Matthew 21:33-46
Drama
Jared: Dave- how have you been? I haven’t seen you at the temple lately.
Dave: Jared, my friend, I’m well. I’ve been on a special assignment from the council that is keeping me quite busy.
Jared: Special Assignment?
Dave: See that gentleman over there? Calls himself Jesus of Nazareth and we’ve had our eyes on him for a while. When we heard that he and his followers were coming to town, word was put out to watch the group carefully. After he came in and made such a ruckus in the temple the other day, I was told to follow him where ever he goes and to report back his activities.
Dave: Honestly, I haven’t a clue. He mostly sticks around with the riff-raff and periodically tells stories.
Jared: Some threat.
Dave: I know, right? Anyway, this was the assignment I drew. It looks like he is about to launch into another one of his stories.
Jesus: “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.
Jared: Boy, he certainly isn’t an original, is he?
Dave: Yea, does he expect the land owner to work the land himself? Of course he hired people to work the land for him. A rich important businessman like that would have important business in Rome or other estates to tend to.
Jared: I wonder what vintage of wine they are producing?
Jesus: “When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.”
Jared: Typical. I’ve been telling the council for a while about these good for nothing peasants. They are absolutely ungrateful. They were hired for a job and instead move in like barbarians and try to take everything by force. They are like locusts: if you let them, they’ll eat you out of house and home.
Dave: I mean, anybody can tend to a field. Don’t they realize they can be replaced just like that? All the owner has to do is call in the Roman army and they will be wiped clean. They simply aren’t like us. We are the best of the best- people chosen in infancy to rise up through the religious ranks because we were smarter, born to better families, and chosen by God for leadership. At least we contribute something important to society.
Jared: Where have the people’s values gone? You know, it used to be that people respected the temple officials. They wouldn’t slack off or try to cheat their employer. What these people need is to get to temple more often and learn what true faith is.
Jesus: “Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’”
Jared: What, is this guy an idiot? They kill his servants, so he sends his son? What does he think is going to happen?
Dave: Uh, duh! Can’t see a hole in that plan!
Jared: When he first started the story, he sounded like a fine upstanding businessman but now he doesn’t seem quite bright. If you are going to be that stupid about running a business, about refusing to cut your losses, perhaps he doesn’t deserve the property to begin with.
Jesus: “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.”
Jared: Boring! I mean, who couldn’t see this coming. I mean, I at least thought this guy was going to be a good story teller. But there isn’t even any suspense here. Honestly, why is the council worried here?
Jesus- “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
Jared yells- “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.”
(Dave begins to look at Jared a little strangely. Jared seems a little blood thirsty here)
Dave: Uh, Jared,
Jared (cuts dave off): At least, that’s what he’ll do if he has any sense about him. These villagers are just wicked, vile creatures. Everything their master told them, they ignored. They took the land, stole its possessions, turned from good to evil and sought to kill off, or at least ignore, the very person who gave everything to them. The world is better off without them.
Dave: Jared- I think you might be missing
Jared (sarcastically): Shh, he’s finally getting to the point:
Jesus: “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’? 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. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”
Jared: That’s right. God’s wrath is about to poor down! These people are going to get it.
Dave (almost yelling) Jared, dude, give me a second here. (grabs Jared’s arm to get his attention. Continues soberly) I think he might be talking about us.
Sermon
Back in August, when I was trying to plan the scriptures for services through the end of this month, I looked at the parable of the vineyard and the wicked tenants and gagged. I don’t know about you, but there are some scriptures that I love and some that repulse me. This parable is one that has always made me cringe. So, my first temptation was to skip it in favor of something else. But as I tried to move on, my attention kept being drawn back to it. So, I swallowed a bit, choose it as my focus text and hoped that God would help me to figure out what to do with it when the time comes.
The reason that I reacted so negatively to the scripture is that it is one in a series of texts that have been interpreted throughout much of Christian history to be an anti-Jewish screed. For example, St. John of Chrysostom, a famous 4th century preacher, said the following about this passage-
“[God] had not turned away from them, but had sent His very Son; that the God both of the New and of the Old Testament was one and the same; that His death should effect great blessings; that they were to endure extreme punishment for the crucifixion, and their crime; the calling of the Gentiles, the casting out of the Jews.”
