18th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 20.1-4, 13, 15-17; Matthew 21.33-42
Church of Scotland, Geneva, October 4 2020
We come from God and we return to God. This is the story of our lives and the story of our world.
In between God comes to us in many and various ways. Which, when we consider the mess we make of our lives and our world, is just as well.
God comes in creation, without which there would be no story to begin with. God comes in the call to Abraham and in choosing him and his offspring to do what is just and right, through which all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed. God comes in the call to Moses and in bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and setting them free to live as God’s people. God comes, supremely and yet surprisingly, in Jesus of Nazareth, “Emmanuel”, God with us in human form.
And God comes again in Christ to lead us finally into God’s new creation. As Paul says in his account of the Lord’s supper: As often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we remember his death until he comes.
*
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells the chief priests and the elders of the people a story. A man plants a vineyard, leases it to tenants, and later sends his servants to collect his share. But the tenants reject and abuse them. Then the man sends his son: surely the tenants will respect his own son. But the tenants kill the son and seize the vineyard for themselves. They are, we may think, the locataires from hell.
Earlier in Matthew 21, we find another parable: this time not a story, but an acted parable. Jesus enters the temple, drives out sellers and buyers, and overturns the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sell doves.
He explains these dramatic actions by quoting the prophet Jeremiah: God’s temple is to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.
His actions are not aimed at the merchants and the money-changers. They’re directed at the rulers of the temple: they are the “you” who are turning it into a den of thieves, a hideout for highway robbers.
Their ancestors the Maccabees freed Israel from the foreign tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes, letting the Jews again be Jews. But they, fatally compromised by their collaboration with the new tyrant Rome, cannot recognize in Jesus the one sent by God to call his people to renewed faithfulness – still less, that what Jesus means by “renewed faithfulness” isn’t quite what almost anyone expects.
Naturally the chief priests and the elders aren’t about to let this go. They demand to know what Jesus thinks he is playing at. “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
And now Jesus has a problem. He can’t say straight out that he is the messiah, the king of Israel sent by God to lead Israel back to God. In first-century Judea, such an explicit answer is the shortest road to a Roman cross.
So he does what he can. In this chapter and the next, he responds with a series of riddles, telling stories and asking questions. Use their eyes and ears, and they can recognize for themselves what authority he has and who he gets it from. Of all his riddles, the story of the wicked tenants is where the answer comes closest to the surface.
‘Then Jesus asks them: “What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants?”
And they reply: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants.”’
Like the prophet Nathan with king David – who slept with Bathsheba and saw to it that her husband Uriah died conveniently in battle – Jesus holds a mirror up to their faces.
And just like David, out of their own mouths they judge themselves. But unlike David, they can’t quite bring themselves to recognize that they are bad shepherds, because that would require them to change.
They end up handing him over to Pilate, the Roman governor, and Jesus ends up on a Roman cross anyway.
*
Jesus is a Jew, sent by his Father to the lost sheep of Israel. Matthew was a Jewish Christian writing for a Jewish Christian church.
Fast forward a century or more, and we find Christians, now mostly gentile, reading parables such as this in a flat-footed way. God, Christians now say, has rejected the Jews and transferred their role in God’s purposes to the church. When Christians in the Roman empire stopped being persecuted and got power into their hands, this had tragic consequences that are still with us today.
But this is a wooden-headed way to read the story. Parables of judgement aren’t told to condemn. They’re told to open eyes and change hearts, as Nathan opened the eyes and changed the heart of David. And even when our eyes are not opened or our hearts not changed, God never gives up on us.
*
If Jesus told this parable only to the chief priests and elders in first-century Judea, it would be of merely antiquarian interest.
But he tells it also to us and challenges us to change. He calls us to be faithful tenants in the vineyard that is God’s creation.
Psalm 24 tells us that
The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it;
but we choose to treat the earth as our plaything.
The consequences today are clear: pollution on a grand and growing scale; mass extinction of living species; species-jumping viruses like the one that is currently keeping us frightened and apart; above all, the global climate emergency.
In his Institutes, Calvin tells us that “we are not our own”, and the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 underscores the point: “We belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to ourselves but to our faithful saviour Jesus Christ.”
But our world goes its own way; and then we are surprised when it is a mess.
As with his original audience, Jesus tells us this parable, not to rebuke or reject, but to bring us to our senses: to help us to see what we are doing and then, seeing it, to turn around and change our ways.
Because he is a faithful saviour, he doesn’t leave us to do that on our own.
In the sacrament we celebrate this morning, the risen Christ unites us to himself and to one another. He offers us the bread of life. On our separate sofas in separate households, “faith still receives the cup as from [his] hand”.
However much we may err or stray, we are still his flock, the sheep of his pasture, and he will keep us safe and lead us home.
Amen.