Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them.  Take our minds and think with them.  Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name we ask it.  Amen

How many of you saw the movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”  Opinions about the movie varied among the people I spoke with in the days and weeks after it was released.  Some people where powerfully moved.  The movie made painfully clear the point that Jesus’ willingness to go to the cross was an incredible personal sacrifice.  These people were deeply touched by the idea that a person would endure such pain, such humiliation, and such injury for their personal benefit.  As we say in the language of our faith, that Jesus Christ would sacrifice his life on the hardwood of the violent cross that we might be cleansed of all our sins and given life eternal.  Connecting the graphic image of Jesus’ suffering in the movie with our personal salvation moves many to a place of deep gratitude and profound devotion.  On the other hand, that very same graphic violence cut many people off from making any intellectual, emotional or spiritual connection with the movie at all.

One objection to the movie that I heard over and over from some Christian scholars and theologians is that the movie offers no context for Jesus’ crucifixion.  That is if you are unfamiliar with our sacred story there is no clear reason or motive given in the movies narrative explaining the religious leaderships’ hatred and bitterness toward Jesus.  At least some scholars suggest that the lack of context for the crucifixion gives rise to some people’s claim that the movie is anti-Semitic.  You see, without a reasonable motive for the religious leadership’s desire to kill Jesus, they are simply perceived as savage, bloodthirsty brutes.  Without a method behind the madness (so to speak), the religious leaders are portrayed as people who want the hero, Jesus, dead simply because they are hard-hearted, hateful people. 

Most Christians familiar with the Gospels, however, know that there is more to the story.  And today’s gospel lesson from Luke is one of the texts that provide us with profound insight into the religious leaderships’ motivation for pursuing Jesus’ ultimate demise.

Let me begin with a little background information.  In this reading, we encounter Jesus literally days before his crucifixion.  He is teaching a gathering of people at the Temple in Jerusalem.  Among the crowd listening to Jesus are members of the religious leadership.  The Temple itself is the sacred space for which these leaders are responsible.  With that in mind, perhaps we should note that the religious leaders who are listening to Jesus are only doing their duty.  Jesus had come into the temple hailed by his followers as a king, disrupted normal activities of the Temple, and even announced its destruction.  For the security of the people and of the Temple if for no other reason, the religious authorities had a responsibility to investigate Jesus.  What are the leaders of Christian denominations to do today when preachers or evangelists with questionable credentials, background and theology cause a massive stir and threaten the established program of the church?  Such situations are seldom simple to resolve.

Now on to the parable itself, Jesus says that there was a man who planted a vineyard, and then leased it to tenants because he moved to a distant country.  When the season came for the produce of that vineyard to be harvested, the owner sent a servant to collect what was rightfully his.  However, the tenants of the vineyard did not want to share what they rightfully owed the landowner so they beat up the owner’s servant and sent him away with nothing.  Two more times the landowner sent servants to collect his share of the harvest, and, both times, like the first, the tenants beat the servants and sent them away empty handed.  Finally, in frustration, the vineyard owner sent his only beloved son to collect his produce believing that the tenants would have to respect his son.  However, just the opposite occurred, the tenants saw the son’s visitation as an opportunity to secure the vineyard for themselves for good.  They said among themselves, “This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours.”  You see, they were hoping, in their greed that if the owner died without an heir the vineyard might become theirs for good.  That would solve the problem of having to share any of the produce with the owner.  The vineyard and everything it produces would be theirs alone. 

Overall the parable is a haunting metaphor for a self-serving people who are actively rebelling against God’s sovereignty.  The owner in the parable is God and the fruit that God is hoping to collect from the vineyard is people living in loving relationships with God and each other.  Relationships characterized by mutuality, love, hospitality, and care and concern for those in need.  However, when God’s messengers and his son come to the vineyard to collect their share of the produce, they encounter self-serving tenants consumed with greed who want to keep all the fruit for themselves.  And to make matters worse, the tenants are conspiring to go as far as violently taking the vineyard from the owner to meet their own self-serving desires.  The story depicts the core of human sin and brokenness—our self-centeredness.  In our self-centeredness, we constantly put our own needs, cares, and concerns before anyone else’s, including God’s, making any hope for relationships of mutuality and love a distant possibility. 

Now the historical backdrop to the tenant’s rejection of the owner is the history of the people of Israel, which we find in the Old Testament.  The parable remembers the role God has played in the lives of the people of Israel, and how the people have responded, or not responded, to God’s efforts to call Israel into a life-giving relationship with Him and each other.  The life and death of Jesus, which is represented by the son in the parable, is the culmination of God’s redemptive efforts toward the people of Israel who have already rejected the prophets of judgment and of grace sent to them by God.  The rejection of Jesus by the religious leadership becomes, in a since, the final straw.  God has attempted over and over to call the people of Israel into right relationship and each time God is met by greed, rebellion, and irresponsibility.  Therefore, the vineyard is taken away from the tenants and given to others.  Luke tells us, “When the religious leaders realized that Jesus had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour.” 

I hope the question of context for Jesus’ crucifixion, with which I began this sermon, is beginning to take shape for you.  The vineyard was a metaphor for all the things that God had graciously given the people of Israel including the religious leadership’s power, authority, material comfort, and political influence.  Jesus is saying in effect to the religious leaders of his day you have used all that God has given you for your own welfare and your own self-serving desires.  God has called you over and over again into right relationship with Him and each other, and, instead, you have rejected and abused his messengers, killed (or soon will) even His own beloved son.  Therefore what was entrusted to you will be taken away and given to others.  And that’s not all.  If we really want to be fair to the text, Jesus not only says that the vineyard will be given to others, but he says that the wicked tenants will be utterly destroyed…pulverized, as if a giant stone was to crush them.  I hope you might see why the religious leadership was a bit out of sorts with Jesus.  And that’s an understatement.  Jesus was a clear and present danger to the lives and livelihoods of those who would conspire to kill him only days later.

Now I have one more very important idea to consider and that is presumably the “other” to whom the vineyard is given is you and I—the New Israel which is the Body of Christ, the Church.  That sounds like good news.  It would be nice to end the sermon at this point, but I can’t.  Before we begin to celebrate our inheritance of the vineyard—before we begin to feast on the rich and abundant fruit produced by our fields.  You must understand that the parable does not just pass judgment on the previous tenants of the vineyard.  The parable also speaks to us the new tenants.  The parable requires us to put ourselves in the place of tenants.  This haunting story of self-serving rebellion against God’s sovereignty should resonate somewhere inside each of us.  You see if we are the “other” to whom the vineyard has been given, we must ask ourselves how have we done as stewards of God’s gracious gift?  When God peers into the vineyard entrusted to us this very day what does he see?  A church full of people living in life-giving relationships with Him and each other—relationships characterized by love, mutuality, and care and concern for those in need?  Or does God see a consumer culture utterly addicted to its own self-indulgence?  These are hard but necessary questions to ask.  I think if we are completely honest with ourselves the truth is that God sees some of both.

And yet hear a word of grace in this parable that might wrongly be understood as a story of judgment only, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”  Jesus is the cornerstone rejected by the religious leadership of his day and by each of us every time we use God’s gifts, God’s vineyard, to satisfy our own appetites.  Yet despite our attempt to extinguish the light of love by nailing it to the cross, God resurrected love and made it the cornerstone, which is source of stability and abundance in the vineyard and in our lives.  You see the fruitfulness of the vineyard has never been ours to control.  The vineyard is fruitful because of God’s grace. That is the Good News.  God provides the vineyard and makes it fruitful—not because we are particularly good tenants but because He loves us beyond measure.  Amen.                              

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