Matthew Henry, a 17th-century Presbyterian preacher who published a widely read biblical commentary- went further-
“This was fulfilled upon the Jews, in that miserable destruction which was brought upon them by the Romans, and was completed about forty years after this; and unparalleled ruin, attended with all the most dismal aggravating circumstances. It will be fulfilled upon all that tread in the steps of their wickedness; hell is everlasting destruction, and it will be the most miserable destruction to them of all others”
Such interpretations send a chill down my spine. I know that centuries of Christian thought like these have spilled over into massive persecutions of Jews at the hands of Christians- Jews were slain almost for sport by crusaders heading for the holy land; entire communities of Jews were wiped out in mass pogroms throughout European history; and of course, most prominently, 6 million Jews were executed during the Holocaust at the hands of one of the most important Christian nations in history- Germany, the birth place of Lutheranism and many other Christian movements. In all of these circumstances, the bulk of the Christian church either celebrated the killings or failed to lift a finger or a voice to prevent them.
And so, it was with some dread that I picked this text. But if we are to be honest about our faith, and if we are to affirm the Bible as our chief source of inspiration and knowledge of God, we cannot merely read that with which we are comfortable while ignoring that with which we are not.
I do not believe God to be a God who desires us to commit violence. I believe God wept with sorrow and shook with anger when Christians engaged or turned a blind eye to these vile acts. Thus, I returned to this passage to see how I could correlate it with the unbelievable God of love as revealed through Jesus Christ.
I realized that one of the core problems in interpreting this passage is that we always assume it is about someone else. We point toward others, be they Jews or some other despised minority and say they are the wicked tenants who are going to be on the receiving end of God’s righteous judgment. However, I think we miss the truth of the Gospel when we assume that Jesus is always talking about someone else. Its only when we assume that Jesus is speaking to and about us that we can truly experience its transforming grace.
This is why I asked Dave and Bert to help me to transform the scripture reading into a bit of a drama about two Pharisees who listen to Jesus and only slowly realize that he is talking about them. I think we need to see ourselves like the two Pharisees- people who assume Jesus is telling stories about others when he is really talking directly to them.
Once I accepted this premise I found something rather amazing in this text. Let’s recall the drama here- a landowner goes away and leases the property to others who are called to care for it. When the landowner checks on the people, he finds that they have rejected his ways and have taken his property, his creation, and used it not for the purpose it was intended but have selfishly seized it to fulfill their own desires and pretended like they were entitled to what they took. The landowner sends messenger after messenger and the tenants only get worse.
The Lord God created heaven and earth, created humanity in the divine image, and set us forth as stewards of the earth to care and love all of God’s creation. And yet, the very ones whom God has created, whom God has charged with bearing fruit in the world, have turned against God and have become selfish. They have consumed and taken for themselves that which God intended as God’s own.
“Who you talking to Jesus?”
“Dude, I think he might be talking about us.”
Big problem here- if we think we are the wicked tenants, and if we think God is coming to massacre the wicked tenants, i.e., us, we better be afraid. But, my friends, I do not believe God desires us to cower and fear and wait to be struck down. I think we get that false impression of the story when we miss one little detail.
Jesus asks- “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
What was the answer?
“He will put those wretches to a miserable death”
Now, think real hard about this next question- who gave that answer?
Yes! In my drama, it was Jared the Pharisee. In our text, it is the mysterious they!
Jesus never says that this is what God is doing. Jesus never claims God is coming to take revenge and to murder and pillage.
If we assume this analogy is about us, then what is the real ending of the story? When God’s son was murdered, did God send an army to wipe out those responsible?
No! God used Jesus’ death as an opportunity to forgive the sins of the very people who rejected and killed him. And then, God sent someone else- not an enforcer, but the Holy Spirit. To continue to try and transform those wicked tenants.
Now the Pharisees in my story have got one thing right- from our human perspective, God is a terrible business owner! God seems incapable of cutting losses and making a profit. The unbelievable message in this parable is that no matter how many times we reject God, God just keeps lovingly sending us someone else in the hope that we might one day return to our original purpose.
This is what is so sad about assuming this story is about someone else. You miss the opportunity to know that God is coming to you, right here today, and pleading with you to return to the work for which you were originally sent. Not because God’s about to drop down a mighty hammer of justice and smash you, but because God loves you too much to ever give up.
Don’t let that story be about someone else.
Claim it as your own.
Claim the love of God in your life.
Accept and embrace with open arms that God is seeking to change your life. Amen.
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