This sermon was preached at St Matthew's Lutheran Church, Maryborough, 8.15am (lay reading), and Grace Lutheran Church, Childers, 9am.
Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and
from our Lord Jesus Christ.
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 have his inheritance.”
Prayer:
Dear Lord Jesus, send us your Holy Spirit, to me that I may preach well, and to
all of us that we may hear well. Amen.
In
today’s reading, we read about a master of a house who plants a vineyard. Jesus
says: Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a
vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower
and leased it to tenants, and went into another country.
Here
in this parable we see a master of a house. The master of the house is God the
Father himself. He is the one who plants a vineyard, he is the one who owns
this vineyard, he is the one who builds a hedge around it, he is the one who digs
the winepress, he is the one who builds a tower, and he is the one who leases
his vineyard to the tenants that he chooses. The word “tenant” here doesn’t
simply refer to someone who rents to property, but someone who also works it.
This is a share-farming arrangement—there is a property owner, and then there
are workers and farmers who come into work the farm. It’s just as if someone
around our area owns a piece of land with a sugar cane plantation, but they are
not able to work it, and so they get someone else to work the plantation for
them.
Also,
we see in our reading that not only does God the Father plant a vineyard, but
he also puts a hedge around it. It is important that the vineyard is protected
from wild animals. Once I remember staying on a farm in South Australia which
had a vineyard on the property, and the fence next to it wasn’t very secure,
and the neighbour’s cows would come into the vineyard and eat the grapes! It
was quite a nuisance for the vineyard owners to have to keep leading the cows back
next door! — Also, God the Father builds a winepress in the middle of his
vineyard. What’s the point of having a vineyard if they’re not making
something? So, this winepress is where all the action happens in the
vineyard—this is where they press the grapes into a pulp, and make the wines. —
God also builds a tower – what’s the tower for? For the workers to watch. They
can make sure that there’s no people coming, or animals coming, or fires coming
that might affect the vineyard.
So
just as Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a vineyard, so also we can see
that there are different jobs that need to be done in the kingdom. In the
Lord’s Prayer, we pray: Your kingdom come. Martin Luther, in his
Small Catechism, writes: God’s kingdom comes when our Heavenly Father sends
us the Holy Spirit, so that by his grace we believe his holy word and live
godly lives here in time and there in eternity. Right at the heart of the
kingdom of God is the God’s Word, and God sends us his Holy Spirit to believe
that word, so that we lead our lives according to that Word.
So in
the vineyard there is also a hedge around it. God’s word needs to be
protected—it needs to be guarded and fenced in, so that we are very clear about
what is in the vineyard and what is outside the vineyard. We need to make sure
that the vineyard is well-fenced and snake-proof, so that the devil doesn’t
come in and alter God’s word, or twist it around to make it say what it doesn’t
say. But also, in this vineyard there is a winepress. The word of God must be
preached – we must be crushed up by God’s law, and confronted with the truth
about who we are as sinners. All of our pride must be stomped under God’s feet
with his gumboots, but all of this happens not to destroy the fruit, but so
that the grapes will grow and mature. It’s only the crushed grapes that are
then collected and saved by the workers, put in bottles, and left to ferment
into wine. And so God also wants his wonderful gospel to be preached to us too,
the message of the free forgiveness of our sins for Christ’s sake, and for it
to permeate and ferment our whole life through. Jesus was crushed on the cross
for us, and is now raised from the dead. Jesus also raises us up and gives us
new life, just like the crushed grapes are now given new life, and made into
something completely new. -- This vineyard also has a tower in it. The tenants
of God’s kingdom need to sit up high and be able to see outside the vineyard
and make sure the vineyard is protected. Here we can see that it is part of the
task of managing God’s vineyard to carefully watch what is outside his kingdom
and make sure that none of it comes in. Then when we can see where the fence
might need repairing. In the kingdom of heaven, people watch and pray. We watch
what is going on in the world, and also we pray that the kingdom of God may not
be infiltrated by error and falsehood.
Now,
let’s read what happens in the next part of our reading: When the season for
fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the
tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.
Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to
them. 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 have his inheritance.’ And they took him and threw him out
of the vineyard and killed him.
What
happens here? Well, nothing went wrong with the vineyard—it was a good
vineyard, and God had planted it well. Nothing went wrong with the fence. The
fence was still working well and no wild animals had got in. Nothing went wrong
with the winepress—everything was in fine working order. Also, nothing went
wrong with the tower—it still stood high over the vineyard. Everything that God
himself had built and put in order was fine. But the problem was with the
tenants. It’s not that they weren’t working in the vineyard, but they started
to think that they were the property owners now, and not the tenants anymore.
They kill their master’s servants, and finally they even kill their master’s
son.
Then
Jesus says: When therefore 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 let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in
their seasons.” You can see here at the end of the parable, God the Father,
as the owner of the vineyard, punishes the unfaithful tenants, and kicks them
out of his vineyard and he leases his vineyard out to new tenants. The old
tenants prevent the property owner, like an owner of a vineyard, from coming to
collect the bottles of beautifully-aged wine which we made from the grapes in
his vineyard. These tenants even killed the owner’s son, so that they could
keep all the produce, and the vineyard, for themselves. The new tenants will
work joyfully for the owner of the vineyard – and there’s a wonderful sharing
of the produce. The owner of the vineyard sends his messengers, and on behalf
of the owner, collects the wine for selling and distributing. Even the workers
in the vineyard get to share in the owner’s work, and are rewarded for their
work.
Now
this parable has two applications. First of all, it applies to God’s chosen
people of the Old Testament, the Jewish people. But second, it also applies to
the church throughout history. So first of all, let’s see how this parable
first of all applies to
I.
The Jews.
In the first five books of the Bible,
we see how God chose the Jewish people to be the custodians of his kingdom. God
called Abraham, and brought him to the land of Canaan. His grandson, Jacob had
12 sons, who became to heads of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Levites, were
chosen to be the priests, and the guardians of the worship and the tabernacle
and later the temple. If we read the book of Exodus, we read about how God
brought his chosen people out of Egypt, and gave them his law, in great detail,
about how they should guard his word and his worship.
But God didn’t simply want his people
to keep a whole lot of outward regulations and ceremonies. He also wanted his
word to sink deep into their hearts, and produce the wonderful fruit of faith.
Abraham had trusted God’s word so many years ago. And we read: Abraham
believed God, and he counted it to him as righteousness. In Deuteronomy, we
read where Moses tells the people before they go into the promised land: Hear,
O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these
words that I command today shall be on your heart. God wants his people to
give their complete devotion to him, and to return to him the wonderful fruit
of his vineyard, like aged wines.
But then what happened? God had not
employed them as owners of the vineyard, but only managers. But instead they
began to consider themselves to be the owners. God had sent his people many
prophets throughout the years, who had called them to repentance. The prophets
had called God’s people to share with their God the fruit of the harvest. But
there was no harvest – instead they rejected the prophets. Jesus says: O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are
sent to it!
God’s chosen people, the Jewish people,
put themselves in the place of God, and saw the prophets as nothing but a
threat to their existence. They thought that God could nothing without them.
They insist that the land of Canaan is their land, because of Abraham, not God’s
land for them to look after. And then when prophets had come to the land,
they had killed them. When Jesus came, both Jews and Gentiles worked together
to have him killed, kicked out of the city of Jerusalem, and killed like a
common criminal, and nailed to the cross.
What then happened as a result? In the
year 70 AD, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was destroyed, and
to this day it has never been rebuilt.
Even after the Second World War, the
Jewish people received the land of Israel back as a nation state. But where the
temple once stood stands one of the largest Muslim mosques in the world, and
one could only imagine that World War III would start if the Jewish people
today decided to destroy that mosque and rebuilt the temple. Many Christians
support the Jews, at the expense of the Palestinians, even Christian
Palestinians. Many Christians support Palestinians, at the expense of the Jews.
