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Text: Matthew The State of the Vineyard In the name
of Jesus, dear friends in Christ: Like most of the Mediterranean peoples, the ancient Jews (and those who lived at the time of Christ) loved their wine. And it’s probably a little hard for American Christians living in the twenty first century to understand exactly how much they loved their wine. We’ve all been infected to some degree with that virus of American Pietism or Puritanism that holds wine under a good deal of suspicion at very best, or more likely, with open disapproval. It’s the point of view that says, “It contains alcohol, therefore it’s inherently evil. It’s the stuff the Devil”, and so on. It was largely this sentiment that gave us the great experiment in prohibition not quite a century ago – and there are plenty of folks out there that would like to see us try it again. As a consequence, we attach a stigma to wine. There are many people who enjoy it with their meals; but they are made to feel just a little guilty about it. An example: just the other day I picked up a bottle of what I would call “spaghetti wine” to go with, well, spaghetti. What else? A parishioner from another church saw me set it on the checkout counter and said (with obvious dismay), “I hope that’s for communion.” The person thought it just wasn’t right for a pastor to buy wine. Way he said it, even made me feel like it was something to be ashamed of. Not so for
the Jews of the biblical era. For them wine
was something to be held in high esteem.
They considered it an almost indispensable food product – and there was
never enough of it to go around. And
don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that they were a bunch of drunks. They frowned on excess and drank responsibly;
besides very few people could afford enough wine to get intoxicated. But look at it this way: these people lived on bread. A full meal might include some olives
and cheese, and maybe, if times were really good, even some preserved fish or
meat – but if you could add a skin of wine, no matter how meager whatever else
you had, you’d be having a full-blown feast.
For them wine was that something special that made life right. And it came to represent for them the
ultimate picture of God’s abounding goodness and love. “God gives us food to feed us – that’s
wonderful, and we should be thankful.
Ah, but he also gives wine to show how marvelously and
unbelievably in love with us he is.” That’s
the way they saw it. Understanding
that attitude will help shed some light on today’s Old Testament and Gospel
readings, both of which have to do with a vineyard. And recognize that when they thought of
vineyards, they wouldn’t be thinking table grapes (that wouldn’t have lasted a
week in the hot Palestinian sun) – they’d be thinking wine. And if wine represented God’s overwhelmingly
lavish grace and love, a vineyard was the place where the miracle
happened. That’s where the promise
sprang to life and budded. That’s where
the ripening grapes hung heavy on the vines whispering of greater things to
come. There’s where people could see the
proof that God’s abounding love was about to be fulfilled yet again. Today’s
lessons about vineyards are a slight twist on that idea. In both, the Lord himself is the one who
plants the vineyard. And you see that
he spares no expense. First he selects a
fertile hillside that will best capture the sunlight and thus ensure wine of
the finest quality. He prepares the soil
and painstakingly gets rid of all the troublesome stones. Then he selects the very best vines and
carefully plants each one with his own hands.
He sets up the trellises, builds a wall to keep out animals that might
trample or graze on the vines, and he builds a watchtower for someone to guard
the grapes from theft when harvest time is near. Lastly, he hollows out a winepress, carving a
deep pool in a solid rock outcropping to capture the precious juice of the
crushed grapes. He does all of this in
anticipation of the harvest to come. In
all this, we see him literally pouring his heart into this project in the hope
that there will be a return on his labor. It is, on
one level, a picture of how the Lord established the nation of Israel. How it was with great effort and mighty
wonders he brought them out of bondage and planted them in the land flowing
with milk and honey; how he chose them to be a special people, how he gave them
his Word, defeated their foes and continued to defend them from their enemies;
how he had his temple built in their midst to keep his holy presence among them
to guide them in his truth and righteousness; how he did everything imaginable
to ensure that they would produce the fruit he was looking for. And what was that? Wine!
The symbol of God’s love. His
love was to be evident in them; in the way they lived and the way they treated
one another. But what did he get for all
his trouble and toil? Nada! Despite his best efforts, his vines produced
only lousy, sour, shriveled, unusable grapes.
