October 5, 2014 – Matthew 21:33-46
Matthew 21:33-46
What God Sends
27th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 17] – October 5, 2014
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
This is a depressing parable.
Nothing goes well and then everything ends in destruction.
Great! Thanks, Jesus!
I was visiting with one of you this week, and you said,
“It seems to me that everything’s going down the tubes. I think the world’s going to end.”
Well: that certainly appears to be in harmony with Jesus’s parable.
A landowner sets up a vineyard, leases it to tenants, and goes away.
Then the tenants decide to take matters into their own hands and take over.
They keep the profits for themselves.
So the Landowner sends agents to reclaim what is his.
The tenants kill them.
Then the landowner sends more agents.
The tenants kill them too.
Finally the landowner sends his own son, his own flesh and blood –
and the tenants kill him too.
Then the chief priests and the Pharisees predict what the landowner will do to the tenants:
utterly destroy them and take back what is his own.
Yah: this is a depressing parable.
But Luther said sometimes you have to squeeze the Bible with both hands in order to
extract a single drop of grace.
Well – that’s what we’re going to do.
You need to know that no landowner in the ancient world would be so gracious as
the landowner in this parable.
Landowners in the ancient world were wealthy.
They were powerful.
And in Jesus’ day they were becoming more wealthy and more powerful.
They were much more likely to send thugs than servants to reclaim what was owed them.
They were much more likely to send an armed contingent rather than agents.
What we have here is a very patient, not to say, indulgent landowner.
An unusual landowner.
An exceptional landowner.
In the biblical imagination, the landowner is, of course, God.
“The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it,” we read in Psalm 24.
“The world, and all its inhabitants.”
Human beings, in the biblical imagination, are not owners of the earth, but its tenants,
called to take care of it on behalf of the landowner.
But we take what is not our own.
We imagine it is ours for our own use.
We do not imagine that every gift of the good earth is for sharing.
We do not imagine that the gift of ourselves is for giving away.
We do not imagine that the fruit of the vineyard of the earth is for sharing and
for the benefit of all – not for hoarding.
We close ourselves off behind our walls and imagine the world is a very small place.
But God imagines something different.
God’s imagination is bigger than ours
God invites us through the prophets to take responsibility for the vineyard –
and for those outside it who might also benefit.
God sends the prophets – and we ignore them.
God sends the prophets – and we sometimes even have put them to death.
And still God keeps inviting us into a future different than the one we imagine.
Until finally God sends God’s own flesh and blood to us, full of grace and truth.
And Jesus invites us into a world of manna-sharing, and mercy-giving, and
peace-making and justice-doing.
Because we have made a mess of the vineyard:
we have made a mess of the vineyards of our world.
we have made a mess of the vineyards of our lives.
we have made a mess of the vineyards of our souls.
When we make a mess of the world, God doesn’t send an army,
God sends an agent that re-imagines the world for us:
a world where lions lay down with lambs.
When we make a mess of our lives, God doesn’t send thugs to shake us up:
God sends an agent that comforts us: I am with you always, to the end of the age.
When we are hungry, God sets a table before us in the presence of our enemies.
When we are guilty, God sends an angel of forgiveness: Forgive them, Father,
they don’t know what they are doing.
When we are lonely, God sends us brothers and sisters: for wherever two or three are gathered,
I am with you.
When we make a mess, God sends us hope: On this mountain I will make a feast for all peoples.
And when we kill, and destroy, and maim, God does not send destruction:
when we give death, God sends not an army, not vengeance, not retaliation:
when we give death, God sends . . . resurrection.
Yes: Jesus ends by asking the scribes and Pharisees: what will God do to these tenants?
And it is the scribes and Pharisees who respond with the God of judgment,
the God of retribution, the God of vengeance.
But those are not Jesus’s words.
Jesus all along in his ministry and even in this very parable has been pointing to a God of
merciful patience and endless invitation.
To a God who continues to invite us into a different reality.
To a God who continues to invite us to imagine ourselves differently.
To a God who experiences death – but imagines resurrection.
Retribution and vengeance is the only reality the chief priests and Pharisees can imagine.
But:
If we were to ask Jesus, “What will God do to the wicked tenants who put the Son to death?”
I’m pretty sure Jesus would respond, “God will raise the Son back to life so that
the Son can forgive the tenants – and invite the tenants into a new day – again.”
While this parable is often called The Parable of the Wicked Tenants,
really it should be called The Parable of the Persistent Landowner.
The Landowner who imagines that the fruits of the vineyard are to be shared by all –
who at great cost shares even the life of his own Son with the tenants.
The truth is that we, like the tenants, are not perfect.
We make a mess of the vineyards of our lives.
But that truth is not the whole truth.
That truth is not the end of the story.
God imagines a different ending to the story of our lives and to the story of this world.
The truth about God is bigger: bigger than our failures,
bigger than the things that have been done to us,
bigger than our meanness and our pettiness,
bigger than the things we suffer as collateral damage in the vineyard of the world.
God’s love is simply bigger than us.
God’s grace is bigger than us.
God’s imagination is bigger than ours.
And the truth about us is bigger, too, than we imagine.
We are not just failures, not just those who have made a mess of the vineyard,
not just those who have been hurt by the thoughtlessness of other tenants.
And we are also not just those to whom God sends agents.
We, in our turn, are sent as resurrected ones into the vineyard – to be God’s agents.
Agents of compassion, agents of fellowship, agents of peace, agents of sharing, agents of grace.
What we imagine to be the end of the world, God sees as yet another opportunity for invitation.
We imagine the end of the world to be destruction.
God imagines it to be a new beginning – full of hope and possibility.
In the end, this is not a depressing parable at all.
It turns out to contain more than a drop of grace.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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