Ordinary 27 / World Communion
October 4, 2020
“Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. 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.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
One of my guilty pleasures is reading stories about stupid criminals. You’ve probably seen this sort of thing, often in tabloids or offbeat articles. These reports are revelations that crime does not pay. People will go to ridiculous lengths to plunder one another.
· Heath Bumpous robbed a bank in Texas last year. It was the day before his wedding, and he needed the cash to pay for the ring and the reception hall. His fiancée sent him a text, “Did you just rob a bank?” She probably wouldn’t have recognized him on the surveillance photo if he had worn a mask or ten-gallon hat. The sheriff suggested they postpone the wedding.[1]
· In Scotland, a man named Gary Rough went to a bookmaker in Glasgow. Rather than lay down a bet on the ponies, he pulled out a cucumber covered with a black sock and demanded the money. An off-duty police officer tackled him to the floor and said, “It’s all a joke.”[2] The officer said, “I don’t think so.”
· Milton Hodges robbed a Lowe’s Home Improvement store in Kissimmee, Florida. He bolted away, jumped a fence, and landed in the Cypress Cove Nudist Report and Spa. No hiding there! The police said he was easy to spot and they apprehended him.[3]
It’s amazing how foolish criminals can be. I’ve been laughing ever since I saw Jasper and Horace, those two hapless thieves in “101 Dalmatians.” And I wonder if the criminals in today’s story ever realized how ridiculous they appeared.
After all, they had been living on rented land. They know how much the landowner has invested in that acreage. He cleared the fields, planted a vineyard, developed the property, surrounded it with a fence, and built a security tower. Then he rented it out to these fools who had no regard for him or his property.
When it was time to collect the rent, those rascals beat up one rent collector, killed a second, and threw stones at a third. Then they did it all over again, one rent collector after another. So what do you think that absentee landlord should have done?
While you are thinking of an answer, let me remind us what he does. He sends his beloved son to them, in a last-ditch attempt to collect. When the criminals see who this is, they think that maybe they should kill him, too. “After all,” they reasoned, “if we kill the son, maybe the Father will write us into his will . . . and then we will end up with this vineyard.”
I can only size that up with a brief conversation from the classic movie, “Forrest Gump.” The neighbor kid asks Forrest, “Are you stupid?” He replies with a line that his mama taught him: “Stupid is as stupid does.”
These are incredibly foolish tenants in that vineyard. They are so focused on avoiding the rent, so set on refusing the rightful produce to the owner of the land, that they will murder his son and expect to end up with the vineyard. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Now,
this is not a logical story. This isn’t even a crime drama. No, it’s a Gospel
parable. A parable is a short story that reveals a hidden truth. In this case,
it’s a two-fold truth. First, the people inhabiting that vineyard are missing
the point. They are missing all kinds of points. You can’t terminate the Boss’s
son and expect to gain what the Boss was going to turn over to him. It’s
further evidence, final evidence, that they don’t understand it is the Boss’s
vineyard. Everything they have depends on him.
And then there’s that second truth: this is a most unusual Vineyard Owner. It’s his land. It’s his vineyard. These are his workers, just as the rent collectors were his workers. What kind of Vineyard Owner patiently waits for them to come to their senses and pay the rent? What kind of Vineyard Owner keeps giving them one chance after another? By my count, seven chances – six rent collectors and his own son.
Some might even think the Land Owner is the real fool here. He could have shut down the whole operation when the tenants seized the first rent collector. He could have drawn a line in the sand and said, “That’s it.” But no. He is patient. He will give them another try, and another, seven tries in all. It is harvest time. He has some grapes he wants to collect. The dangling question is, how far will he go?
This is Matthew’s ornery parable with its two-fold truth. The clueless tenants commit one crime after another under the mercy of their impossibly patient landlord. The question is, how patient will he be? How much longer will he let them get away with being so deplorable?
That’s the question that Jesus lifts into the air. It’s fascinating to me to hear the answer that his first audience offered up. They said, “He’s going to come and blast them out of the vineyard. He’s going to come and punish.” Now Jesus never inferred that, but that’s how they respond. This is fascinating to me because it opens a trap door, and they fall right into it.
These are the religious professionals, the Pharisees and the priests. According to Matthew, they will bear the responsibility of eliminating Jesus, the beloved Son of another Land Owner. The punishment they demand of the wretches in this story will fall back on them and crush them. This is the Gospel of Matthew, after all. According to Matthew, if you think God is all about retaliation and punishment, chances are that is the God you will end up with.
Yet the terrible judgment is that, if you think this way, you are missing the kind of God we meet in Jesus: generous to a fault, persistent to the end, infinitely patient, but still expecting good fruit. In fact, listen to how Jesus answers the question that he poses. He turns the whole punishment game on its head.
To make his point, he quotes a line from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (Psalm 118: 22). He might as well have added, “The son that the tenants rejected is the one who can pay their rent.”
The Presbyterian novelist Frederick Buechner once wrote an essay about the work of Flannery O’Connor. She was a great southern writer, and a lot of her stories turn on bizarre moments when God reveals strange and unexpected grace. It’s a glimpse of what Jesus announces of the kingdom: the one who is rejected may be the one most valued. This prompts Buechner to write:
If God is to save souls, he must do so with people who for the most part fight tooth and nail against the process… Human life is so distorted and distorting that the grace of God is broken to pieces by it - like light through a prism - and reaches us looking like everything except what it is…. It is often through such outlandish means as these that we are saved if we are to be saved at all, and opposed to our saving is all the madness and perversity not only of the world we inhabit but of the worlds we carry around inside our skins, that inhabit us.[4]
We live and work in a vineyard we do not deserve. The owner of it leases it to us anyway. He keeps checking to see if we’ve turned from abuse to fruitfulness. He desires for us to love the vineyard as much as he does. He wants us to stick it out until a new season brings fresh grapes.
So we return to the Table of God’s New Wine. Not only to be refreshed, but to be re-commissioned. We come to taste and see that God is good – and we are sent back into a world that is no friend of grace. Even if we fight against our own saving, we learn again that God has accomplished it anyway. Kindness is the will of the Father. Mercy is the bequest into which our names are written.
We come. All of us. And we pray that what we receive on this plot of land may renew the lives of those around us, until the day comes when hostility ceases, when abuse subsides, and every last one of us remembers that the rent has been paid – thanks to Jesus the Son.
(c) William G. Carter
[3] https://929thebull.com/police-caught-a-thief-who-broke-into-a-nudist-resort-because-he-was-the-only-one-wearing-clothes/
[4] Frederick Buechner, “Foreword,” in
Jill P. Baumgaertner, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring (Wheaton, IL,
Harold Shaw Publishers, 1988) ix – x.
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