Grapevines

Reflections on the Lectionary for August 14th

This is a reflection on the Revised Common Lectionary readings for August 14th, 2022.

Outside our garage, around the corner where the trash and recycling bins stay, grows a grapevine. It was already there when we moved in on a February day a couple of years ago. The vine was clinging to the side of the house under the eave, looking dead in the Colorado winter. We didn’t know what it was, or whether it was alive. We moved our things into the house and settled into the space, and slowly winter turned to spring.

One day Jessa rushed up to me in excitement. “It’s a grapevine!” She said it as if nothing could have made her happier in that moment, which was probably true. We went around the side of the house, and sure enough, there were small little grape leaves growing on it. Soon tiny grapes formed, and they grew all summer long. We began to daydream about what we would do with the grapes.

When I was a kid, my mother tended grapevines in our back yard. Those, too, were there before we arrived at the house, as far as I can remember. Certainly the grapevines produced fruit as if they had been long established in that place. The grapes were large and purple, and my mother pressed them for juice, which she put away in Ball jars to keep for the winter. The juice of those grapes is one of the strongest sensory memories of my childhood—thicker than commercial grape juice, sweet, and laced with a hint of the bitter taste of the stems and seeds.

I had that grape juice in mind when I was thinking about the grapes growing outside our garage, and—this was the early pandemic—I had visions of making do-it-yourself jelly or juice, or at least of having grapes straight off the vine on a hot summer day. We watched the grapes swell and flourish, and we googled how to tell when they were ripe. One day we went around the side of the house to check the progress, and we were stopped in our tracks. The grapes were gone. Birds, we assumed, had also been watching the grapes, and they had known before we had that the fruit was ready. The vines were still there, and the wide leaves, but the grapes were nowhere to be seen.

Isaiah 5 tells another story of grapes. The author calls it a “love song.” I wonder whether that description is meant to be ironic. Isaiah’s story of grapes is a violent one—a fantasy of vengeance and retribution, of failed hopes and spurned love. If it’s love, it’s a bitter variety. The author—who claims to speak for God—wanted one thing, and got another thing entirely. God, in this story, had in mind a perfect love, and like most love stories, it turned out differently than the lover thought it might. The vineyard on a fertile hill was overrun with wild grapes, and the lover’s—God’s—vision of a tidy and orderly cultivation was shattered. The allegory here is between God and God’s people; God, in the mind of Isaiah, had plans for the people, but the people turned out to have ideas of their own.

This is a story about disappointment. Disappointment is one of the dominant themes of the prophets, and of the entirety of the Hebrew Bible and a lot of the New Testament for that matter: God is let down by God’s people. The grapes are not up to par. The wild grapes had taken over, and like a spurned lover, Isaiah has God working through sinister fantasies. Maybe the vineyard should just be trampled, Isaiah muses. Maybe it should be devoured. At the very least it should become a waste. If I can’t have it, the God of Isaiah is saying, no one should have it, and the whole thing can molder and die.

It's interesting to put that passage from Isaiah in conversation with the one from Hebrews 11. Isaiah’s God is a pouty and vengeful lover; the God imagined in Hebrews is intertwined with God’s people in a long and beautiful partnership. Hebrews tells a story of faithfulness, expressed in the lives of individuals and in the actions of Israel. God was there making a way, Hebrews says, and God’s people were there following the way God made. Both God and people were faithful all the way, and the wildness in the story is something to be harnessed by both God and humans, instead of something to be trampled out and abandoned.

Lest Christians fall prey to the old heresies of supersessionism and anti-Judaism, pitting an angry “Old-Testament God” against a loving God of the New Testament, the lectionary returns to anger and destruction in the Luke passage, but this time the violence is on Jesus’ lips. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Jesus’ words about discord within and among families would fit just fine in Isaiah’s love-song about grapes. Jesus in this passage from Luke is a little bit exasperated, a little bit frustrated, and telling truth in a way that cuts deep while also coming from a place of love. Read together, these passages from Luke, Hebrews, and Isaiah leave us with the impression that love, like growing grapes, is often complicated.

This is especially true of long loves. Grapevines are an investment; they can be passed down through families and tended across generations. Planting a grapevine means falling in love with the future; it means loving something you cannot yet see—something you might never live to see. The story of God and God’s people works much the same. None of it worked out very much like God had planned, at least the way Isaiah and the other prophets tell it, but it worked out all the same. “By faith,” Hebrews intones, we have come this far. By faith we made it through, by faith we got over, by faith we turned hardship into joy. The most fortunate of lovers, the most skilled growers of vineyards, and the most faithful God can all say that: we have come this far by faith.

Psalm 80 speaks directly to God: “You brought a vine out of Egypt…and planted it.” This Psalm and Isaiah 5 echo each other, in their visions of desolation and waste, but Psalm 80 speaks of restoration. It sings about salvation. It dreams of a vineyard made whole and tended, by a God who will “give us life.” It’s a remarkable declaration of faith in the vine-keeper, and a desperate prayer for tending.

We still tend the grapevine outside our garage, even though we have never eaten a single grape from it. We train it around the corners of the house, helping the vine find its way to new patches of sunlight, and we trim away weeds from its roots. The grapes from the vine, like the cherries from the tree in the front, all go to the birds, which is fine with us. We are not especially skilled horticulturalists, but we try to give the grapevine some space and let it do the rest. We have learned not to be possessive of the fruit; since we didn’t plant the vine, we don’t feel entitled to its grapes. The birds can have them, because the beauty in a wild vine is that it belongs to the world. So too with God’s people—and perhaps this is how the Isaiah passage is a “love-song,” though Isaiah didn’t see it that way. A vineyard with a broken-down wall is a vineyard that feeds the world around it. It doesn’t belong to anyone as a possession, but it belongs to the world.