Matthew 21:33-46 "Of Vineyards and Mangers" Scott Hoezee

As we this evening conclude our autumn look at the parables of Jesus, we see where telling parables gets you in the long run: it gets you dead! Tonight's parable is not the last parable Jesus tells in Matthew, but it was sufficiently inflammatory to those who heard it that it was surely the beginning of the end for Jesus in that final week of his life. In our first parable sermon back in September, I compared parables to narrative time bombs. These are stealthy stories that steal into people's hearts, confusing them initially, throwing them off balance for a while. But at some later point the "Ah-ha!" moment may arrive as the real meaning of the story suddenly explodes in people's minds like a time-bomb. The parables were meant to blast people into new awareness, new understandings, new ideas.

But if all of the parables were like narrative time-bombs, then I think it's fair to say the Parable of the Tenants before us this evening was like a proximity-fuse grenade! In this case, it did not take very long at all before this parable blew up in the faces of those listening to Jesus. In the end we are told that the Pharisees and other religious leaders in Jerusalem that day knew at once that "Jesus was speaking against them." It made them furious and they were ready, right then and there, to arrest him and be done with this Jesus once and for all. Clearly Jesus got their attention! Tonight let's see if he can get our attention, too.

This parable is one of only three that appears in all of the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Curiously, some of Jesus' best-known parables (like the Good Samaritan) occur in one gospel alone but nowhere else. Only the parables of The Sower, The Mustard Seed, and The Tenants get repeated in triplicate in the New Testament. It seems that the synoptic evangelists each concluded that no gospel account of Jesus' life and ministry could be complete without these particular parables being in there somewhere.

In one sense that is rather surprising, especially considering that these days The Parable of the Tenants is not as familiar or beloved as any number of other parables you could think of. In fact, if you asked the average Christian person to name, off the top of his or her head, as many parables as possible, I'd wager that the Tenants parable would be one of the last ones mentioned (and it probably would be left out altogether by not a few folks).

Yet there is something within this story that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all perceived was central to the gospel. Perhaps that is because contained within the imagery of this parable is material that points to a key pivot point in salvation history. If we look closely, we will see that Jesus is shifting the focus from Israel alone to the entire world. The first hint of this comes in the first verse. You perhaps noticed that verse 33 is pretty detailed when it comes to describing the vineyard. Jesus could have said simply no more than, "Once upon a time a certain man owned a vineyard," and then gone from there.

But in this case Jesus is downright elaborate in mentioning the planting of the vineyard, the wall, the winepress, the watchtower. What's up with all this detail? If you think back to most of the other parables we've looked at these past three months, you will realize that parables typically contain an economy of words and a sparseness of detail. In Matthew 21, however, vintner-related details fairly pile up. But there is a reason for this: it is an overt allusion to Isaiah 5. Isaiah 5 contains its own kind of parable in which Israel is compared to a vineyard. In that story a vintner who clearly stood for Yahweh invested lavish amounts of labor and money into his vineyard, anticipating that the end-result of all his fine and hard work would be a rich harvest of lusciously sweet grapes. But when the harvest came, the farmer found that every single vine contained sour grapes, bitter and vile and inedible! So in a fury he plowed the whole thing under.

Isaiah 5 was a prophetic parable pointing forward to the time when God's vineyard of Israel would be "plowed under" by the Babylonians on account of Israel's repeated bitter failings to produce the kind of spiritual fruit God was looking for in his chosen people. In other words, the image of Israel as vineyard was used in Isaiah 5 to point forward to a key turning point in God's dealings with this world. Now in Matthew 21, by so deliberately invoking this same image, Jesus likewise is as much as saying that in the grand scheme of things, a new and significant turning-point would soon be reached.

The vintner-farmer is God. The vineyard is the people of God, the Jews, in Jesus' day. The tenants who eventually turn on the vineyard's owner were clearly the religious leaders of the day, and the moment you make that connection, it's not difficult to see why in the end these folks were so huffy over what Jesus had said! But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's stick with the storyline for a moment.

For some odd reason, the tenants conclude that they can seize the vineyard for themselves. Maybe the harvest one year looked particularly lucrative and they didn't want merely to share-crop the profits. Maybe they had been scheming to commit this agricultural coup-d'etat for a long time. In any event, they decide they can manage the thing without the owner. The first step to take in severing all ties with the owner was to rough up, if not simply murder, the owner's emissaries who showed up one by one as time went by.

