Matthew 21:33-46
In the name of Jesus; amen.
We often want what isn’t ours. In the parable that Jesus tells a landowner hires tenants to care for his vineyard. When harvest time comes the landowner sends his servants to collect what is his, but instead of the tenants handing over the produce the landowner expected they killed the servants he sent.
So the landowner sends even more servants and again the tenants kill them. So the landowner makes a radical decision: he sends his own son to the tenants to claim what is rightfully his. When the tenants see the landowner’s son they too make a radical decision and seize the son, throw him out of the vineyard and kill him so that they can claim the son’s inheritance.
Now parables were Jesus’ way of telling a story about God or the Kingdom of God. It’s important to remember that because often times Jesus’ parables can seem outlandish.
What parent would send their child into what all the rest of us would see as such a dangerous situation? Today we would send in the Marines to deal with people like these tenants. Jesus’ landowner looks like a fool to act the way he did. But parables weren’t meant to be taken as literal stories. They were meant to teach us something about God.
We should see God as the landowner in this parable. God who created the world just as the landowner made his vineyard. If parables are meant to teach us about God and God’s kingdom then what does this parable teach us about God?
Jesus tells this parable to a specific audience who would have been familiar with vineyards and the idea of hiring tenants to work them. At the end of the gospel reading the chief priests and the Pharisees get upset because they figure out that Jesus is likening them to the tenants.
In Jesus’ story the landowner is willing to try over and over again to give the tenants a chance to do what is right and in the process he suffers great loss. Jesus asks his audience to finish the story for him: “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” And the people give their answer: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
It’s no wonder the chief priests and Pharisees are upset when they hear the parable.
But the truth is that this parable should make us all feel uncomfortable. The tenants were entrusted with the care of the vineyard, but instead of honoring the deal that was made between them and the landowner they seek to break it by keeping what wasn’t theirs. And in the end they go so far as to kill the heir so that they can claim the land for themselves.
It wasn’t hard for the tenants to begin to believe that the vineyard was actually theirs. We all do it.
The culture we live in uses ownership as a means to place value on a person. The more we have the more worth society places on us.
Much has been made of the looters in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ripped through parts of Texas and Louisiana. Most people I’ve talked to have agreed that it was ok for people to break into stores to take food and supplies they needed, but not to take things like TVs and stereos. There wasn’t even electricity so what would a person need with a big screen TV?
But while it was wrong for people to do it, I understand the mentality. Many of those looters had little before the hurricane took everything. In a society that teaches that having something makes them worthwhile they seized an opportunity to have something they never had before. We see it all the time. And not so long ago we saw it happen with rich people too… remember Enron? They knew it was wrong to cheat people out of their savings and yet… they wanted what wasn’t theirs in order to claim status that didn’t belong to them.
I can see how these tenants would have desired the land that wasn’t theirs. But more importantly I can see how they would have thought little of going to great lengths to acquire it.
The looters saw large screen TVs and didn’t think: there’s no electricity I don’t need this; they thought OWNERSHIP.
The tenants saw the vineyard and didn’t think: well this doesn’t belong to us; they thought OWNERSHIP.
They believed the lie that ownership means power and status.
But the landowner saw it differently. The landowner saw what he had and gave it to others. The tenants were given a place to live and work to do. They were given what they needed. The landowner entrusted those tenants with all he had so that they could live.
Now Jesus was talking about faith when he told this parable. In simplest terms: the landowner is God, the slaves were the prophets, the son was Jesus, and the tenants were those who claimed they owned the faith: the religious leaders.
It might be easy to turn this into an anti-Jewish story by saying that the Jews didn’t accept the prophets or Jesus; but we must be careful not to lay claims like that on this story or we miss the point.
God is clearly the landowner and Jesus is his son, but we have to be careful not to forget that we are the tenants. The story of God’s grace is not for us to hoard, but to share and return back to God.
Now I’m hoping that you’ve made another obvious connection to Jesus’ parable. The vineyard is also the world in which we live and it has been given to us by God to care for it.
It’s clear that we owe something back to God. While salvation is only through God’s grace, Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, expects something of those to whom grace has been given in the gift of God’s kingdom.
We are expected to live under God’s authority; to produce and give back the proper fruit. Not because we will be thrown out of the vineyard if we don’t; but because we’ve been given the gift and the responsibility of caring for God’s kingdom.
And that is good news. God has entrusted the kingdom to us for all that we need out of his love for us. Grace has been given to us and will not be taken away because of Jesus’ gift of his death. Now it is time to produce the fruit of that love and return it to God.
Amen.
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