Pentecost 18 – 8 October 2017 – Year A

Grace to you from and peace God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen

The text for this meditation is written in the 21^st Chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew: Verses 33 – 46:

³³ “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. ³⁴ When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. ³⁵ But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. ³⁶ Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. ³⁷ Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ ³⁸ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ ³⁹ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. ⁴⁰ Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” ⁴¹ They said to him, “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.” 

⁴² Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: 

‘The stone that the builders rejected 

has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord’s doing, 

and it is amazing in our eyes’? 

⁴³ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. ⁴⁴ The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”

⁴⁵ When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. ⁴⁶ They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

The crowds that went before Jesus and that followed Him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”  When He entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” and the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” – The next day on Monday Jesus clears the temple of the money changers – then on Tuesday Jesus is back in that same temple teaching the people and telling parables and that is where we find ourselves today in our Gospel reading, in fact last week's reading, where the chief priests and the elders of the people questioned Jesus’ authority, happened on the same day as today’s reading: on that Tuesday in Holy Week.

The parable we hear this day is very specific: His audience is right in front of Him and Jesus is speaking directly to the people gathered around Him that day. However whilst this parable is extraordinarily personal to that moment in time, as in all such parables, it also very much applies to all Bible readers down through the ages. When we understand what he is saying to the people around him, we will understand his message to us.

On that Tuesday Jesus is back in the temple, no one but He knows that it’s the week that we will end up calling Holy Week. It’s just days before His crucifixion on Good Friday and whilst His disciples were anxious about being in the greater Jerusalem area, and even more so about Jesus confronting the Chief Priests and Pharisees; they did not truly know, or fully believe, that Jesus would be crucified by the end of the week.

That day Jesus and His disciples are there in the temple, the very seat of religious authority in Israel, and they have a great crowd around them and it’s filled with people who have come up to Jerusalem for the Passover. Jesus uses this parable that the people know really well; they recognise it from Isaiah, and when Jesus is teaching this, you can almost see the moment that the Chief priests and the Pharisees figure out that Jesus is speaking about them. Their fear is that the crowed will figure it out too, and they want to get rid of this man who is questioning them: This Man Jesus.

The parable Jesus tells is about the Salvation History of Israel – the terrible story of the failure of Israel’s leaders to receive those who God sent to them. In the parable God is the master of the house who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, built a tower for it and leased it to tenants. This started back with Adam and Eve but you could say it really got rolling when God came to Abraham and over time He built up this promised people into a fine vineyard: The Vineyard becomes Israel. The tenants are the religious leaders who are supposed to be tending the vineyard, tilling, cultivating, pruning, harvesting the fruits for God. On that Tuesday these were the Scribes and Pharisees, Sadducees, Chief priests and the Elders of the people.

When the season for fruit came, the Master, God our Heavenly Father, sent servants – these are the prophets (people like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Ezekiel). In the parable we hear that these servants were beaten, stoned and killed – the writer of the letter to the Hebrews described it like this, saying that the prophets sent by God to Israel were: tortured, … that they suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, and they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, and mistreated—The treatment of them grew worse and worse the closer they came to the days of Jesus’ coming into Israel and the number of prophets increased as in the parable. Then God stops sending prophets for a time until it's time for His Son to come.

The son of the Master from the parable is Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, and just like in the parable the wicked tenants do not receive Him with respect, they make sure that He is killed – hoping to keep the vineyard to themselves. Here we see Jesus pointing to His own death on the cross. What follows is the question: ^{Matt 40  “}Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” From the crowd comes the answer, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time”   

Up to this point this parable is very specific about people and events up to that moment – so then how can we understand it for us, two thousand plus years later.  I guess the question is “who are the other tenants to whom the Master will let out the vineyard?”

On that Tuesday, in the Temple, with the great crowd, Jesus is surrounded on one side by His disciples; Men who had left families and day jobs to follow Him; and on the other side, the religious leaders of the day, the Pharisees, Scribes, Sadducees and Chief priests, men who were religious authorities in Jerusalem, and in the midst of this Jesus is telling this parable and as He looks out He sees on the one side the tenants that will have the vineyard taken away from them (the Pharisees and the Chief priests) and on the other side Jesus sees the ones referred to in the parable as “the other tenants to whom God will let out the vineyard” (His disciples): On the one side powerful rich men who lord their positions over the people while on the other side poor common people, fishermen – even a tax collector – men trained by Jesus to be servants of the people.

