“33 “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. 34 When the harvest time approached, he sent his
servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. 35 The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. 36 Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. 37 Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. 38 “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ 39 So they took him and threw him out
of the vineyard and killed him.
40 “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” 41“He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”
42 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “ ‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? 43 “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. 44 He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. 46 They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.”
Billy Joel just wanted to renovate his house, but he—one of the best-selling singers of all time—found out he didn’t have the cash. He was confused because money was pouring in, but once he looked into it, he was terrified. His manager, Frank Weber, had made off with millions.
Now as Billy Joel’s manager, Weber had a dream job. Billy Joel was an established hit machine. All Weber had to do was ride the gravy train, but that wasn’t enough for him. He had to take what wasn’t his.
Billy Joel wrote a song about the fallout on his last studio album. A mishmash of the lyrics goes, “You take a piece of whatever you touch; too many pieces means you’re touching too much… you shoulda looked out for me… you could have been standing on the Great Wall of China.” The message is, “you had a really good place. Why couldn’t you have stayed in your place rather than trying to take mine?”
We have it in us to be like Frank Weber. We have it in us to give up a dream situation with God because we want what’s God’s. His response to this betrayal is more comprehensive than a lawsuit and a song. We’d be wise to mind our place, and remember it is an enviable place; it’s spiritually self-destructive to take God’s place. That’s the claim of this sermon: it’s spiritually self-destructive to take God’s place.
We will study this in two points. First: Jesus’ parable. Second: Jesus’ reflections. First, in verses 33-41, we see Jesus’ parable. Second, in verses 42-46, we see Jesus’ reflections.
We see this message in story form in our first point: Jesus’ parable. Jesus loved to tell parables; we see this in in his call in verse 33, “Listen to another parable…” We’d be wise to learn to love what Jesus loves. We aren’t told Jesus’ tastes anywhere because those aren’t prescriptive. It stands to reason that being fully human he enjoyed certain foods more than others; from his teachings we know he was aware of different kinds of music. We aren’t told his preferences in such matters, though, because they are meant to mimicked any more than you need to prefer your grandfather’s favorite ice cream because you love him.
Parables, however, are another matter. Jesus’ love for them is prescriptive. You can’t love God and not love God’s words. He has forever united Himself to them. You see this honor in Psalm 138:2, “You have exalted above all things Your name and Your word.” The second person of the Trinity—Jesus who is speaking these parables—is even called “the word.” We say “a man is only as good as his word.” That’s even more true of Jesus and Jesus loves to word us—to turn that word into a verb—with parables.
This parable occurs as he has come into Jerusalem as king with the triumphal entry. It is yet another vineyard parable—a symbol that God’s people would have rightly taken to refer to themselves. The prophet Isaiah used this symbol saying, “My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well.” You can see Jesus gets his parable from Isaiah—planting a vineyard, digging a winepress, building a watchtower. God abundantly providing everything that’s needed. Jesus loves God’s word and explains reality by it. The rest of this parable is a filling out of Isaiah’s next line, “Then He looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.” This parable shows that bad fruit.
It’s a parable directed at the fruitless chief priests and Pharisees. They are the tenant farmers of verse 33, “There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey.”
Such a situation would have been quite familiar to Jesus’ listeners. “Examples of land cared for by tenants and of leases between tenants and owners are well known. Tensions and conflicts between the two parties are also well attested, right down to arguing over who got the twigs left over after pruning,” as Klyne Snodgrass has found. Interested people would have listened attentively to Jesus this was the Bible Jesus was talking about and this was real life Jesus was talking about. He is the greatest preacher ever.
This vineyard was a really good situation for the tenants—as with the beginning of the parable of the minas. God isn’t setting His people up for failure. The owner empowers this to be a productive garden—hence the winepress. He has every reason to expect fruit. He has given these tenants a dream job—like Adam and Eve in the garden. “It’s all provided for you. Just tend it and reap the rewards.” The tenants were to work the land, give a portion to the owner, and live blessed off the rest.
Like Adam and Eve, though, and like Frank Weber, these tenants don’t mind their place; verse 34, “When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way.” That sounds remarkably like the last chapter of the Hebrew Bible as they arrange it, 2 Chronicles 36:15-16, “The Lord, the God of their ancestors, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place. But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the Lord was aroused against his people and there was no remedy.” The crowd and religious leaders listening to Jesus could not have not recognized that. Jesus helps us realize how we are behaving if we have ears to hear.
Even those without ears to hear would have recognized the wickedness of the tenants. Everyone in the ancient world would have detested their behavior. Killing messengers and heralds was considered murder even in power politics. There was a decorum to life that was to be maintained and these tenants fell afoul. That’s the wicked behavior of God’s people to God’s prophets, though. Jesus was telling these leaders of his day that they were repeating the same mistakes and would do worse unless they repented now. That’s a warning for us when we want to do other than God’s way in God’s world and particularly with God’s kingdom. We are children playing hydrogen and sparks.
The coming of the son is the explosion. ‘Last of all, he sent his son to them. “They will respect my son,” he said. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, “This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.” So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.’ Jesus knows his Father isn’t naïve thinking that humanity would honor him. He’s saying that humanity should have and he’s certainly right, but you have to let a story be a story. Parables aren’t perfect representations of reality. They are stories designed to make a point and the point here is the wickedness of the human heart.
These tenants show their wickedness in their treatment of the son. He is his father’s representative in everything. To bless him is to bless the owner. To curse him is to curse the owner. Jesus is the perfection of that which is just one reason why rejecting Jesus is rejecting God. Salvation by Christ alone isn’t an artificial limiting of grace. It is the contours of logic—you can’t reject God without rejecting God.
