Let me sing for my beloved my love-song…

Smadar Elhanan was the youngest of four children – the only daughter, much adored by her three elder brothers, and her parents Nurit and Rami. Her name, in Hebrew, means ‘the grape of the vine’, and is a reference to the beautiful poetry found in the Song of Solomon. In the best possible way, she was the ‘princess’ of her family, and lived a happy life in Jerusalem, until just after her 14^th birthday, when two Palestinian suicide bombers detonated their bombs in West Jerusalem’s equivalent of Oxford Street, killing five people instantly, including Smadar and two of her friends of the same age.

Speaking of that terrible day, her father, Rami, says, “You find yourself running crazily through the streets, going from one police station to the next, one hospital to the next, until eventually, much later in that long accursed night, you find yourself in the morgue and [a] terrible finger is pointing right between your eyes and you see a sight that you will never, ever, be able to blot out.”

Let me sing for my beloved my love song…

In the year that Smadar was murdered, another beautiful baby girl was born in Jerusalem: Abir Aramin. Her parents, Salwa and Bassam felt the same delight that had been true once upon a time for Rami and Nurit. Fast forward ten years, and young Abir was standing with some friends outside the gates of her school in Anata, a troubled district of East Jerusalem, well known for clashes with soldiers of the IDF. And, on this most terrible of days, one such soldier deliberately shot her in the head with a rubber bullet. A day or so later, she died in hospital.

Let me sing for my beloved my love song…

It is easy, of course, to sing a love song when all is going well. But Nurit and Rami and Bassam and Salwa will not be the last parents, in the Middle East, in Ukraine and Russia, or across this broken planet, who will have to sing the heart-rending love song of grief – of a grief of separation so awful and profound that it surpasses decent imagination.

Grief of this kind is stark and ultimate. Forty years ago, 39 soccer fans were killed and hundreds more injured at Heysel stadium in Belgium. A monument erected to those who died then has inscribed upon it Auden’s poem Funeral Blues – the poem made famous from its use in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which laments so bitterly the death of a beloved:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

At the start of Holy Week, on the day when we have heard already in our morning worship the account of the Passion and death of Jesus, we might feel it is apt for us to be ‘in tune’ with such grief. But I want to suggest this evening, that it is not enough simply to acknowledge the pain of such grief – the pain that is inherent in the eternal story of the Passion of Christ.

For our readings tonight issue us a challenge – a challenge demanding of us that not merely do we enfold the grief of the Passion into our lives, but that we work out what God is calling us to do with it.

In other words, we must ask what it means to say that, in Auden’s terms, you should put out every star, that you should pack up the moon and dismantle the sun and pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.  What does it really mean to say that nothing now can ever come to any good?

And the answer to that question sits in that most stark and pointed parable that was our second reading. A parable that infuriated its hearers and, despite their high calling, made them bent on revenge and murder. And what a strange parable to tell… a parable that is strange, and which is almost nonsensical…

The landowner leases his vineyard to some tenants, and they default on the rent, and abuse his servants. So, eventually, he sends his son, in the hope that he will be respected by the tenants in a way in which the servants were not. But what do the tenants say? Nothing about respect or honour – instead they say This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.

Let us kill him and get his inheritance….? Really?

While life in the 21^st Century has many differences to life in the First Century, the rules of inheritance were not that different. The tenants’ plan is nonsensical, as Jesus points out: the tenants will be put to death and the vineyard will be leased to other tenants. So what on earth are the tenants thinking? The idea would have been as ludicrous to the first audience of this parable as it is to us today. Why do the tenants think they have any chance of succeeding in this misguided, murderous scheme?

There is but one answer that can make sense of this parable – there is only one state of affairs that can underpin and account for the tenants’ seemingly bizarre behaviour – behaviour that is both murderous and suicidal. The tenants must believe that the landlord is dead.

The tenants believe the landlord is dead, and thus the inheritance is up for grabs if his son is killed as well. And given that this is a parable and not a news report, what Jesus is saying to the face of these religious leaders – who were already far from happy with his behaviour – Jesus is looking them in the eye, and saying to them, “You behave as if the God you claim to worship is dead.”

Because, if God is dead, then anything goes. And, if anything goes, then Auden is right, and nothing now can ever come to any good. Once you recognise that this underpins the logic of the tenants in the vineyard, you are hardly surprised that the scribes and the chief priests want to ‘lay hands’ on Jesus there and then.

And if we live in a world in which God is dead, then we live in a world in which the strongest and the richest and the loudest and the most bigoted will have the upper hand. And, if the world seems like that, what love song can you possibly sing then?

Isaiah’s prophecy of the vineyard is one of the most powerful passages of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is powerful in its condemnation of the behaviour of the people of Israel – the people who should have been God’s pleasant planting, but who produced bloodshed not justice. Isaiah is naming and shaming the people of God with a vision of the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and of the Temple – a prospect, symbolically, that could even be said to represent the death of God. And what love song do you dare sing then?

And by the time Jesus is telling his listeners this most powerful of parables, have no doubt that the game, as it were, is up. He knows that he is in the end game, and that the death which he has predicted not once but three times is looming. This is a man who knows that those who act as if God is dead will have no compunction whatsoever about killing him. And what love song can you dare sing then?

Those who grieve tend to make good footage for journalists. Those who grieve with real dignity make good examples for the world around them. But those who use and channel their grief, not to deny it, but to turn it into a power for good, do more than that – they change the world around them. Which is why Rami, the grieving Israeli father, and Bassam, the grieving Palestinian father, joined a remarkable organisation called The Parents’ Circle, to ensure that the tragic deaths of their daughters would not be in vain.

In this extraordinary organisation, alongside others, both Arab and Jew, who have suffered similar bereavements, they speak together as a double act, a double act of people who the world would expect to hate each other, but who, instead, claim each other as blood brothers moulded together in a love that surpasses the evil which killed their precious children. They speak together of a love-song that says that in the Holy Land and across the world, it does not have to be like this. They speak together in a way that counters those who act as if God is dead, and which demands the listener to recognise that reconciliation and peace must have the final say.

As Bassam says: ‘The year Smadar was murdered, Abir was born.  But what I didn’t know when Abir was killed is that she and Smadar would keep on living.  And we will not let other people steal their futures.  Try shutting us up, it won’t work.  [Our] grief, the power of it…is atomic.  To live on in the memory of others means that you do not die’.

That is the kind of love song we should sing for those who are beloved. That is a love song that sings of God, even in a world where we it can appear that God is dead.

For Auden – well Auden would have been right. It would have been fine to put out the stars, and the moon and the sun. If loves does not last for ever, then turn them all off.

But the love song of Passiontide, the love song of Holy Week, our love song this week is a song we will sing and sing and sing – even when God will die in front of our eyes. For the love song of the washed feet and the broken bread of a Thursday night, the love song of the scorching heat and the agonized death of a Friday afternoon – the love song that gets sung as darkness covers the whole land – that love song will get sung again as the first lights of the newest dawn the world has ever known breaks on a Sunday morning.

What song will you sing for your beloved this week?