All Around the Watchtower

In today’s gospel lesson, we carry on with Jesus taking his people, Jewish leaders, to task for their failure to recognize him as God. He starts telling a parable that should be really familiar to them, since it’s drawn from the prophetic witness in the book of Isaiah: “My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded rotten grapes.” Jesus picks up on this passage from Isaiah when telling his parable to the chief priests and Pharisees. “There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower.”

Now come the rotten grapes in his parable: “Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. 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. 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.' 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. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" 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." 

Quiz time: who is the landowner who plants a vineyard? God. Who are the tenants? (Israelite leaders who are rejecting God) Who are the slaves? (prophets) And of course who is the son? (Jesus). Jesus is once again, pressing the Israelite leaders to recognize the pattern: God sent his prophets again and again to the Israelites from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, through to Zechariah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, etc. Again and again they were rejected, imprisoned, tortured, and killed by their own people. For doing what? Proclaiming God’s truth, God’s Word, to the people. Jesus tells the Pharisees and chief priests: but I know you’re not done yet, I know the human heart is stubborn and wants what it wants: you will kill the final prophet, the landowner’s, God’s own Son. Me. Jesus both fulfills and foretells the fundamental sin: I came to my own and my own rejected me. 

Before we Christians get all high and mighty, imagining that we gentiles are the ones to whom God has handed the kingdom; that God took the kingdom away from Israel and gave it to the church” - we need to remember another passage of Scripture, Romans, chapter 11: “You will say then, “Branches [the Jews] were broken off so that I [a gentile] could be grafted in.” Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but tremble. For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either. Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off.”

You cannot read this Gospel lesson without also reading every other part of Scripture or you will - very much like the chief priests and Pharisees, completely miss the point Jesus is making; the point, in fact, that Jesus is challenging you and I with: have you, have we, become the tenants? 

God has given us the Scriptures, the sacraments, teachers, a body, the church, in which to work out the faith and our salvation, grace, time and spiritual gifts. And what have we done with these things?

Let me go back to our reading from Isaiah on which Jesus drew for his parable today: “[God] expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!” This is why Israel was cut off; why they were placed in exile for 70 years; exile in Babylon; exile from experiencing God’s presence and direction; and exile that would draw out desperation in the midst of our propensity to self destruct, from the division of the church into east and west, then again the western church, to our present day divisions into which is sown the death of millions: rotten grapes, again and again and again: rotten grapes where we turn on one another, where we revel in being polarized (good and evil, conservative or liberal) and find our identity in our political and social and ideological identities, seeking ways to cut down, to tear apart, to threaten, harass, torture, imprison, kill, and fundamentally turn away from God’s demand that to love him, we must love our neighbours; and our neighbours are often people we presume are our enemies. Is it any wonder God says, “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 break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.”

And yet. And yet. God gave us this vineyard - the world. He gave us a fence, the Church reading the Scriptures together, to help us learn how to tend those whom we are given to care for at this time, in this place. He gave us the sacraments before which we confess our sins that we might be renewed in the life eternal of the one whom we offered up on the Cross. He gave us his grace, his love, in coming to take on our sin, so that we might, along with every person ever to be born, we might have the time to recognize our sin, our failure to love, our failure to act with compassion, kindness, gentleness and self control; to recognize our hubris in presuming we are just and right while the world reels from our handiwork. God does not give us these things as a certain possession; he entrusts us with them as means by which we might become stewards of his grace, rather than entitled, presumptive, pride filled Pharisees.   

The tenants say, in effect: “The vineyard is ours.” The Christian response must instead be: “The vineyard belongs to God; I am only its steward.” When God says, “I will choose those who bear fruit,” he has no interest in our religious identity, our wealth, our capacity, our ability to quote Scripture or rattle off philosophical or theological maxims, or to hold steady to worldly positions on things. What God wants is good fruit. He wants people willing to develop the humility and perseverance to persist in following Jesus; not to pursue our own agendas derived from our worldly understanding, but our submission to God’s leading and changing us so that we can bear his fruit in this world. Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins; let them not get dominion over us; then shall we be whole and sound, and innocent of a great offence. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.   AMEN