit.

Maybe what is wise in the text is an acknowledgement that suffering, destruction, and dislocation arise as a natural consequence of injustice. But this is not the whole of Isaiah’s theology. Isaiah also believes that God controls history, and that it was God’s doing to raise Assyria up for the punishment of Israel.

In his painting Creation of Wartime III, Samuel Bak demonstrates precisely why this theology of the prophet Isaiah can be found wanting. What kind of a God punishes a population through war? What kind of a God uses the forces of Israel’s enemies to penalize them through the exercize of destructive power? The distant setting of ancient Assyria makes the vindictive theology in Isaiah seem plausible if not palatable—but the context of Nazi Germany during the Second World War illuminates the horrors of such an interpretation of God’s involvement in human history. Would God empower such agents as these to punish anyone for unrighteousness, even for injustice? Should such a God be worshipped? Is such a God worthy of praise?

Bak invites his viewers to think about these questions. His work suggests that it might be preferable to believe that such a God doesn’t exist (indeed, has never existed). The space from which God was once imagined relating to humankind from the heavens—now a negative void delineating God’s absence—invites contemporary viewers to think about what image of God might adequately fill it.

Like his ancient predecessor, and as an observant Jew, Jesus must have had Isaiah’s love song in mind when he told the parable of the workers in the vineyard, as it expresses a theological imagination similar to Isaiah’s—that the Kingdom of God is like a vineyard that ought to produce the fruits of justice and righteousness. Jesus imagines the vineyard to be maintained by a manager who is reckless in generosity for those who contribute to its creation, whether they labour all day or just a little. Rembrandt’s imagination follows Jesus’s in picturing what responses this recklessness might awaken. Leaving aside the question of the fate of those who never enter the vineyard, or those who enter but allow the vineyard to spoil, Jesus focuses on a vineyard that thrives. Because they reap what they sow (Galatians 6:7), everyone benefits from a society that is more just. The Kingdom of God is like that, Jesus teaches.

Considered together, the images of the relief celebrating Assyrian victory over Israel, Bak’s image of a more recent episode of destruction, and Rembrandt’s painting depicting Jesus’s prophetic parable, raise before faithful ones the question about which imagination they are living into: the shrivelled vineyard Isaiah laments, or the lush vineyard Jesus envisions. Jews and Christians, alike, worship a God who, finally, desires justice for the poor and liberation from oppression. Will we enter such a vineyard, or will we plant ourselves outside its fences?

 

References

Friedlander, Saul. 2008. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of Extermination (New York: Harper Perennial)

Vrudny, Kimberly. 2016. Beauty’s Vineyard: A Theological Aesthetic of Anguish and Anticipation (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press)

See full exhibition for Isaiah 5

Isaiah 5

Revised Standard Version

5Let me sing for my beloved

a love song concerning his vineyard:

My beloved had a vineyard

on a very fertile hill.

2He digged it and cleared it of stones,

and planted it with choice vines;

he built a watchtower in the midst of it,

and hewed out a wine vat in it;

and he looked for it to yield grapes,

but it yielded wild grapes.

3And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem

and men of Judah,

judge, I pray you, between me

and my vineyard.

4What more was there to do for my vineyard,

that I have not done in it?

When I looked for it to yield grapes,

why did it yield wild grapes?

5And now I will tell you

what I will do to my vineyard.

I will remove its hedge,

and it shall be devoured;

I will break down its wall,

and it shall be trampled down.

6I will make it a waste;

it shall not be pruned or hoed,

and briers and thorns shall grow up;

I will also command the clouds

that they rain no rain upon it.

7For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts

is the house of Israel,

and the men of Judah

are his pleasant planting;

and he looked for justice,

but behold, bloodshed;

for righteousness,

but behold, a cry!

8Woe to those who join house to house,

who add field to field,

until there is no more room,

and you are made to dwell alone

in the midst of the land.

9The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing:

“Surely many houses shall be desolate,

large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.

10For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath,

and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.”

11Woe to those who rise early in the morning,

that they may run after strong drink,

who tarry late into the evening

till wine inflames them!

12They have lyre and harp,

timbrel and flute and wine at their feasts;

but they do not regard the deeds of the Lord,

or see the work of his hands.

13Therefore my people go into exile

for want of knowledge;

their honored men are dying of hunger,

and their multitude is parched with thirst.

14Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite

and opened its mouth beyond measure,

and the nobility of Jerusalem and her multitude go down,

her throng and he who exults in her.

15Man is bowed down, and men are brought low,

and the eyes of the haughty are humbled.

16But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice,

and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.

17Then shall the lambs graze as in their pasture,

fatlings and kids shall feed among the ruins.

18Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood,

who draw sin as with cart ropes,

19who say: “Let him make haste,

let him speed his work

that we may see it;

let the purpose of the Holy One of Israel draw near,

and let it come, that we may know it!”

20Woe to those who call evil good

and good evil,

who put darkness for light

and light for darkness,

who put bitter for sweet

and sweet for bitter!

21Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,

and shrewd in their own sight!

22Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine,

and valiant men in mixing strong drink,

23who acquit the guilty for a bribe,

and deprive the innocent of his right!

24Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble,

and as dry grass sinks down in the flame,

so their root will be as rottenness,

and their blossom go up like dust;

for they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts,

and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.

25Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people,

and he stretched out his hand against them and smote them,

and the mountains quaked;

and their corpses were as refuse

in the midst of the streets.

For all this his anger is not turned away

and his hand is stretched out still.

26He will raise a signal for a nation afar off,

and whistle for it from the ends of the earth;

and lo, swiftly, speedily it comes!

27None is weary, none stumbles,

none slumbers or sleeps,

not a waistcloth is loose,

not a sandal-thong broken;

28their arrows are sharp,

all their bows bent,

their horses’ hoofs seem like flint,

and their wheels like the whirlwind.

29Their roaring is like a lion,

like young lions they roar;

they growl and seize their prey,

they carry it off, and none can rescue.

30They will growl over it on that day,

like the roaring of the sea.

And if one look to the land,

behold, darkness and distress;

and the light is darkened by its clouds.

More Exhibitions