A sermon for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on October 2, 2011.
Exodus 20:1-20
Psalm 19
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46
Has anyone ever told you the honest, brutal truth about yourself?
How did you respond?
I’m sure for most of us, we got incredibly defensive at first and then as the initial emotions wore off, we started think about what was said a bit more, and then realized that the person may have been right.
Today’s parable is about a confrontation that went terribly wrong.
Some context.
Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem created a great stir in the community life of the Jewish people there.
Many began thinking Jesus was a prophet and possibly the promised Messiah who would come to his people and free them from oppression.
Matthew 21:23
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
The understood accusation in this question is that Jesus does not have the authority he thinks he does.
Instead of responding directly to their accusation, Jesus begins to speak to them about their own authority.
Jesus first shows that the authority of the religious leaders is really built up on the perception of their authority by the people.
If they deny John’s prophetic identity, they are on the people’s bad side and might lose respect or receive great anger. If they affirm John’s prophetic identity, Jesus will ask them why they didn’t listen to John and respect him.
Their authority is not based on what is true or what is most important, but authority for authority’s sake. They enjoy their position of influence, they enjoy the status and wealth that accompany being in a position of power and importance.
They are willing to protect their power at the expense of truth and therefore use “truth” as a way of manipulating people and circumstances for their own self-interest.
So when they say in response to Jesus’ asking whether John was a human or divine messenger that they don’t know, they don’t really mean that they don’t know, they just mean that they plead the fifth so that they can maintain their image, status, wealth – their power.
As we learn more of who Jesus is and what Jesus stands for, we realize the threat that Jesus’ teaching and his life are to the status quo. They threaten the way things are. They threaten our comfortable routines. Jesus’ life and teachings cause us to reflect on our own lives. Are we more drawn to what is comfortable than to what is true?
After exposing their unwillingness to be truthful, Jesus accuses them through the parable of the two sons of being the son who says one thing and does the opposite.
They are the ones who are full of words and bankrupt of actions.
Jesus further claims that tax collectors and prostitutes – the despised of society – are more fit for the kingdom of God because they at least care more about truth than their comfort – as seen in the fact that when the tax collectors and prostitutes heard John preaching that everyone must repent and be baptized to prepare for the coming king, the coming kingdom, they responded with honesty concerning their need to turn their lives around. Whereas the religious leaders responded with defensiveness and indignation – proving their unwillingness to let truth question their power.
And so we come to today’s parable.
Jesus puts the resistance of the religious leaders to truth in context by telling them a story about a vineyard and its tenants.
The religious leaders’ position is one of serving God’s people Israel. They are responsible for new generations of Jews to understand who they are as worshippers of God and as a people who have the history that they have. The religious leaders are responsible to lead the Jewish community into understanding themselves truthfully in light of the story of the Tanakh (what we call the Old Testament) and by understanding that story to understand how they should live in light of their current circumstances.
This is a role of stewardship, of tending to a community of which they are not the highest authority. The highest authority, the only true authority over Israel has always been God.
Jesus’ parable is a story of two aspects of Israel’s existence as a community. There had always been a tendency of leaders of the Israelite community to think of themselves as the final authority or at least to wish themselves to be. Reading first and second Kings in the Old Testament gives you a good feel for this dynamic. An authority figure (usually a king) starts running the nation however he feels like it should be run (usually for his own best interest) and a prophet comes to him to tell him that he’s not being the steward of God’s people in the way that he should be.
Authority figure misrepresents God, disobeys God and leads the people who are influenced by him astray.
Prophet comes and seeks to point out the error and call the authority to change in light of truth.
Of course, as many of us know, and as all of us can imagine, such confrontations of injustice with truth were never pretty.
This is the story that Jesus tells. It’s not a pretty story.
A landowner does six things:
Plants a vineyard, puts a fence around it, digs a wine press in it, builds a watch-tower, leases it to tenants, and goes to another country.
God is the landowner and the community of Israel is the vineyard. The picture of a vineyard as representing the community of Israel is throughout the Bible.