This isn’t a parable about leadership being given to Gentiles – it isn’t a parable about the missionary expansion of the Israel (which we now know as the church). This is about God the Father changing who His tenant farmers will be: God the Father takes one group of leaders, the Chief priests and the Pharisees, who had the Word of God in the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament and throws them out for being wicked, corrupt, for misleading the people and mismanaging the vineyard, for killing His messengers, for being party to the death of His Son. In their place He puts the disciples who had Jesus - the Word of God - with them, and who believed in Him and treated Him with respect.

The Disciples and the Pharisees and Chief priests were all Jewish so this isn’t a Jewish verses Gentile thing. God the Father through His Son Jesus added into Israel the Gentiles grafting them in, expanding the vineyard by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the same way it happens today through preaching, through teaching, through baptism, through friendships. This parable is about God being God and about the desired nature of His Servants: it tells the story of the coming of Jesus and foretells the crucifixion and the change of leadership in God's Israel, in His vineyard. Was there any hope for the Pharisees and Chief priests? Was forgiveness for them too? We look to men like Joseph of Arimathea and Pharisees like Nicodemus and Saul of Tarsus (who became St. Paul) These were men grafted into Christ, grafted into the vineyard: Each one repentant and forgiven by Jesus.

In view of this, it would be easy for each of us sitting in the pews to say ‘this isn’t about me; I am part of the vineyard; I am part of the crop for whom the tenants are intended to care’. No this is strictly a message for Church workers, Priests, Bishops, Seminary Professors and the like. It is true this parable can be directed to these people, even today, as a warning that they need to be about the work of Christ Jesus our risen and ascended Lord, and that they have a task and that task is to be the ones who serve not the ones who are served. Jesus, God the Father, the Holy Spirit does not want tenants farmers who labour for their own self-gain. In saying that however, in a world where Christianity is rapidly becoming irrelevant; we, each and every one of us are tenants – of our family – of friends in need – of those who look to us an example. Daily, each of us are confronted with vineyards that are in shambles and overgrown with the weeds of evil, and Jesus looks to us to use the power of the Holy Spirit gifted to us at Baptism to nurture those vineyards and be tenants in His holy name.

Today’s parable is all about the weak sinful nature of mankind and the graceful, patient love of God who will go to any length to bring us, His people, into salvation. He calls our Bishops and Priests to serve us; He calls us to serve each other; all in His name. Can we let go and trust that our loving God is in control: If self doubt is our problem or if we are prone to judge others let me cite a few example of God’s workers:

Noah drank too much, yet God saw to it that Noah built an Ark to rescue humanity from death and destruction.  Jacob lied and tricked his elderly Father into receiving an inheritance yet God saw to it that Jacob was one of the fathers of his chosen people.  Joseph was an annoying little brat with such a big mouth his brothers wished never to see him again, yet he saved the people of Israel and Egypt from a great famine.  Moses was a murderer, yet God saw to it that he set the nation of Israel free from the bondage of Egyptian slavery.  Gideon was afraid and doubted God’s promises; God saw to it that he was able to bring down an army of 30,000 men just by blowing a trumpet.  Rahab was a prostitute; Samson was a womaniser, King David an adulterer, Jonah ran from God at every opportunity, yet God saw to it that he would not abandon them from his plan of salvation.

What this parable does is showcase to us the desperate, enduring love of God.  God does not offer this love merely once, or twice, but God gives his love a million times or more to all who receive it. There are no limits to God’s generosity even as much as we try to take advantage of it.

German theologian Helmut Thicke describes the parables of Jesus best when he said we will never understand the parables until we see ourselves featuring in them.  

“We are the Wicked Tenants, We are the failed disciples, we will never pray like we should, we will never study the scriptures like we should; we will never be generous towards the world around us like we should.  We give every good reason for the Land Owner to give up on us, yet He doesn’t.  He gives us chance after chance.  The Land Owner even gave his son’s life to save ours.  The reality of Christian living is we will never pay the rent.  We will never show the gratitude towards God we should; we fail to embrace the blessings that he gives. Yet our incomprehensibly loving and graceful God keeps giving us the keys to his kingdom through his own Son.”

In this Gospel account Jesus makes it quite clear just who He is – God incarnate, in the form of man, who willing comes to the vineyard, His Church on earth, to fulfil the task that His humanly predecessors could not do. Confront the sins of the world and take them upon Himself as a substitute for each and every one of us sinners. He died for our sins and was resurrected into victory over death that His vineyard, His Church on earth, may be irrigated with the water of Holy Baptism and fertilised with His precious Body and Blood that our blessings may be full into eternity. Amen

The love and peace of our Great Triune God that is beyond all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen