Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost October 4, 2020

Paula Murray

Most people are uncomfortable with the Gospel of the day, and have been over the generations, for the vicious tenor of the text. It’s just an awful story even if the point made does really get to our understanding of Jesus’ role in our salvation and sets us up for the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In this story evil is real, the authority of God is mocked, and characters representing ordinary human beings seek nothing more than to bury Jesus Christ once again in the tomb so they may be their own saviors. We heartily dislike this story, in the same way we dislike cancer, big winds blowing trees down on houses, and forest fires roaring their ways through scenic mountain acreage and suburban homes. Today’s parable is one of several we’ve heard over the last few weeks that some label judgment parables.  It’s the worse of the lot, but all of these parables work to remind us that we are all sinners; we do come under God’s authority; and we must have a Savior for we cannot save ourselves.

Like previous parables, the story begins on a familiar note.  Out here in semi-rural Pennsylvania most of us probably know people who lease land from those who own it for more acreage to farm. A man buys a vineyard, improves the land, builds a fence around it and a tower to secure it from robbers, then leases the vineyard to tenant farmers and moves elsewhere.  Of course, the lease must be paid, and it is customary that it be paid in a percentage of the harvest.  So the landlord sends three servants to collect the grapes or the wine owed him and the tenants kill one and beat up the others instead of paying their rent.  The vineyard then sends another set of servants and the same thing happens.  Finally, the vineyard owner sends his son, his heir, to collect the wine or grapes because the heir speaks with the authority of his father. But the tenants do not respect the authority of the father as carried by his son.  In fact, they kill the young man, and they do so knowing he is his father’s heir.  Their thinking is frankly insane.  “Come,” they say to one another, “let us kill him and take the inheritance.”  No landowner would ever allow the killer of his son to “take” the son’s inheritance, no, instead, the vineyard owner will meet those miserable cretins with a small army, retake his land, and hang the bodies of his evil tenants in the middle of the vineyard.

The wages of sin are death. Remember, this is a judgment parable. The wicked acts of the tenants buy them their deaths, not the reward of riches they did not create or build up.  The parable is clearly a teaching story, so the characters in the story represent others.  The vineyard owner is our Father in heaven, who has created everything on heaven and earth including ourselves and who sustains us in life and in death.  The Son is Jesus Christ, who was sent to earth for our salvation and who speaks for our Father in heaven and with His authority.  Sadly, the tenants are those political and religious leaders of Israel who, even as Jesus opens up their thoughts and secret sins, are plotting Jesus’ death.  The lesson is simple.  God the Father has entrusted the vineyard that is Israel into the hands of the tenants, meaning Israel’s leadership, who crucified the Son who spoke with His heavenly Father’s authority for the salvation of Israel and the redemption of the world.

This morning’s parable is both a sophisticated and straightforward analogy, and it speaks directly to us, not just Israel’s leadership of the day, if we substitute ourselves for Israel’s leadership and we become the tenants of the story. But Pastor, you might think, I have never sought Jesus’ death.  True, but we do often seek to live as if He never was made man. We know that God’s Word is never applicable only to a single generation, to those, for instance, who opposed Jesus and worked to get Him killed.  It is applicable to all of us, especially those of us who are baptized Christians, who say “Lord, Lord,” with our mouths but then act as though we are our own lords and saviors, under no one’s authority and power other than our own.

Jesus is the living Word of God, carrying in His incarnate self the authority of God.  Like He will someday do in Emmaus, Jesus opens their own Scriptures to those who literally bedeviled Him in the past, explaining the Word and laying out their blind opposition to God’s will and susceptibility to God’s judgment.  “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Jesus then pronounces judgment, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.  And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”  Again, this is rather uncomfortably clear.  If we do not walk our talk we will find at our judgment that  the kingdom of heaven is not ours.

Jesus reiterates here with regards to Himself what the prophets have said in the past with regards to Israel’s relationship with God. From this morning’s Old Testament reading from Isaiah we heard God say through the prophet, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.  I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will bread down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.  I will make it a waste….”  Again, God says through His prophet Isaiah, walk your talk.  Acknowledge my authority as your God and bend your will and your behavior to it.

So the question before us is this dear brothers and sisters in Christ, who will be our authority?  Under whose power will we live and move and have our being?  We may think we are our own authority but we do no more than fool ourselves.  We will all of us go through life leaning on the power of some other for comfort’s sake and to keep fear of death at bay.  All here will die.  Our deaths may be foreseeable on the near horizon if we are older, or hid far off in the distance of time if we are younger.  Either way, death is certain, and we choose our authorities on the basis of what we presume to be their saving powers. 

Those authorities have varied from age to age.  It was the Law for Jesus’ detractors.  It may be some odd conception of science for us.  Look at the picture below.  What will save you?

Right now, it seems for many people their salvation lays in that box of sanitizing wipes, and maybe that may keep a cold at bay or even covid if used correctly.  But whether it is covid or cancer there will come a time when no sanitizer and no pill will put off our deaths.  If Christ’s cross is not really a part of our lives, then to what may we appeal? Science is a means of coming to know the creation, but it does not save. Medicine is a way to make our passage through this world healthier and more comfortable, but it does not save. So why do we spend so much time fretting about our hands and about the pronouncements of a Dr. Fauci or a Dr. Adler or the authority of the CDC versus that of the WHO and so little time fretting about our relationship to Jesus Christ?  Tend to the latter, and you will know your fate and you will not fear it.  You will, in fact, someday look to it as gift, the greatest of them all.

The final harvest of the Spirit is our salvation. It is best for us when we do not just say that we believe it but that we also make it the cornerstone on which we base our lives, now, and eternally.  Let St. Paul have the final word this morning.  “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith — ¹⁰that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”