I’m going to tell you a time when I saw the light. When my mind was changed. When I repented of my childish ways, put them aside, and embraced what was new and true and beautiful and good. It was July of 2020. We were caught in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, just starting to implement mask mandates and social distancing. We were still months away from a vaccine, embroiled in arguments over school reopenings, looking for toilet paper in the grocery stores, and I was also visiting my parents in Louisiana, who were without power and water following a hurricane.

Yet through all of it, I had a religious experience. Taylor Swift’s album Folklore was released in late July of 2020, and I was completely blown away. I hadn’t really listened to her music before, but I knew at that point that whatever preconceptions I had about her being just another pop artist were utterly dashed. The album was amazing, born out of Swift’s own experience of the pandemic: rich, layered, and nuanced, with phenomenal songwriting and instrumentation perfectly fitted to both the subject matter and the mood. Above everything, I remember thinking, this is an album that captures the moment we are in. Anxious and restless, yes, but also buoyed by a strange kind of sabbatical from the everyday pressures of life. Didn’t you all feel it, too? A sort of guilty pleasure about getting to stay at home, getting to cancel meetings, getting to measure the days not by the minutes of the clock, but by a more natural rhythm.

One of the songs on that album is called “Exile.” It’s a collaboration with Justin Vernon of the indie folk band Bon Iver. It’s a masterful breakup song told simultaneously from two perspectives. The female voice, sung by Swift, tells of all the challenges that led up to this point; the many chances that she gave her ex-lover to change; the warning signs that were all around.

Meanwhile, the male voice, sung by Vernon, persists in a kind of willful obliviousness, expressing sadness, regret, and good old-fashioned jealousy.

Miscommunication–talking past one another–is demonstrated in the song itself as the two ex-lovers literally sing past one another. They’ve inhabited two different worlds for so long that neither can see inside the other’s perspective. Hence the title: they are exiled from one another’s countries, banished, doomed to roam distant lands of their own making. Their expectations for this relationship have not been fulfilled.

Isaiah 5 is also a beautiful, tender, sad breakup song called “The Song of the Vineyard.” In it, the prophet Isaiah imagines God singing a song about God’s own vineyard, which God had tended and planted. A watchtower is placed in the middle of the vineyard, implying that God wanted to keep the vineyard safe from intruders and protect its inhabitants. God is the benevolent keeper of the vineyard, in other words, affectionate and compassionate.

Yet the vineyard defied God’s expectation, yielding rotten, inedible fruit instead of ripe, sweet grapes. The song then becomes a lament from God, like a jilted lover who wants to know how things went so wrong: “What more was there to do for my vineyard than I have not done in it? Why did it yield wild grapes?” Or as Taylor Swift might put it, “you didn’t even hear me out / you never gave a warning sign.”

Using puns in the original Hebrew, Isaiah drives the point home: God looked for mishpat and got mispach instead. God expected justice, especially justice for the vulnerable–widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor; and observed injustice–bloodshed, violence, and oppression–instead. God looked for tsedaqah and got tse’aqah, expecting righteousness–fairness and equity–and heard a shriek, a wail, an outcry for help instead.

Something similar happens in Psalm 80, in which God again tenderly transplants a vine from Egypt, liberating God’s people from slavery. God planted it between the Jordan River and the Great Sea, but the vineyard was eaten up by wild animals–like the Assyrians and Babylonians. Its grapes were plucked by anyone and everyone who passes by. The Psalm ends with a plea that God would tend to the vine once again, preserving its life and restoring its usefulness to the land and the people.

What happened in this relationship? How did it all go so wrong? Where did the breakdown in communication come from? How could the people of God not hear or understand God’s intentions for them and for the world?

Jesus has an idea. He retells the song of the vineyard in Matthew’s Gospel with a pointed and specific critique in mind. He begins with an almost word-for-word rendition of the Song of the Vineyard from Isaiah, a song that he and his audience both know very well. But then he starts to change things up. In his version of the story, the vineyard is leased to tenants, a common practice at the time. The vineyard owner goes away, and it is time to collect the produce. But the tenants have seemingly gone crazy. They work against both their own interest and the interest of the landowner, killing his agents one by one.

Finally, the landowner sends his own son, thinking that maybe, just maybe, the tenants will give him some respect. But his expectations are thwarted, in a deliberate echo of the Song of the Vineyard again: he expects justice, but no justice comes: he sees bloodshed instead. He expects righteousness, but no righteousness comes: he hears a cry instead.

You’ve probably already figured out the characters. God is the landowner. The agents of God whom God sends, time and time again, are the prophets. The son is Jesus.

The turn comes with Jesus’s question to the religious leaders he intends to critique. Like many powerful parables, this one works Socratically: Jesus guides the conversation so that the people he most wants to affect must answer the question themselves.

