Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80:7-15 Phil 3:4-14 Matthew 21: 33-46
Martin Luther apparently once said ‘sometimes you have to squeeze the biblical text until it leaks the gospel’. I can think of several passages like that but none more so than the one we just heard from Matthew; this parable of the wicked tenants. Let’s squeeze it and see if we can get it to leak gospel for us.
So, we have this landowner who plants a vineyard, puts a fence around it, digs a winepress, builds a watchtower, and leases it to tenants before going off to another country. Harvest comes and he sends his slaves to go and collect his profits. The tenants don’t want to hand it over, so they beat the first guy. The landowner sends more – they get beaten and killed and stoned, so he finally sends his son, thinking he will be respected, but they kill him too.
And I have so many issues with this passage, even in those short few verses, because it just doesn’t make any sense to me.
First, the landowner – he takes all this time and effort and money to create his perfect vineyard, for himself and generations to come, and when he ups and leaves, he keeps sending people to get what is owed to him even though they can’t bring him his wealth because they are killed or injured. And then, eventually he sends his own son…even though he knows full-well how the people before him were treated. That is dangerous, foolish even.
And then we have those tenants – the violent, murderous tenants – and they somehow believe that if they kill the slaves they will get to keep the harvest, and if that wasn’t crazy enough, they seem to think that if they kill the son, the heir, then they will actually get to keep his inheritance. And it may be tentatively possible, but it is certainly misguided. It’s actually insane.
For centuries this parable has been used to fuel an antisemitic rhetoric so it’s even more disagreeable for that reason, but the truth is, it just doesn’t sound like good news. It doesn’t sound like the gospel. It doesn’t sound like God.
Can we squeeze this passage, so it leaks the gospel? Well, as I read, so I began to find the first leak in the actions of that landowner. Initially I felt mad with him – why had he upped and left? The landowner represents God, and don’t we believe in a God who neither leaves nor forsakes us, a God that is not far off; the one Isaiah describes as our Beloved in the prophesy we just heard. That God is nearer than our own breath. In my musing I felt abandoned by that Divine Landowner until I realised, he hadn’t disappeared at all. He was near enough to send his own slaves and servants and even his son to the vineyard.
Consider his actions and see if it leaks the gospel for you…
First, he sends his slaves. They don’t return, or they return battered and bruised. Then he sends more, and the same thing happens. And then he delivers his only son into the hands of those who have treated others so badly, even unto death. And he does it because he will do whatever it takes, risk whatever it is, to have a relationship with those tenants who are tending the land he has created.
One theologian put it like this, ‘This landowner acts more like a desperate parent, willing to do or say or try anything to reach out to a beloved and wayward child, than a businessman. It’s crazy – the kind of crazy that comes from being in love’.
And then Jesus turns to the pharisees and the chief priests who are listening to this story and says to them ‘when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They respond with a hefty sentence – he will put them to a miserable death – but we have the benefit of being post-resurrection people.
So, our Jesus question isn’t ‘what will he do to the tenants?’ it is more ‘what did he do?’ and the answer is quite different. The answer drips with gospel goodness – our Divine Landowner sent their only son, out of love for us, to open the way to life in all its fullness – to show us a new way to live – to tell death it is no longer the end – to kick the darkness until it bleeds light and to restore hope and peace and joy.
Didn’t our season of Creation remind us, just this past month, that we are the tenants of the land God created? That we have been left to tend and harvest and care for the earth? And do we believe that God will, is, returning – not in judgement, not in anger and wrath, but out of crazy outrageous love that means God will risk anything and everything to keep us as God’s children.
And how often we cling tightly onto all that is God’s. We hold onto the blessings we receive – even though they are directly from the throne room of heaven; all things come from you O God, and of your own do we give you. We have nothing of our own – everything is gift, pure grace and yet, we hold onto it all so tightly that we are at risk of smothering it, damaging it, even killing it.
So, the question is not ‘when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to us who are God’s tenants?’ The question is much more, while we are waiting for harvest time, and for the Divine Landowner to return, how will we tend and care for this part of the land God has entrusted to us. May we hold gently and lightly to all God has given and may we be effective stewards, not destructive tenants. Amen.
Holy Adventures 