No love – only injustice, bloodshed, hatred, and the piteous cries of
the abused and distressed. With deep
disappointment and disgust, the Lord of the vineyard abandons his project. He stops tending it and lets it become
overgrown, dried up, full of weeds and briers, and trampled on by the
livestock. The parable
that Jesus tells fills out the picture in greater detail, as the Lord of the
vineyard keeps sending his agents to collect his share of the produce – the
wine. But the tenants refuse to keep
their rent agreement. They throw the
master’s agents out of the vineyard; sometimes they beat or even kill
them. It is, of course, a picture of how
God kept sending his prophets to his people to call them to repentance and to
be the loving people he planted them there to be. From this vineyard of Israel, God’s love was
to well up and overflow to the entire world – but the tenants wanted to drink
it all up themselves, so they rejected God’s prophets. They ridiculed and abused them, and sometimes
they put them to death. And what really
stands out in the parable is the remarkable patience of Land Lord. He doesn’t call for the authorities to have
these rebellious tenants evicted at the first sign of trouble. Instead, he just sends more agents to try to
collect his fair share of the produce.
One after another they get the same terrible treatment; but the Lord of
the vineyard keeps trying anyway. At
last he determines to send his son.
“Surely they’ll respect him,” he tells himself. He is so patient and hopeful in the face of
repeated rebuff that it looks silly to us.
We think, “How could he be so naïve?”
It appears that his patience knows no limits—but that’s where the
tenants make their fatal error. They
mistake the Land Lord’s incredible patience for a lack of concern on his part. That only makes them bolder. They think he’ll let them get away with
anything. So they kill the Son hoping
that with the heir of the estate out of the picture, they themselves will get
to keep the vineyard. It never seems to
occur to them that this just might push the Land Lord to the end of his
patience. Makes you wonder who really is
being naïve. And as it turns out, it’s the last
straw. At the death of his Son, the Land
Lord strikes back. This is an insult
even he cannot bear. And applying the
parable to the history of the Jews, we know how this played out. They rejected Christ, God’s Son, and had him
crucified. Even after Jesus rose from
the dead, most of them continued in their rebellion against the Lord of the
vineyard; and in the end they were dispossessed and destroyed as a nation. The vineyard the Lord intended for them was
handed over to Gentiles who were to tend it and give him the return he was
looking for. And so we might be tempted
to think that when the Gospel came to Gentiles like us, the prophetic character
of these two stories was completely fulfilled. But if that’s what we thought, we
would be making a grave error. As much
as these two vineyard stories speak of the history of Israel and Judah, they
speak even more sharply to the Christian Church today – to each of its
congregations – and to each of us as individual Christians. These things were written not just for
ancient Jews, they were written for us as well.
We need to see ourselves in the roles of the vines of Isaiah’s vineyard,
or the wicked tenants of Jesus’ parable. How’s that? Well first understand that all the things the
Landowner did for his vineyard at the beginning, and all the things the Lord
did for his chosen people, were but shadows of the wonderful and miraculous
things he’s done for us in his Church.
If he took them out of physical bondage and gave them a land of their
own, he’s called us out of the bondage of sin and death and planted us in the
Kingdom of his Son. That’s the vineyard
he labored so hard to create. He chose
us for no other reason than his grace and made us part of his family in the
water of Baptism. Through this rebirth
he placed his own living Holy Spirit in each of us. Above all, he sacrificed his Son to atone for
our sins to give us eternal life. He’s
since continued to feed us with his Word that we might mature in the faith and
produce the fruits of righteousness and love.
And he’s promised each one of us an eternity of unbounded joy as we live
in his love. And it’s abundantly clear
that he’s spared no expense to do these things. But like the Landowner in the
stories, he’s looking for a return on his investment. He expects the love he’s showered on us to be
evident in the way we treat each other, and that it should overflow from us to
those who are as yet outside the vineyard.
The questions we should be asking ourselves are, “What’s the state of my
vineyard? What promise does my vine
hold? Am I producing grapes full of the
sweet juice of God’s love or only pathetic, sour, little raisins? Or am I hoarding God’s love for myself, and
not paying the rent as I ought? You see, the danger here is that
we too might abuse God’s grace. Like the
tenants of the vineyard, we are so used to God’s love, his patience, and his
forbearance that we cannot imagine a time when he might revoke the gift because
of our total failure to produce. We
think, for example, that we can remain infants in the faith; that there is no
need to continue to grow by learning the Word and exercising it in our lives. “I believe in Jesus. Isn’t’ that enough?” But young vines do not produce good
grapes. It usually takes years of
maturing before you can get good quality wine.
