Sermon for October 4, 2020: Vineyard Vengeance

In today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 21, Jesus uses the familiar image of a rebellious, unfruitful vineyard to illustrate his own mission not of vengeance, but of grace.

I found helpful for this week Michael Renninger’s sermon here and David Lose’s reflection here.

Here’s my sermon on Isaiah 5:1-5 and Matthew 21:33-46.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

Every time you read a Bible story, two great questions to ask are, “What does this story tell us about God?”, and “What does it tell us about ourselves?”. Those questions are a good lens to get into this Gospel story from Matthew.

Our Gospel passage today begins with Jesus telling an odd story about a vineyard. There’s a landowner who rents out his vineyard, but come harvest time, the renters refuse to pay.

In fact, not only do they refuse to pay what they owe, they beat up and even kill the messengers who come to collect the rent.

But, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try agin, right? So the landowner sends some more servants to collect…and they get the same reception. The landowner won’t give up, though. He makes one last-ditch effort, and this time, he sends his own son to them.

Now, these people have just beaten up and killed a bunch of messengers. They’re obviously in open rebellion at this point, so sending the son frankly seems pretty risky. I’m not sure what he’s picturing happening, but unsurprisingly, these no-good, murderous freeloading tenants kill the son too.

And at this point, Jesus breaks out of his story, and he asks the religious leaders who are listening, the religious leaders who if you remember from last week have been questioning his authority, he asks them what they think the landowner will do next.

Now, the way Jesus began his story is a little strange. If you look at that first verse of the gospel reading, he describes a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch tower, then leased it out and left.

What do these details of the fence, the wine press, and the watch tower have to do with the story? They’re never mentioned again. Listening to the story today, these details sound randomly thrown in.

But Jesus’ original hearers would have made the connection he was going for, because he uses the same language Isaiah used in our first reading today.

If you’re familiar with Isaiah 5, the parallel is clear. Jesus is connecting to a traditional story people are familiar with, sort of a shorthand to make a point, like if we talk about George Washington and the cherry tree, or Christopher Columbus, or something like that.

In Isaiah 5, the prophet Isaiah uses this metaphor of a landowner and a vineyard to describe God’s frustration with Israel. The vineyard represents the chosen people of Israel, and the landowner represents God.

Basically, God’s frustrated because after doing everything possible to create a fruitful vineyard, the vineyard hasn’t done its part.

Isaiah says the owner of the vineyard has put the vineyard on a very fertile hill, dug it out, cleared out the stones, and even built a watchtower in it. Everything necessary for the vineyard to grow good grapes. God has blessed the people, giving them an abundant land flowing with milk and honey, protecting them from their enemies, setting them apart from other nations as a holy people.

But despite the best efforts of the owner, the vineyard has yielded wild grapes (which would be useless for making wine), rather than good cultivated grapes. God has told Israel how to live, how to thrive, and they’ve disobeyed.

Instead of following the commandments, instead of loving their neighbor, protecting the vulnerable, and acting with justice to be a blessing set apart for the world the way God intended, they’ve accepted bribes, they’ve allowed the poor to be oppressed, they’ve put their trust in foreign armies, and they’ve denied justice. The fruit is bad.

So, what is to be done with a vineyard that keeps failing to produce good fruit?

Verse 5: Now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured. It will be abandoned and destroyed, trampled into the dirt, made into a wasteland.

That’ll show it! That’ll teach it to stop growing bad grapes! And historically, this is what happens to Israel – the Assyrian empire came and conquered Israel, taking them away into a long exile. The nation is decimated. The land is ruined.




So when Jesus asks his audience what a landowner should do with a dysfunctional vineyard, or in this case, a vineyard with rebellious tenants, they know the answer. This is the old familiar Isaiah story.

So they answer, “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.”

The answer is to get rid of the tenants and find new renters, to knock down the walls and punish them. The answer is violence, to fight back, to punish those evil, disobedient people.

Do you remember the two questions from a couple minutes ago? What does this story tell us about God? And what does it tell us about ourselves?

The religious leaders’ answer is the natural human response. It’s the right answer, according to the world. When we’re mistreated, we want to fight back. Sometimes we can overcome that instinct, but I think it’s always there. If someone takes what I believe belongs to me, I want to do something about it. If someone steals from you, then it’s fair to steal back from them, right?

These people are evil. Not only have they stolen from the landowner, but they’ve killed his messengers and even his son. Vengeance is more than justified. At least, that’s the human view. That’s what they assume is the right answer.

But Jesus goes somewhere completely different. He quotes from an entirely different story, not from Isaiah, but from Psalm 118, a Psalm of praise and thanksgiving about looking to God for help.

In this culture, quoting part of a Psalm can often be a sort of shorthand for referring to the entire Psalm. The verse Jesus quotes is about the stone rejected by the builders becoming the cornerstone of the building. It’s about God doing something miraculous. Jesus moves from the familiar, expected story of punishment, destruction, and exile to a passage from a Psalm the people know is about rejoicing, giving thanks that God has marvelously come to the rescue.

Jesus gives us a completely different picture of God than the one the religious leaders have. Because of course, the chief priests and Pharisees are right.

The obvious thing for the landowner to do is to punish the rebellious people, destroy the useless vineyard, strike back against the people who killed his son.

What does this story tell us about God? It tells us God’s not interested in the vengeance we humans would expect. It tells us God is about grace and forgiveness, not vengeance.

It illustrates one of my favorite verses in the Bible, John 3:17. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Since we know the rest of the story, we know what Jesus is talking about—he’s talking about himself. Jesus is the rejected stone who becomes the cornerstone.

That word “Cornerstone” can also mean the keystone, the stone in the middle of an arch that holds everything together, which is exactly who Jesus is. We know Jesus is the Son who came into a rebellious, sinful world and was killed. And we know even Jesus’ death isn’t the end of the story.

By his willing suffering and death, Jesus reveals to us that God is willing to do whatever it takes to redeem us.

Our human tendencies toward vengeance and death are crushed beneath God’s forgiveness and grace.

Our unfaithfulness and rebellion are overcome by the persistent faithfulness of a God who offers forgiveness and grace, over and over and over. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

Thanks be to God. Amen