The Silence of God during the Passion

Bourguet, Wilkinson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498281744
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

God's silence during the passion is certainly a silence towards man, but in particular God was silent towards Christ in his perfect and complete humanity.It is also the silence of the Father towards the Son...At first sight this silence is troubling and perhaps shocking, suggesting that God is in fact absent. However, the author invites us to go beyond this first impression--and the silence turns out to be of tremendous richness, overwhelming depth, and surprising beauty. We are invited to refocus our attention and discover what the Father is saying in a completely new way. These pages sing with love for God, and our meditation of the passion narratives draws us into deep contemplation of the One they celebrate, the Crucified.

chapter 2

The Parable of the Vinedressers

As well as the announcements made to the disciples at which we have already looked, there are a number of other passages that point to the Passion, but we can set nearly all of them aside since they don’t add anything to our understanding of God’s silence. However, there is one last declaration which is passed on to us by each of the first three evangelists (Matt 21:33–46; Mark 12:1–12; Luke 20:9–19); it is a little like a portal, opening onto the way of the cross, a magnificent, poignant, strong and thoughtful text which will help us better approach the mystery of God’s attitude to the cross, and helps all the more in that it comes from the lips of Jesus himself. There is no one better than the Son to reveal to us the mystery of the Father in the full extent of his love; he does this in a veiled way since God is described in the parable under the cover of a person, and with anthropomorphic traits. This serves both to distance God as the altogether Other, while also bringing him very close to us. Such is God in his love, a thousand miles from our human understanding and yet infinitely close. His love is so humble that he draws very near.

The parable is told by Jesus a day or so after the feast of Tabernacles—which is to say a few days before his death—at a moment, no doubt, when he judged his hearers sufficiently prepared to receive his words. He understood that the disciples had already taken on board something of the subject matter, though not in very clear way, not at least with regard to what it would reveal of the Father.

Certainly, Jesus tells this parable in the hearing of the disciples, who we know were with him, but he tells the story also and specifically to the religious leaders—to the chief priests and elders, as Matthew tells us (21:23); to these we add the scribes, who appear in both Mark’s account (11:27) and Luke’s (20:1); and then also “the people” (Luke 20:9).

The audience was composed of people who knew the Old Testament scriptures, which helps us understand that when Jesus used scriptural allusions, he knew that they would be understood. Luke wasn’t in any way incorrect to avoid such allusions—he was writing for gentiles who were becoming Christians and knew little of the Old Testament; but for this reason we need to pay more attention to the accounts of Matthew and Mark if we are to grasp the parable in the depth Jesus intended by rooting it in biblical tradition.

The parable was spoken in the temple in Jerusalem (Matt 21:23), and we need to bear this in mind. In this holy place, Jesus would feel the need to be very careful in his way of speaking about God, and that, moreover, is how he proceeds. For this reason, the word “God” is not actually pronounced; at the end of what he says, he speaks of “the Lord,” another historic designation for God, though this was not a mention he could avoid since he was quoting a verse from the Scriptures (Ps 118:22–23).

The most important person in the parable is a father, as we discover at the moment he mentions his son, but we should note that the word “father” is nevertheless not used. This father, surely, is none other than God, so it is interesting to observe that Jesus has just the same respect for the word “father” as he has for “God”; he pronounces neither word, as though they belonged to the class of the inexpressible, names above all other names, names which would be defiled by falling on impure ears—such is the infinite respect of Christ for his Father.

The Song of the Vine

For the fine connoisseurs of the scriptures who comprised Jesus’ audience, the parable would send them straight back to a celebrated prophecy—the famous “song of the vine,” which is found in Isaiah 5. Here is the text in a translation from the Hebrew into which are integrated the Greek phrasings as reprised in the Greek of the gospel.

1. I will sing for my well-beloved

the song of my well-beloved over his vineyard.

My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill.

2. He hedged it around, removed all the stones

and planted the choicest of vines.

He built a tower in its midst and a press for the wine.

Then he awaited its produce of fine, good grapes,

but all it produced was bad.

3. Now then, you who live in Jerusalem and men of Judah,

be judges between me and my land!

4. What more could be done for my vineyard

that has not already been done?

Why, when I expected her produce of quality grapes,

has all she produced proved bad?

5. And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.

I will break down her hedge that she may be ravaged.