So God is landowner. The community which God promised to Abraham, and gave form to in the desert under Moses is God’s vineyard. The leaders that God entrusts his community to are the tenants.
When the landowner sends servants to collect produce (possibly because the produce had not been sent and the landowner was beginning to wonder).
The servants are not welcomed but seized and beaten and some killed.
He sends more servants and a greater number than the first group.
These two are treated in the same way.
This back and forth sending/seizing story is the a big part of the later story of the community of Israel that we can read about in the Old Testament.
The community of Israel would be lead astray by the present king or priest or both and a prophet would try to speak to the issue, to remind the leader of their responsibility, and these prophets would be abused and many times killed.
The response of power which is built on lies and injustice to truth is violence.
A beautiful passage in the gospel of John chapter 3 gives words to this experience:
“And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.
And so, having experienced so much resistance from the tenants after sending servants, the landowner determines that he will send his son – they are bound to respect the authority of his son.
But rather than respect the authority of the son, they see it is an opportunity to secure their lasting power, their usurping of the landowner’s ownership. The vineyard will be theirs if they can get rid of the one who will inherit it.
And so when they saw the son, they seized him, they threw him out of the vineyard, and they killed him.
In less than a week from the telling of this parable, Jesus would be seized, thrown out of the Jerusalem city limits, and killed.
The question of authority and the questioning of authority leads to the greatest violence for the sake of preserving the status quo, the power which was built and sustained by manipulation and falsehoods. The darkness could not stand the light and its reaction had to be to try to eliminate it.
The religious leaders in Jesus’ telling of the parable, are being tied in to the history of the persecution of the prophets that they would have heard many times before in their training in the story of the community of Israel.
Now Jesus asks them what should be done to the tenants. The religious leaders respond that they should be put to death and that the vineyard should be leased again to more worthy tenants.
Unable to see themselves truthfully, they cannot recognize that they are participating in the story of the evil tenants by refusing to recognize truth in the person and teaching of John and now in the person and teaching of Jesus.
Jesus concludes that they will have their authority taken from them (not that they will be killed). That the kingdom of God, the vineyard he began will be given to those would serve and represent God’s desire for truth, mercy, and justice.
The religious leaders realize that Jesus was talking about them and they become angry and want to arrest him. But true to form they do nothing out of fear of the crowds who are becoming more and more convinced that Jesus is the true authority.
It all began with the religious leaders’ question: By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?
And Jesus turns the question around on the religious leaders – by what authority are THEY doing these things, and who gave THEM this authority?
Unveiling the fact that the only authority they have been willing to recognize is their own authority and that they fight against any new word, however true, from the one who gave them any authority they have – the landowner whose vineyard they serve.
And so I think we can see a dynamic within ourselves as individuals and our community where on the one side we have our self-interest and on the other we have what is right. On the one side we have our own perceived final authority and on the other we have the authority of God’s truth and love revealed in Jesus’ person and teaching which has the power to deconstruct our habits, our practices, and ways of life which have strayed from God’s way.
We are called as community of followers of Jesus to look at ourselves as individuals and our community in the light of God’s word. In what parts of our lives as individuals and our life in community are we refusing to let in the light?
Is there anything in our lives as individuals or in our life as a community which we would be tempted to act like the tenants in the parable if someone were to challenge it?
We read in the first letter of John chapter 1, verses five through nine:
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
To live in the light is to participate in life to the fullest. To be free of lies, is to be free indeed. This is only possible as we continue to listen to how God would have us change and be continually willing to give up the old to make way for the new in our own lives and in the life of our community.
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
We are God’s agents of reconciliation in the world. We are the ones bringing the good news – the light in the darkness– that God loves the world. But we must allow our own darkness to be confronted if we are ever going to be able to with any honesty or integrity confront the darkness of the sin and injustice around us in this world.
Therefore, may our eating and drinking together in remembrance of Christ’s reconciliation, be a prayer of repentance and renewal, death and resurrection, for ourselves and our community, that we may die to darkness and rise again to light, truly to be lights to the world as we go out this week.
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