Or his grace and forgiveness may embolden us to think that we may
continue in any sin or rebellion that suits us with impunity. “Hey, I’m forgiven, so it no longer matters
how I behave.” That’s the old, “God
hates sin but not sinners” deception.
I’ve got news for you: sin
doesn’t exist without sinners; and hell will not be filled with sins; it will
be filled with sinners upon whom God’s wrath will rest forever. It’s wrong to think that because God is gracious
to sinners that it’s okay with him that they remain in their sin. There’s a world of difference between a
repentant sinner who relies on God’s mercy, and a smug sinner who relies on
mercy without repenting. It’s an
extremely dangerous game to play, as today’s reading make clear: sure, God is patient: but his patience has
limits. Especially when we, like the evil
tenants, hear his Word over and over again asking us to produce the fruit of
love he seeks. This message comes to us
through any number of messengers that he has chosen, be it a pastors, parents,
fellow Christians, or whoever. It makes
no difference: when we reject or ignore
the message, we are effectively throwing his agent and his Word out. Worse still are those instances in which we
become so bold as to kill his Son. These
are the instances of planned repentance.
It happens when I say to myself, “I know what I am about to do is a
selfish, loveless act. I know the Lord
Jesus would not want me to do it.” No
matter; I look him in the eye and say, “I’m going to do it anyway, and then
come back and ask for your forgiveness.”
We do this knowing full well that the price of that forgiveness is his
death—and so what we are effectively saying to him is, “You can die for me
again so that I can sin and still get your inheritance.” We do this again and again with no notion at
all, it seems, that our Father in heaven may ultimately take exception and
throw us out of the vineyard. It can be
a fatal mistake. As the two
vineyard stories tell us, there comes a point in our failure to produce when
there are frightful consequences. In one
case, the Lord allows the sin you’ve chosen to run its course. “Fine,” he says, “you won’t produce? Okay.
I’ll let you run wild. I’ll stop doing the pruning and shaping. I’ll let your life become overgrown with
sin. I’ll tear down the wall I’ve built
that protects you. I’ll withhold the water
of my grace and forgiveness. We’ll see
how well you do then.” Sadly, I expect
you’ve all known people to whom this has happened. You’ve seen the consequences of their having
rejected his message – and you’ve seen what a wreck they’ve make of their lives. In other instances it’s happened to whole
church bodies or nations. Take the
countries of Western Europe for example.
Once the Gospel of Jesus Christ thrived there; but then they started
taking the Gospel for granted. It fell
first into abuse, then into disuse, and then it faded out almost entirely. The Lord took it from them just like he took
it from the Jews, and he passed it to someone else who would be more
faithful. The same thing has happened in
many mainline Protestant denominations in this country in the last thirty years
– and don’t think for a moment that it couldn’t happen to us as well. These two
vineyard stories are sharp warnings to us.
Both of them admonish us to take a good hard look at the state of the
Lord’s vineyard right here to see what’s being produced. They force you to ask, is the wine of God’s
love flowing freely from my life? Am I
being as gracious, forgiving, and loving as he would have me be? Or am I taking all of God’s love for me, and
keeping it here for myself. Am I taking
his grace for granted? If we’re honest
about it, we will all have to admit, “I am an unfruitful vine in the Lord’s
vineyard. I am one of the wicked tenants
who has rejected his message and helped to murder his Son.” It’s when you get that point, when you see
the seriousness of the situation, and you justly fear God’s impending wrath,
that you are ready again for the miracle of the Lord’s vineyard. That’s where his promise always remains. It’s there that you can come broken,
repentant, and desiring his power to amend your life. And when you do, he takes the wine of his
love and transforms it into something even stronger and more wonderful. He presses it to your lips and says, “Take
this and drink it; this is my blood shed for you for the forgiveness of all
your sin.” Giving it to you, he cleanses
your heart, and he fills you again with his life and Spirit, and with them the
ability to show forth in your life the love he has for you. That’s what
Jesus meant when he said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. If anyone abides in me, and I in him, he it
is that bears much fruit.” May he richly
dwell in each of us that we overflow with his love. Amen. Soli Deo
Gloria! |