Jesus asks the religious leaders who are gathered what the owner of the vineyard should do to those wicked tenants, and they respond: the tenants deserve to die. Not only do they deserve to die, they deserve to die “miserably”–with malice and violence. Like any good action movie, they are doing what human nature calls for time and time again: what we think of as punishment, revenge, justice. It’s a scorched earth policy: burn it all to the ground, they say, and then hand over the vineyard to people who will respect the landowner–because they are afraid, the implication seems to be. After all, wouldn’t you be afraid if you were the next tenants of this landowner? Isn’t fear the best motivator, the best way to deter future crimes?

What does motivate us to do good? What motivates us to do evil? Everyone struggles with this question, from lawmakers to teachers to parents. Do you encourage people with rewards? Do you threaten them with punishments? Do you beg? Do you pretend to not care, using reverse psychology in the hopes that they’ll “rebel” and do the right thing after all?

One of my favorite living writers is the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, who writes for everyone, drawing on pop culture, literature, music, and film to make his ideas vivid. In one of his newspaper columns, “Why I Am an Atheist,” he writes, “I don’t like people who behave well because they fear that otherwise they might end up in hell. I prefer those who behave well because they value good behavior.

I don’t trust those who are good for the sake of pleasing God. I prefer those who are good because they actually are good.”

I think that Jesus and Rovelli probably have a lot more in common than not. At the very least, Jesus knows, and teaches, that fear is a terrible way to motivate us to act with generosity and justice. Unfortunately, religion tends to rely on fear, falling back on it when the real conversations about morality and behavior and mercy and grace become too challenging and difficult to face.

So, rather than respond to the religious leaders’ thirst for vengeance for those wicked tenants, for a justice that looks like violence, Jesus says something totally off the wall, something completely new: the stone will fall on him. He will be crushed by the world’s violence and retribution. Upon his very body, he will take the world’s anger and wrath, its thirst for revenge. And then God will raise him up, conquering death and showing that the world’s way is doomed to fail.

And we who are left to see this violence perpetrated on the Son of God? We will act in gratitude, not fear; in solidarity, not in division; in peace, not anger. What motivates us to acts of kindness, goodness, and mercy is that we have already received from God kindness, and goodness, and mercy. What motivates us away from acts of violent retribution is that we are not God, nor do we aim to take the place of God. Of course, the open secret is right there in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul says that it is not the wrath of God, but the kindness of God, that leads to repentance (Rom. 2).

Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike a few days ago, which would have made her the first woman executed there in 200 years. But the drugs did not work, and as of this morning she is in the hospital, condition unknown.

The Episcopal, Catholic, and Lutheran churches oppose the death penalty and have for many years. The Episcopal Church is clear that the “life of an individual is of infinite worth in the sight of Almighty God” and that taking a human life “falls within the providence of Almighty God” and not any human being or government. The death penalty also removes the possibility for redemption and reconciliation. The Episcopal bishops of Tennessee have been joined by its Catholic and Lutheran bishops in calling for a commutation of Christa Pike’s death sentence. As they write, such an “act does not deny justice. It declares that justice need not become vengeance and that the State of Tennessee can choose restraint, human dignity, and mercy.”

We would like to think that the world works in orderly and predictable ways. It’s why we come up with rules, things we think can and should apply in every situation, rules like retribution and punishment. Yet Jesus takes us on a journey beyond rules and into the heart of God, where we must pray, think, conversate, evaluate, and, ultimately, throw ourselves on God’s mercy in order to learn how to be merciful to others. It’s nowhere near as clean and clear as we’d like it to be. But it’s much better than the alternative.

When Rovelli once made a trip to Mali to present a paper at a conference, he wanted to go a bit off the beaten path. He took a taxi to another town and stopped in at the local mosque. Wanting to do the right thing, culturally, he took off his shoes, holding them in his hands as he walked in. Generally, people were very nice and welcoming, but then he noticed a young man running toward him looking very concerned. Rovelli quickly realized that the rule was not that you can’t wear shoes in the mosque; the rule is that you can’t have any shoes in the mosque, period.

He rushed back out to leave his shoes with the others when an older man approached, took his shoes, put them in a black bag, carried them into the mosque, and handed them back to him. Touched by this gesture, Rovelli writes, “I was speechless: there are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness.”

I pray for the day when the Church is known as a place in the world where rules are less important than kindness. May we carry the banner of the one who gave himself over to the violence and retribution of humanity rather than punish, condemn, and seek revenge. If we are to err, may we always err on the side of grace.

AMEN.

Read this post on Substack: https://adarmond.substack.com/p/places-in-the-world-where-rules-are