“Let me now sing of my friend…” (Is 5,1) God is a friend to humankind. God, our friend, hopes for us. We have been created in God’s hope. The hope of God is that one day we will have life and have it abundantly. In his hope, God has provided richly for his friends. He has given us everything we need for life and he hopes that we will bear the good fruit of love, peace, joy, goodness and fulfillment. “His divine power has bestowed on us everything that makes for life and devotion, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and power. Through these, he has bestowed on us the precious and very great promises, so that through them you may come to share in the divine nature, after escaping from the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with devotion, devotion with love. If these are yours and increase in abundance, they will keep you from being idle or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (2Pt 1,3-8) God hopes that we will be fruitful and produce the good fruit of love and joy in our lives. We share in the divine nature so that we can share in God’s joy and in the abundance of life. Jesus reveals to us, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” (Jn 10,10)

In the Parable of the Vineyard in Matthew 21, 33-43, we see God as the landowner who invests in his creation by building a vineyard. He planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower. What more could he do? He has provided everything that is necessary to bear abundant fruit. In his friendship he entrusts this beautiful vineyard to humanity as tenants and goes on a journey. Now it is left for us to cultivate his vineyard and bear fruit, the fruit that will become a fine wine to bring joy to the soul. God, the landowner, is absent for a while, but there are signs all around of his love and care for us in the vineyard that he has planted. We are given the privilege to work with God in being life-giving, yielding a rich harvest of love and joy, through the fine wine of communion that God hopes to enjoy one day with humanity.

However, we are not satisfied with producing fruit for the glory of God – we seek our own glory, self-mastery and dominion. We don’t want God to tell us how our lives should be lived, what will make us happy or how to use our freedom. Once the landowner has left and can no longer be seen, we decide that we no longer need him in our lives. We want to be masters of our own lives and indulge all of our selfish pleasures. We want to plant our own grapes and drink our own wine. Though we have been created as a praise of God’s glory (Eph 1,12) we seek only to glorify ourselves. We begin to assert, in the absence of God, that God doesn’t really exist. We eliminate God from our lives and refuse to give him any place among us. We refuse to give God his due in our lives and no longer recognize his authority. Finally, we kill the heir, the Son, and in killing him we believe that we have killed God and eliminated him from our society.

This is the story of our modern, secular society that seeks to eliminate all references to God in our common life. Our society is declaring that “God is dead” (Nietzsche), and we no longer have any need for him and are no longer obliged to live by his instructions. It is madness to kill God and to believe ourselves to be suitable replacements. This vineyard only yields “wild grapes” that produces a wine that is filled with bitterness, strife, competition, greed and divisions. This society becomes nihilistic, rejecting all objective morality and ethics. There is no objective reality, life is just what we say that it is, gender is just a construct that needs to be deconstructed. Life is meaningless. There is no respect for life for it has no intrinsic value. We fall into a nothingness of existence.

Still there is hope, for God’s hope will not be defeated. “Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.” (Mt 21,43) God’s hope is a hope that does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured into the hearts of his children by the Holy Spirit. (Rom 5,5) God is still hoping, and looking for those who will be his friends and who will bear good fruit. “In contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” (Gal 5,22) Jesus assures his disciples: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.” (Jn 15,5f) “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” (v. 8) “I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.” (v. 11) God is alive and well and his Spirit is life and bears fruit in those who live as sharers in the divine nature. Without Jesus, the world deconstructs into nothing, with Jesus we have life and have it more abundantly.