The kingdom of heaven is not a matter of politics. The kingdom of heaven is a
matter of the word of God, it is about Jesus our Saviour, and faith in him. And
so, even though there continues to be terrible trouble in the Middle-East to
this day, the solution is not for the Arabs to crush the Jews, or the Jews to
crush the Arabs, but for both Jews and Arabs to receive Christ as their
crucified Saviour, together with Christian people of all nations. It is
only with Jesus that there can be Glory to God in the highest and peace on
earth. In Colossians, we read that Jesus made peace by the blood of his
cross.
In the early books of the bible, we
read how the kingdom of God was given to the Jews alone. But then towards the
end of the bible, we see all these wonderful letters. To whom? To Romans,
Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, and
Hebrews. You see, God had taken away the kingdom of God away from the Jews
only, and given it instead to the Jews who received Christ, the Son of God. And
then He also grafted in many believers from other nations. The Jews are not
forgotten—the church today is not an anti-Jewish group. Not at all! The church
is made up of people from all nations, including Jews. In fact, in started off
with Jews, and expanded all throughout the world. All the books in the bible,
even in the New Testament, were written by Jews, like Paul and Peter and James
and John. The church doesn’t belong to one ethnic group anymore, and even
today, the kingdom of God has expanded even to places that the apostles didn’t
even know existed, like Australia. In recent years, there have been missions to
some of the most remote people on earth, to the Mongolians, to the Nepalese, to
tribes still unreached in Africa, in South America. Even today in Australia,
the Gospel is still yet to be preached to a new generation of people, who seem
to be being “protected” more and more from hearing the Gospel.
So let’s now come to how this parable
applies even to
II.
The Church today.
The church today is called to be a
custodian of God’s vineyard. But sometimes we can start to put our own human
wisdom in place of God’s word. We can start to think that God won’t do anything
unless we do it for him. We start to think that the Holy Spirit doesn’t know
how to call people, and so we exchange his word for entertainment. We water
down his word so that the wine can’t mature properly. When true messengers of
God come our way, whether they be pastors or laypeople, we can so easily remain
stuck in our comfortable lives, instead of listening to God’s call to repentance,
and presenting a harvest back to him. God sends people all throughout history,
who speak the word of God afresh for us, and when they do this, we must listen.
Because if we reject God’s word, then we reject Jesus himself, and if we reject
the Son, then reject the owner of the vineyard also. Jesus says: I am the
way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.
Sometimes, even in the church, Christians
can reject Jesus, and rob God of his own property, because they want it for themselves,
and turn it into their own little social club, as if it’s all about them. The
church is not a social club built around us, it is the mouthpiece for our
living God. And when we turn this mouthpiece into something else, then faith is
completely eradicated from people, and it is given to other people. Even in our
culture—in European, western culture—the Christian faith was once at the very core
of the civilisation. And now, in our country, the name of Jesus for many people
is nothing more than a swear-word. Now it is not Europe where most of the
world’s Christians are to be found any more, but Africa and other places. But
what about them? Will they remain faithful to God’s word? Africa is a continent
that is full of false prophets too. God knows full well how to take his kingdom
away from one group of people and to rain it down upon another.
So it is of utmost importance for us
Christians to keep the faith. It is not for us to make Christianity into
our own brand. We cannot work by ourselves, but with God every step of
the way, and let him shape and change us, and it is his word that must sink
into our hearts and minds. If we don’t remain faithful to God’s word, then the
church won’t be here anymore when people come looking for it. There might be a
church building, but the church won’t necessarily be inside it. But if there is
a church inside the building, then it can only be a group of sinners who trust
their Saviour, who look for their hope and their salvation from Jesus, their
Good Shepherd. Any other group of people is not a church, and it is only a
matter of time before they become an angry group of dangerous tenants.
In the church, we do nothing but plant
seeds and water the seed. God is the one who gives the growth. And so in the
meantime, let’s work together with God in that task, being shaped and formed by
his word—in changing our minds in repentance, and receiving the wonderful gift
of the free forgiveness of every single one of our sins, and we look forward to
that wonderful time when Jesus will return and share with us the joy of his
harvest. Amen.
Dear Jesus, when you come to your
Father’s vineyard, we want to receive you with joy, and share in your harvest.
Send us your Holy Spirit, and keep us faithful to you. Amen.
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