The tenants had some sense of the son’s importance—“he stands for the father; kill him and the vineyard is ours.” It’s a misguided sense. They think that killing him will leave them in charge and in ownership as if the owner were dead. They think by killing him they will become him. The chief priests and the scribes think that too but not consciously. They are seeking to usurp Jesus’ place in God’s kingdom without knowing it. They are entrusted servants who want by right what was theirs by trust. They could have executed their responsibilities and enjoyed their place in God’s kingdom. Instead, they tried to execute the Son of God and lose it all.
It’s senseless. The tenants thinking that killing the owner’s son will net them the land is senseless; they aren’t thinking, but that’s us in our sin too. We aren’t thinking. When we sin and afterward ask ourselves, “what were you thinking?” the most honest answer is, “I wasn’t.” That would have been Adam and Eve’s most honest answer when the garden owner came to ask them questions after they sinned. Rather than blaming, they would have been wiser to say, “I was wrong. I wasn’t thinking.” We would do well to confess the same in our sin.
Jesus makes clear that the tenants’ plan will get them somewhere but it’s nowhere they’ll want to go; verse 40, “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”
The owner doesn’t submit to the violence of those tenants. He and the authorities will put an end to them. God is never intimidated or flummoxed into compromise by human wickedness. He makes no deals to avoid trouble with us. He will put unrepentant wretches to a wretched end. That’s a call for us to repent of our wretchedness and trust “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”
The wretches here are the leaders who won’t accept salvation. The king has come to Jerusalem and the tenants of his vineyard will not change and produce fruit. They didn’t want him as king and now they are out of the kingdom. There is a shift here in the gospels from Israel to the church—“he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.” Any Jew who will not submit to the king of the Jews forfeits his status and any Gentile who comes to the king of Jews becomes one of his people.
The questions, then, for us as the church becomes will we be fruitful? That’s the end of the parable. Fruitfulness is the stated goal of the agricultural parables—thirty, sixty, a hundred-fold, a mustard tree, wheat not weeds. Fruitfulness is what the owner wants from his vineyard.
We have no more right to the vineyard than those tenants. We have it in us to be foolish enough to grow dissatisfied with our place and try to seize God’s place. We have it in us to want the glory, the control, to be the center, to be the focus. This parable is a call to repent and work the king’s land in the king’s way. That’s the parable. Now Jesus has some reflections on it. That’s our second point: Jesus’ reflections.
Jesus wants us to see that fruitfulness and expulsion were nothing new. After this parable, ‘Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures?’ Jesus thought, and thinks, his parable and his kingship is as obvious from the Scriptures as snow in a snowstorm. This shows how well Jesus reads his Bible, but more importantly it shows us how poorly we read the Bible. What’s obvious to Jesus is rarely obvious to us. That’s not because it isn’t there. It’s because we continue to need eyes to see and ears to hear.
How well do you know your Bible? It’s not merely a question about whether you know King Jehu drove his chariot like a madman or that the gates in heaven are made of pearl. It’s a question about your heart. It’s a question of whether you read the Scriptures with the same Spirit as Jesus. That’s why we pray before and after the sermon. It’s not a breather in the liturgy. It’s a plea to see and hear like Jesus. “Have you never read in the Scriptures?” can be a criticism or an invitation.
Jesus sees the current situation unfolding on his way to the cross in terms of the vineyard song in Isaiah and now in terms of Psalm 118, “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Jesus is that rejected capstone. He is the murdered son. Jesus interprets and explains reality in terms of the Bible. He thinks the life really is as the Bible says and can really only be understood that way.
The climax of the story is the irrational killing of the owner’s son. That’s the climax of human history as well. You can’t miss the depravity the tenants once you see that. You can’t miss the depravity of the religious leaders once you see what they will do to Jesus. We can’t miss the depravity of ourselves when we see that this death has to do with our guilt. If the parable seemed a bit extreme to you with the tenants murdering the son, that is reality. Our evil is that extreme. Will we accept that? Will we accept the cross of Christ? You can’t accept grace until you accept your sin. In bringing you this message this evening, I am acting in line with the servants sent to the tenants. They didn’t receive the message. Will you? Will I?
The religious leaders wouldn’t. They are the “you” of verse 43, “I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.” Jesus has been telling his disciples what the religious leaders would do to him; now he tells the leaders themselves what they will do to him. How will they respond? How would you respond if the Son of God told you that you would kill him? “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him…”
I imagine most of us know the rest of the story, but you recognize that at this point it could have been otherwise. They could have been cut to the heart and repented rather than became enraged. That’s what David did when he came to know that Nathan’s parable was about him. He repented. The leaders in Jesus’ day didn’t. The question for us isn’t whether we will sin. The question is whether we will repent. You will never find sin-free people. If that’s what you need to be happy with others, you will never be happy with others nor will you be happy with yourself. If you look, though, you can find repentant ones.
The religious leaders would not join that group. They were so angry about this story in which they killed the son that, in their rage, they killed the son. That’s irony upon irony. “We’re not that kind of people and we’ll show you that we are not that kind of people by being that kind of people.” That’s where our self-justification brings us. That’s where our unrepentance brings us.
Hell will be full of people who don’t think they are the sort of people who wind up in hell. Heaven will be full of people who think they are the sort of people to wind up in hell. In Jesus’ words, the first will be last and the last will be first. Mind your place. Any other choice is to, like Frank Weber, give up all the blessings you’ve been graced in exchange for stealing what’s not yours and will never be yours. You can have everything God gives or try to take His place and wind up with nothing. He lets that choice be yours. Amen.