If by gospel we mean good news, then there is arguably more gospel in to-day’s reading from Isaiah than there is in the words we have just heard from St Luke. As the prophet echoes the cries of the street vendors and market traders shouting their wares milk and wine, water and bread the astonishingly good news is that it’s all being given away for free.
The book that we know as Isaiah is a collection of writings from at least three different prophets proclaiming their message before and after the period of Jewish exile in Babylon. This chapter brings to a grand climax the prophetic utterances attributed to the second Isaiah, a prophet living in Babylon, who foresaw the release by Cyrus the Persian of the exiled Jewish community and their return to Jerusalem. Of course it’s not just the groceries that are free. The wine and the milk symbolise the yet more wonderful gift of God’s faithful and steadfast love, once promised to the house of David, and now in Isaiah’s vision extended to the whole people of Israel. The chapter concludes with a vision of a great procession of exiles heading back through the hills towards Jerusalem in joy and peace, everyone singing their hearts out a bit like the closing scenes of The Sound of Music.
Cyrus did indeed allow the Jewish exiles to return home, but the circumstances of their straggling return to an impoverished and broken down city, where they were not altogether welcome, were so far from the triumphant and happy progress apparently envisaged by the prophet that it must have looked as if he had got it wrong. Eventually it came to be understood that the exiles’ return from Babylon was only a partial fulfilment of a prophecy, which looked beyond that event, significant as it was, to a yet more glorious future when God’s loving purposes for his people would finally be realised. However, in the prophetic vision of the second Isaiah, the people of Israel are also identified with the figure of a servant of God, who would suffer unimaginable pain and anguish in order to redeem his people, bearing in himself the consequences of their sins in order to mend their broken relationship with God who has never ceased to love them. Isaiah speaks of a new and everlasting covenant with his people a new testament and from the earliest days the Christian community has understood that Jesus assumed the role of the suffering servant so that in him and through him we might be the beneficiaries of that new testament. So, the good news proclaimed by the prophet Isaiah, is indeed our good news, our gospel. It is we who are called to buy wine and milk without money and without price. It is we who are loved by God unconditionally and for ever, as David was loved. It is to us as God’s people that nations we did not know have come running (v 5). For all its faults, when the Church is true to its mission, it shines as a beacon in the world, with a glory that is not its own, but comes from God’s own light. That is wonderful news, and we should give thanks for it more often than we do.
But there are risks, as Paul points out, if we take our inheritance for granted. Drawing lessons from the exodus, the archetypal model for God’s action to save his people, Paul reminds us that all the Israelites were led by the cloud, they all passed through the Red Sea, they all ate manna in the wilderness, they all drank from the rock which Moses struck to give them water in the desert. Yet very few of them lived to enter the promised land because they took all these wonders of God’s love for granted, and ignored God’s commands. They worshipped the golden calf, they married Midianite women, their perpetual whingeing and complaining showed that they still did not trust the God who had done so much for them.
And just in case the Corinthian church should suppose that all this was centuries ago and nothing to do with them, Paul uses the language of baptism and communion to assert that as Christians we are in the same position as those who had passed through the Red Sea, eaten the manna and drunk the water that Moses procured for them in the wilderness. Paul had reason to fear that the liberal intellectuals of Corinth might think that their privileged knowledge of the mysteries of the Christian religion, and particularly their participation in its sacraments, made them immune to the dangers of idolatry and sexual immorality which were part of the ambient culture. They may have taken particular pride in their baptism as ensuring salvation, and in the Lord’s Supper as replenishing their spiritual resources. Both could be regarded as rites which, like some Graeco-Roman mysteries, confirmed their superior status and sealed their immortality. Not so, he insists. On its own, our physical participation in the sacraments is no more help to us than the Israelites experience of God’s care for them in the desert. Unless we believe in what we are doing, and allow our belief to influence our way of life, we are as much at risk of God’s judgment as the generation that perished in the wilderness. And there’s no excuse, Paul insists. We are never tempted beyond our limits, and there is always a way out. Stern stuff.
And when we turn to the gospel reading, we encounter similar warnings. When a tower collapsed killing eighteen people, were they particularly sinful? No, of course not. When the tsunami overwhelmed so many people around the shores of the Indian Ocean, were they particularly sinful? No, of course not. But we will perish as they did, says Jesus in our gospel reading, if we do not repent. The crisis, the moment of decision, is very near. The owner of the estate will perhaps give the tree one more year if it’s not bearing fruit, but after that it will have to go.
What are we to make of such stern warnings in the context of Isaiah’s vision of a God of great mercy, who will abundantly pardon, a God of steadfast love, who so clearly wants us to be part of that joyful procession as the mountains and the hills burst into song? Paul himself insists elsewhere that there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can separate us from the love of God. There are no exceptions to that statement, but the barriers he dismisses are all external height and depth, things present and things to come, angels and rulers, life and death; the one obstacle he does not mention is ourselves. God’s love for each one of us is so great that it is difficult to imagine that any of us could possibly throw it back in his face, but it is central to the world he has made that we have been created free, and that means that we are free to say, No, Lord, I don’t love you. None of us would say that, or even think it, but our rejection of God’s love can so easily be a whole lot less direct that that. What worried Paul about his church members in Corinth was their divided loyalties. On Sunday they were there at the Lord’s table, but on Monday or Tuesday they might be paying their respects to some other god, or behaving immorally, without seeing that their toleration of other gods and other standards of behaviour was tantamount to rejecting the Lordship of Christ. It is all too easy for us to do the same if we profess our allegiance to Christ by coming here on Sunday, but honour the gods of power and influence, status and money by our behaviour during the week.
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. God’s love is infinitely generous and utterly free, for the price has been paid by one who died for us. But when we respond to God’s love, we have to do so whole heartedly. Perhaps we should see our readings this morning as an urgent Lenten reminder to pray for help in ensuring that no other love will draw us away from the love that we owe to Jesus our Lord. In the words of Thomas Cranmer’s prayer of humble access, that we use in Lent as a vehicle for our self-examination and repentance, let us put our trust in God’s manifold and great mercies, and so respond to the love which gives us freely. In the bread and the wine, Christ’s body and his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.