by Rev. Eric Folkerth

When I was in kindergarten, I was the star of our kindergarten musical. It was a lavish song and dance production of Oscar Wilde’s short story, “The Selfish Giant.” I played the eponymous lead role, very likely because I was the tallest boy in the kindergarten class.

I can no longer remember any of the dialogue, or any of the songs I apparently memorized. And this was in a day well before phone cameras… So while there is grainy 8 mm tape, black and white pictures, and a reel-to-reel sound recording somewhere, sadly there’s nothing I can easily share with you today beyond this one picture.

Yes...that’s me... hands on hips…on the far right…in the homemade costume sewn by my Mother.

The gist of the “Selfish Giant” story has stayed with me my entire life as a powerful metaphor of Jesus’ call to us.

The Selfish Giant is about a Giant who owns a beautiful garden. It’s a verdant place where local children come to play.

But, as they often do, the children destroy and desecrate the garden, not out of malice…but because they are children stomping and playing as children will do.

This enrages the Giant, who quickly builds a tall stone wall around his garden, effectively blocking the outside world. His garden safely secured, he then goes away for the winter to visit a Giant friend in another land.

He returns in Springtime, expecting to see his garden in full bloom. But, shockingly, despite the fact that everything else in the world is lush and green, inside the walled garden it is still Winter. There’s snow on the ground and dead, wilted plants everywhere. The Giant is confused, hurt and angry.

What could have happened?!

In the midst of his confusion, and unbeknownst to him, the local children secretly tunnel into the garden, under one part of the wall. And….their renewed presence suddenly brings life back! While the Giant is intially again enraged, it soon dawns on him that the *wall itself* brought the winter. And so he tears it down.

“It is your garden now, little children,” Wilde has the Selfish Giant exclaim.

“…and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall.”

Wilde’s short story includes the Giant and the children living in a happy harmony for many years, and with him eventually realizing that one of the children is a Christ-figure who has been helping to encourage all these events to unfold.

But the school play was centered on the metaphor of a walled garden and how the walls designed to keep things safe, ironically bring only an eternal Winter.

This story leaps to my mind today because of the incredibly challenging Gospel lesson for this Sunday that has some similar themes.

It’s a horrific story, really.

It’s about a vineyard owner who —like the Giant— walls things off. This parable is clearly intended to be about the growing conflicts between early Christians and early Jews. And we should quickly, and clearheadedly, note how stories like this have tragically served as a theological justification for horrific anti-Semitism by Christians over the years.

In this story, the landowner (apparently God) sets up an original walled vineyard and rents it out to some vine growers (The Jewish people). From time to time he sends workers (prophets) to the garden, but his tenant farmers kill them. Eventually he sends his own son (clear reference to Jesus) who is also killed.

In an act of rage at this, the landowner murders all of his tenant farmers and replaces them…the insinuation is, with followers of the son.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous this story has been over the years, especially interpretations that in any way literalize it. The Gospel of Matthew has far too many of these kinds of stories that can be easily twisted from spiritual metaphor and into a literal call to arms.

Two thousand years of bloodthirsty Christian leaders have used this story as moral license to kill and destroy those who would stand in their way.

But....this story, in its original context, was about a sibling rivalry between a tiny sect (early Rabbinic Judaism) and its cousin (early Jewish Christianity).

Once Christianity gets adopted by the Roman Empire, all of that nuance was often lost. It is absolutely *not* a stretch to imagine that modern day “replacement theory,” a scurrilous theory of White Supremacists today, can trace its theological roots to poorly interpreted literal readings of this very parable.

But any such interpretation is based on two important misunderstandings:

1. That the walled garden/vineyard was ever the point.

2. That DEFENDING the garden…defending actual land and territory…creating new “Christian Empires” was EVER the point either.

It was not.

As we can’t help but admit, Christianity itself has become something of a “walled garden” in our present day. It’s become tribal and insular, in exactly the same ways Jesus is critiquing in the parable!!!

In both cases —the Selfish Giant and this Gospel parable— the way out appears to be to trust in a world without walled gardens or vineyards. To trust in a world where we are not either selfishly walling ourselves off, OR creating new tribes of “us verses them” that fight over territory or control.

Jesus’ entire Gospel message was about tearing down the walls. In fact, just ten verses before this story, he’s turning over the tables in the Temple because the “house of prayer” had become a closed-off religious system that excluded outsiders.

When you look at this whole section in the Gospel of Matthew, it's clear that this disturbing parable is in direct response to that event (turning over the Temple tables...) and the threat that leaders of his day now see him to be. Jesus 100% now believes he is about to be arrested and likely killed.

And so, here in this section of Matthew, Jesus tells a whole series of pretty blunt and increasingly desperate parables that draw a distinction between the still-too-tribal Jewish leaders, and the more open faith he had hoped to bring to humanity, earlier in his ministry. Jesus is clearly frustrated that the meaning of his Gospel message is being rejected by Jewish leaders and misunderstood by his own Disciples.

One of the points of this story seems to be that violence only ever leads to more violence.

This parable is actually meant to say to leaders of Jesus’ day, to his Disciples, and to us:

“Create a space that welcomes everyone in, not a new (or renewed) tribal faith that excludes others and commercializes prayer.”

This is the heart of what it means to be a Christian peacemaker and disciple of Christ. We are not called to murderous tribalism. We are not called to destroy others, theologically or literally.

It’s very easy to blame religion for all violence in the world. But, IMHO, this is an incredibly lazy historical analysis.

As Karen Armstrong shows in her seminal world “Fields of Blood,” there is plenty of evidence of murderous tribalism both before and after Christianity, or any of the world’s great religions. Our murderous tribalism seeks the sanction of religious faith, the blessing of theology. Theology doesn’t create the tribalism in the first place. But, yes. It sure can reinforce it.

As poet Sam Keen writes in “Faces of the Enemy,” we have always been “Homo Hostilus.” This is a part of what’s inside us. It’s a part of what caused the fear and mistrust in Jesus’s day, and a part of what causes the ironically harmful tribalism of modern Christianity today.

Why is this so?

Why is there ever a walled garden in the first place?

Should we blame God?

I have no idea.

But let me just pile on… Why is there a “talking snake” in the very first Garden of Eden? (It’s a talking Snake, not Satan…btw…)

The recurrence of these tribal stories —the first “perfect” Eden, the walled vineyard of this parable, the Selfish Giant’s garden— seem to suggest that we have both an existential fear of the outsider, a drive to selfish resource-hoarding and wall-building.

BUT! We ALSO have a calling to the deeper spiritual core that can overcome these divisions through a commitment to a life of peacemaking, inclusion and a trust in the leading of God.

The choice for which spiritual practice we embody and spread is, in every age, entirely up to us.