Finally, for lack of any other idea, the owner sent his only son, hoping against hope, perhaps, that they would finally respect him. But the sight of the vineyard's heir-apparent appears merely to have inflamed the greed of the tenants. They say, "Once the heir is dead, we can claim the vineyard for ourselves." It's an odd thing to conclude. Scholars point out that this was a faulty line of thought. So long as the owner lived, the death of the heir would make no difference in terms of who could claim the vineyard. It would still be the owner's property. And since the owner wasn't going anywhere, the idea that killing the son would advance their cause seems to be an example of sheer folly (and just that may be the point).

Of course, the one thing this parable does not suggest is what would have happened had the owner himself come to the vineyard. Would they have attempted to murder him, too? Apparently that was not even an option, which is why Jesus stops his parable to ask the crowds for the logical ending to the story: "What do you suppose the owner will do with these tenants?" Literally the crowd replies, "He will annihilate those evil-evils." The Greek word for "evil" is piled up twice, as though to say they were the worst of the worse, the doubly evil villains, evil-squared.

It is at this point that you expect Jesus to say something like, "Yes indeed, the owner will come and wipe them out." But he doesn't's say that. Well, not exactly anyway. Instead he quotes a rather odd verse from Psalm 118 about the stone rejected by the builders becoming the cornerstone after all. You suspect that no one in the crowd that day saw this one coming. What happened to the tenants, the vineyard, the story itself, for goodness sake!? What does a stone have to do with what Jesus had just been talking about?

In terms of imagery, this may be a difficult transition to make. But in terms of the larger theological symbolism contained in the vineyard story, we can see how this cornerstone image fits in perfectly. This entire parable is about rejection. First the tenants reject the owner by rejecting the entire sharecropping arrangement. Then the tenants reject the owner's emissaries and servants. Finally, they reject even the heir, the owner's only son. But true to form, God is about to do a double-reversal: the son who got rejected will emerge as a highly powerful figure who will, in turn, reject the rejecters!

The gospel writers seemed to savor the delicious irony of salvation emerging from the least likely location. They enjoyed this irony so much, in fact, that the once-obscure text of Psalm 118:22 went on to become the single most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament. Out of all the thousands of verses in the Old Testament, this little nugget about the rejected stone becoming the head of the corner wins the prize for most frequent New Testament citation. In a quirky way, the verse itself does the very thing it is talking about: the little verse that seemed least among many other verses in the Hebrew Bible emerges on top in the gospels and epistles! You would have expected a different verse to get this kind of attention--perhaps something from the covenant with Abraham, a snippet of a sermon from Moses, one of those soaring prophetic passages from Isaiah, or even Psalm 23.

But no, Psalm 118:22 manages best to convey the gospel's great reversal of expectations. From lowly and humble beginnings, Jesus would end up being the rejected one whom God would raise up to be the most impressive of all biblical figures. The carpenter's son from the backwaters of the Roman Empire would turn out to be the cosmic King. As we sang about in some of the carols tonight, it was that mild and simple baby in the manger in whom the hopes and fears of all the years were met.

But it takes faith to accept that. The problem with the tenants of Israel in Jesus' day is that they had long since given up on true faith. Practically speaking, and for all intents and purposes, they had decided they could run God's kingdom without God. So when in history God had tried to redirect them through the prophets, they ignored, battered, and sometimes just killed those prophets. Their insularity was so complete they had concluded that unless someone said things that affirmed what they were already doing and believing, then that person could not represent God. They were so cock-sure they had God cased that they found it easy to reject anyone who did not sing the party line.

It was no different with Jesus. John's gospel tells us that Jesus was the very Word of God. Everything Jesus said, therefore, was completely consistent with the true nature, character, and intentions of God. Yet Jesus didn't talk like a Temple-establishment Pharisee. He didn't teach what the scribes taught. Faced with such conflicting viewpoints, the religious leaders of Jesus' day could do one of two things: first, they could accept what Jesus said as God's truth, thus admitting that their own theology had been wrong for a long time already. Second, they could stick to their guns by rejecting Jesus as a misinformed, heretical charlatan. We know what they chose. And it is for that reason that in verse 43 Jesus boldly and directly says that the kingdom of God would be taken from them and given to another people.

