The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 19; Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46
This morning I want to focus on the passage from Matthew’s gospel. It’s a part of a much longer argument recorded in chapter 21 where Jesus confronts the Temple leaders in Jerusalem. Looking at just this one parable in isolation is challenging. It’s like coming into a movie smack in the middle, and staying for just 5 minutes.
I go to a nice coffee shop downtown each morning. It has free copies of the day’s newspaper. It also has large flat screens on which the latest movies run continuously with no sound. People are always in a rush. But sometimes they stop in their tracks and watch for several minutes because even a short clip can be gripping. They see what’s going on and are captivated at one level. If they had the whole story from beginning to end their experience would be full of meaning and make more sense.
So it is with our gospel parable. This is part of a much longer dialogue that Jesus has with the leaders of the Temple in Jerusalem. The central question is about who Jesus is: “By what authority are you doing these things?” ask the Pharisees—things like healing the sick, raising the dead, forgiving sins, and questioning ritual laws. Earlier he told the parable of the two sons, the one who said he was going out to work in the fields and didn’t, and the other who said he wasn’t going, but went anyway. “Which of the two did the will of the Father?” he asked. The obvious answer was “the one who went out even when he said he wouldn’t.” I tell you, said Jesus, the extortionist tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom ahead of you. Why? Because they heard John the Baptist preaching and they repented and believed God, unlike the Temple leaders.
Now Jesus launches into the parable about the owner of the vineyard and the wicked tenants.
The parable begins with a perfectly ordinary description of a landowner who designs and builds a state-of-the-art vineyard – complete with a perimeter fence, a wine press and even a watchtower. He has to go away on business and he hires tenant farmers to look after the cultivation of the grapes. The usual agreement would have allowed the tenants to keep some of the produce as long as some was also set aside for the landowner by way of rent.
In the parable the nice arrangement falls apart badly. When harvest time arrives, the owner sends his servants to collect what is due to him. But the tenants beat some and killed one. The owner, without hesitation, sends a second delegation. They receive even worse abuse. One would think that at this point the owner would send in the troops. Instead, almost counterintuitively, he thinks that if he sends his son, they will respect him. Instead, they kill the son applying a weird logic that if they did that, they would inherit the vineyard.
We cannot begin to mine this parable without understanding how it resonated with those who first heard it. The minute the chief priests and Pharisees heard him begin the story about the landowner who planted the vineyard, they would have had before them in their mind’s eye, almost immediately, the well-known passage in Isaiah chapter 5, known as “The Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard” in which the prophet Isaiah, before the Babylonian captivity speaks God’s judgment on the shepherds and leaders of Israel:
“My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill./ He dug it and cleared it of stones/ and planted it with choice vines;/ he built a watchtower in the midst of it,/ and hewed out a wine vat in it./ He expected it to yield grapes,/ but it yielded wild grapes.” (that is to say, fruit worth nothing in the production of drinkable wine) Then the beloved speaks: “When I expected it to yield grapes/ why did it yield wild grapes?”
The well-known passage goes on to make clear that God’s judgment falls on those responsible for leading and teaching the people of Israel.
And what was it that God wanted the leaders of Israel to cultivate in the people of Israel and Judah? In what had the leaders of Israel failed, asks Isaiah?
“He (the Lord of hosts) expected justice but saw bloodshed, righteousness but heard a cry.”
That picture of a failed crop, despite the soil being fertile, and the judgment on the vinedressers, was before the Pharisees and chief priests in the temple at Jerusalem when Jesus told the parable we are considering this morning. Even the details of a fence and watchtower and winepress were pointedly duplicated in Jesus’ re-working of the Isaiah passage.
Isaiah’s words provide a clue about the motives of the wicked tenants in Jesus’ re-telling. Why were these worthless tenant farmers, you may be asking, so violent when the first group of the landowner’s servants arrived to collect the produce? Well, the tenants had, of course, done such a terrible job that either they had no fruit or they produced wild grapes, unfit for consumption. They didn’t want that message to get back to the owner of the vineyard.