I will open up gaps in her wall

that she may be trampled underfoot.

6. I will reduce her to ruins; she will not be pruned or hoed.

Brambles and thorns will flourish

and I will give my orders to the clouds

that no rain should fall in this place.

7. The vineyard of the Lord of the universe, this is the house of Israel,

and the people of Judah, the plant which he cherished.

He looked for equity, and, behold! there was crime!

For justice, and, hark! the cries of the victims!

Mark and Matthew, unlike Luke, explicitly preserve the link made by Jesus with the prophetic song, as we see at the beginning of the parable: “a man planted a vineyard, surrounded it with a hedge, built a winepress and erected a tower.” Each of these details, none of which has any particular importance for the parable that follows, are drawn from the prophecy in order to touch the hearts of the hearers; they would understand immediately that the man in question is none other than God, and that the vineyard is the people of Israel, bound to God by a wonderful bond of love, a bond celebrated by the prophet as he calls God the “well-beloved,” affianced to his people. The vineyard, in fact, in Jewish culture, is a figure of the fiancee (Song 1:6, 14; 2:15; 8:12).

Touched to the heart by the parable, Jesus’ audience could not but listen with close attention and real involvement, but also with a certain degree of apprehension, because the song of the prophet becomes a complaint and even a threat, expressing the suffering of a God who regards himself as having been grieved by his people.

This aggrieved God—to whom we are sensitized by the prophet —is the subject of the parable. There is no innovation in Jesus’ presentation of a suffering God; he just takes it further.

“He leased the vineyard to tenants”

The first surprise Jesus has in store for his audience is the arrival on stage of the tenants. In the prophet’s song, God is himself the farmer and he cares for his vineyard, like a fiance for his beloved. In the parable, the owner of the vineyard entrusts his property to others, who undoubtedly were expected to care for the vineyard with the same love as the owner. By introducing these new tenants, it was not part of Jesus’ intention to disconcert his audience. On the contrary, he actually honors them. They will quickly recognize themselves, as the gospel indeed tells us they do, because they are present among the listeners, that is, they are the chief priests. These are the ones who were supposed to care for the vineyard, as God’s representatives.

Then, however, we see that those who were so honored as to be representatives of God turn out to also be the ones who wound him. We see that God, who in the song of the prophet is found to be so grieved, will now appear as grieved afresh. But this time, it is not by the vineyard itself—the people—but by the tenants, who will treat the owner with contempt and mistreat all those he sends to them.

The number of messengers from God differs in the different gospels, but this matters little because the result is the same, worsening into a crescendo of violence. The more servants are sent to the tenants, the more wounds are inflicted upon God’s love, his trust, and his hope.

To say that God is a God who hopes is heavily underscored in the words of the prophet, who uses the verb “to hope” three times, and each time with God as its subject (vv. 2, 4, and 7). This stress on God’s hope being placed in his people is even further underlined because absolutely nowhere else in the Old Testament is God the subject of this verb. What wonderful good news that God would have this hope in us . . . What an honor and what a joy, and all the more in that he is not expecting anything impossible of us; is it really too much to expect that a vineyard might produce grapes? Even that was to be in its own good time! But what a shame it is for us, and what a disappointment to him, when we consider what in fact we do. O Lord our God, God of mercy, have pity on us!

In the parable Jesus doesn’t use the word “hope,” but he knows the word is alive in the hearts of his listeners; the reality is definitely there, if hidden. It is a grieved God he presents to us, a God who is disappointed, wounded in his hope, with a wound which is re-opened and aggravated by each new attempt against him by the tenants, as each servant is sent.

Even if the word “trust” is not seen in the parable, God’s trust is very much present, as it is in the prophet’s song. Doesn’t the owner have a right to be trusting since he chose people specifically skilled to fulfil the task entrusted them? It is surely a sign of trust that he would leave on a lengthy journey without any disquietude, convinced that his property is in good hands. Again, what extraordinarily good news it is that God would place this trust in us! He does i...

Table of contents

• Translator’s Note
• Introduction
• Announcing the Passion
• Chapter 1: The Parable of the Vinedressers
• Chapter 2: Gethsemane
• Chapter 3: Before the Sanhedrin
• Chapter 4: Before Pilate
• Chapter 5: Simon of Cyrene
• Chapter 6: On the Cross
• Chapter 7: In the Dust of Death
• A Prayer