The Greek word for "people" there is ethnos. In Greek that word connoted the Gentile, non-Jewish world. It is used in the singular in that verse, which is perhaps why "people" is not the best translation insofar as "people" sounds more plural and diffuse. But Jesus says that what had been Israel's alone will now be given to a new nation, a new entity altogether. And although the Gentiles to whom Jesus refers represented many different nations, in the end Jesus says that out of that global diversity a new unity would emerge. There would be one day soon a New Israel made up of people who revel in and glory over the rejected stone that God will make the cornerstone of an entirely new edifice of faith.

If you are here tonight as a non-Jewish person, then that is the good news part of Matthew 21: the very new ethnos or people about whom Jesus speaks includes you as a citizen of God's New Israel. The bracing, "bad news" side of this parable is that we also face the temptation to reject any idea that does not accord with what we already think. Nobody likes being told they have been wrong.

And perhaps never is that more of a danger than in this Advent and Christmas season. All the world takes it on itself to tell us what Christmas is all about. As we thought about in our first two Advent sermons recently, most of what society wants to press upon us as the "true spirit of the holidays" is malarkey. What we need to do, therefore, is constantly submit ourselves to God's Word alone. And if what that Word tells us about what we now call Christmas is different from how we've thought in the past, then it is our past thinking (and not the Word of God) that needs to go.

Matthew 21 is not connected to Christmas. But I am going to stretch things a bit in conclusion tonight to remind all of us what Christmas is really all about, despite how different at least some of this is from the popular imagination. First, the baby in the manger was a real human baby who was not in any sense just obviously also the Son of God. He did cry, he did fill up his diaper, he was totally dependent on the care and protection of his parents because anyone who wanted to could have crushed that infant skull with one hand. The Word that was made flesh was also made vulnerable for our sakes. As someone recently wrote, the incarnation is not so much about sweetness and light as it is about utter terror. Incarnation is terrifying when we see what the Son of God was reduced to!

Second, Christmas is as much about all that is squalid in life as it is about all that is serene, twinkly, and pretty. The Son of God was born in a barn among not just the donkeys and the cows but their stink, too. What's more, swirling all around this little one named Jesus was a terrible world. A king named Herod slaughtered dozens of babies in the hopes of hitting also the new king he'd heard tell of. Christmas happened in the middle of a mini-holocaust that left many mothers with full breasts of milk but with no little ones to feed. Their sobs echo along the ages as a vivid reminder of why the Son of God had to go to these lengths to save us. A world this bad can be saved only from the inside out.

Third, the Child of Bethlehem came not only to comfort the afflicted but to afflict the comfortable. Christmas is about judgment on sin, about the wrath of God against evildoers as much as it is about a sweet message of peace on earth. Fourth, in a few weeks people all over the place can pack away their front-yard creches for another year, but although those plastic baby Jesuses will stay in the manger once it is tucked away in the closet or attic somewhere, the living Christ of God never stays in the manger. He grows up. He has difficult things to say. And he will eventually look every person square in the eye either to receive him or her in grace or to send him or her away in judgment. The Christmas Babe can be whisked out of sight eleven months out of twelve. Jesus the Christ never goes away and never ceases his call to believe on him alone for salvation.

Our daughter celebrated a birthday this past week, and we were glad to mark the occasion with a party. We were happy to recall the day of her birth and re-tell the story. That's what we do on birthdays. But instinctively we know that birthdays are never just about the past. We don't ask the person whose birthday it is to pretend to be a newborn for the day. And although especially we parents may miss the days when our children were small, we never really wish they had stopped growing at some point. On birthdays we want the person whose special day it is to be him- or herself because it is that person we want to spend the day with.

Births are what get each of us going in life, but it's the beginning of the story, not the end. Christmas is like that, too. Matthew 21 reminds us that only those who can accept what the grown-up Jesus has to say have a right to be glad about also his birthday. Because if some day the birth becomes more important than the person who grew out of that birth, then the stone that the builders rejected becomes a crushing reality for us, too. Small wonder this parable led to Jesus' death. Here's hoping it can be for us a source of life. Amen.