This parable in Matthew’s gospel is repeated in two other gospel accounts, in Mark and in Luke. Both Matthew and Luke have Jesus put this question to the Pharisees, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” And they answer immediately, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants.” Jesus gets the Pharisees to articulate the judgment that would be falling on them as teachers of Israel. They would be replaced when the kingdom of God’s anointed one comes.
Now we saw earlier that the big question behind the telling of this parable at this moment in Jesus’ ministry was to answer the big question posed by the Pharisees, “By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you this authority”? And the parable provides the clue.
There is no mistaking what Jesus was saying to the Temple leaders: God was the owner of the vineyard, which he loved, and Jesus himself was the Son sent by the Father to restore the world to it’s God-designed created order – to bring healing and wholeness to its fatal brokenness.
Restoring the kingdom of the Father is a costly business as the church has learned down through the ages. For the Son of God it will mean a brutal death on the cross.
All this must have pierced the conscience of the chief priests and the Pharisees. But Jesus doesn’t stop with simply the transfer of the tenants. He concludes his parable with an important citation from Psalm 118, verses 22 and 23 (included in all three versions): “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone/ This was the Lord’s doing/ and it is amazing in our eyes.”
Therefore I tell you, says Jesus, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. By inserting this passage from the Psalms, Jesus is making a deliberate switch – from the old vineyard metaphor to a new one about the cornerstone in God’s kingdom, rejected by others.
What is the explanation of this progression from vineyard to cornerstone? Jesus’ audience then and we, who hear these words today, have been shifted from the just retribution on the wicked tenants to a new platform entirely, where the king himself bends down out of love to take on the blindness and the violence directed at him. No longer is it retribution, but the cornerstone of a completely different kingdom. What does this tell us about the God of mercy and love?
I like what one blogger wrote in an exchange on this point. He paraphrases Jesus saying this: ‘Yes, such retribution would be right in the kingdoms of Rome or Babylon. But God’s kingdom is totally unlike those kingdoms..and that’s why his kingdom which is coming in me, will be like a stone that will cause those who think and act in keeping with the kingdoms of this world, to stumble and to fall!”
There’s a bigger picture beyond our judgments about the leaders of the people of God – judgments that must be made when the fruit on the vine is worthless or simply non-existent. Even while we admit that God makes demands on leaders of our churches we will always stumble upon this rock – the living and risen Son of God, Jesus. Our perception of God’s kingdom falls short over and over again because we cannot grasp fully the greatness and holiness of God seen so shockingly in Christ Jesus.
We will stumble afresh on this stone in every age and culture – and it’s a good thing. A church gets caught up in programs and building repair and may take paths ill-chosen and then stumble upon Christ in the face of the poor or the desperately sick or the abandoned and suddenly wake up.
I can’t tell you, for instance, how much it has moved me to see a group in our church coming forward to do something for the refugees in Syria. We stumble on the stone, Jesus, standing before us and that gives us an entry into the kingdom in a deeper or different way.
This summer when we were in England I met a young man whose business has taken him and his family to France. He buys and sells vineyards, as it happens in the Bordeaux region. But his parallel vocation is as an evangelist of the most unusual sort. He is part of a team linked to a couple of the most-respected mega churches in the US. They have organized themselves to come alongside Roman Catholic parishes in France. They offer themselves to work with the bishops and priests in bringing ordinary folk into a living walk with Christ. They want people to know more about what they say and do when they go to mass, and the parish priests love them for it. They send these energized people back to regular worship in their parishes.
I was very impressed. For years, yes even centuries Christian churches worked at a distance from each other clinging to principles, good ones often that generated reform in dead institutions. Now it seems, some Christians have stumbled together on the rock which is Jesus and are doing things that are bringing in the kingdom of God in a new way. No longer are they politely keeping to their ecclesial differences – even their separate churches. They have found something greater in the kingdom of the Son, something greater about the love for his people, something about true holiness and righteousness. Will this vineyard bear fruit in abundance once more? Where there were once years of drought, perhaps in such ways there will be much fruit and a sweeter and richer wine to bless the world.
