Isaiah 5:1-7 and Matthew 21:33-46
Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard. And the song from the prophet Isaiah begins. He speaks of a garden, a vineyard, and its enormous promise for fruitfulness. Planted on a fertile hill, free of all the stones, choice vines, a valley west of Jerusalem renowned for its grapes, probably red grapes, and a watchtower, so that the vintager can be vigilant and can protect the vineyard from any predator or pest. A wine vat hewn right there out of stone, so that the grapes can be fresh when they are squeezed. What could be more promising?
The beloved who has created all this for pleasure and for the good of all, rightly expects a great harvest of grapes. The Vineyard owner, who we understand to represent God looking upon the chosen people Israel, not only expects: but LONGS for the vineyard to yield grapes. But it doesn’t. Instead it yields wild grapes. Again, the translation could just as easily read not merely wild grapes, but "rotten stinkers."
What’s Isaiah talking about? And what is Jesus up to when he invokes the same passage from Isaiah, but refers to the wicked tenants as the rotten stinkers and not merely the grapes? What is happening All Along the Watchtower? If you are a baby boomer you may remember Bob Dylan’s famous song that alludes to this Isaiah passage:
All along the watchtower, plowmen dig my earth. None of them along the line. Know what any of it is worth.
Dylan, writing at the height of the Civil Rights movement, witnessing the riots in the cities, the marches where African Americans and those marching with them were being beaten, as the war in Vietnam was escalating. Dylan saw a nation of tremendous abundance producing such injustice, brutality, and oppression. Here in this land of the free and home of the brave, this pleasant planting, we are right to expect justice, but instead saw bloodshed, we are right to expect the fruit of righteousness, but instead we heard the cry of the oppressed.
Isaiah wishes to sing a love song for his beloved’s vineyard, but soon the love song turns to a sour lament. It is a song of unrequited love. The people of Judah are asked to look at themselves, at their society, and to pass judgment. Are they living the covenant? Do they care for their poor? Are they faithful in their worship of God or do they busy themselves with building huge beautiful houses while their own kinsmen are homeless and hungry? Isaiah asks the people of Judah if they are responding to the longing that God has for them to live in relationship with God where they recognize God’s presence at all times. Are they striving to live in holiness?
What kind of stewards are they of what God has given them so freely? Do they know what any of it is worth? And do they see that the hour is getting late? For the consequence of the injustice and the unrighteousness of their society is its total destruction and the eventual exile.
The temperature only gets hotter when Jesus takes this same parable and puts his own spin on it. In Matthew, Jesus tells them a story of his own, a clear echo of this well-known prophetic poem in Isaiah. Isaiah's poem ends graphically: God came to the vineyard looking for justice, but instead found bloodshed; for righteousness, but instead heard cries of distress. In the Hebrew this is a vivid pun: God came looking for mishpat, and instead found mispach; for tsedaqah, but instead heard tse'aqah. We can't quite catch that in English, but you get the flavour of it if we say that God looked for justice, but it was just a joke; for righteousness, and instead got a load of rubbish. Isaiah's song was designed to explain why God could no longer withhold judgment from his own people; they were greedy and proud, experts in food and drink but ignorant of God and his ways. So the vineyard would be left to go wild, to reap the results of its own chosen way.
The vineyard owner who in this parable represents God has leased the vineyard to tenants who will take care of it. And it is time to enjoy the harvest. So he sends his slaves to collect the harvest, they fare miserably. One is beaten, the next killed, the last one stoned, which could very well mean that he is killed too. God tries again. Same thing happens.
But then, in an act that can be interpreted as either complete stupidity, naïveté or simply wildly extravagant…the Owner sends his Son. Now the way the law worked in the day was that if the tenants saw the son, they could assume that the landowner was dead. If the heir is killed, then, because possession is everything, they could then claim the land as their own. So they kill the son.
This Son is Jesus, predicting his own death, at the hand of the tenants of God’s world, And so, according to Matthew, Jesus says that the kingdom will be taken from you, you the house of Israel, and given to a people who will produce the fruits of the kingdom.
This passage, interpreted narrowly and without imagination or care, has been used to the Church’s shame as a proof text for centuries of anti-Semitism. Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew gospel has been quite tragically interpreted as justification to say that the Jews have relinquished their inheritance by killing Jesus. But to interpret this parable this way is to ignore that Jesus’ incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection was meant for the salvation of all humanity, and that God’s works in Christ are inconceivable apart from Scripture’s constant message that salvation comes from the Jews, the fold into which all humanity is meant to be brought into the Divine presence.
So what about us now? How do we fare in this parable? What fruits have we returned to the owner of the vineyard? In an article in Friday’s LA Times entertainment writer Paul Brownfield captured the recent "good works" spirit of television these days. From Oprah to Extreme makeover, to the copycat "Three Wishes" and the morning shows Today and Good Morning America. He writes: Katie Couric and Matt Lauer and Al Roker have been standing amid the two by fours of several Habitat for Humanity houses being built right there in Rockefeller Plaza doing their morning spiel in a caring-only zone re-dubbed "Humanity Plaza" Today has made its set a virtual relief zone, the Gulf Coast’s misery becoming a kind of green room, with celebrity guests picking up a mike hammer and driving in a miked nail before going inside to plug their products.
Yeah, you say, but they’re helping. True. Except that charity on TV is never just about helping. It’s about being seen helping. Morning shows have to be happy in the worst of circumstances, and these have not been happy weeks. The complex emotions surrounding these shows, make them difficult to wholeheartedly applaud or condemn, but to make them work you have to parade and exploit the pain of the victims Brownfield points out. I quote: Make your private pain public, act it out for us, let us set it to music, and let us appear to have grown from our proximity to you and in exchange we will give you a new house and a ride in a stretch limo and who knows what else – all the goodies that will inevitably, by their very goodie-ness, fix your problems. Oh, but we’re only here for a week.
Contrast this to the fruits I bore witness to on Monday of last week as I conducted the graveside service for Ruth Linne a member of St. Matthew’s who died at the age of 91. Ruth died as she wished to, still living in her own home here in Valley Village. Ruth’s was widowed for many years, she had no children or extended family. Ruth was a friend of Mabel Dilley’s mother, most of her friends had died. As her Pastor, like those before me, I have visited her often and brought her communion on your behalf. Bob and Phyllis Schultz, who are members here took care of Ruth’s doctor visits, and needs, and helped her in so many ways over the years. And in the last two years her neighbors, Ben and Shirley, realizing that she could no longer cook for herself began bringing her meals. Not one meal, but three meals a day, not for a week… but for two years these neighbors who were not previously close friends of hers, brought her three meals a day. Even when they were going out of town they brought food for her to have in the refrigerator. They did not receive any money, nor were they remembered in the will. Ruth left her house to the California Lutheran Homes which are for the elderly, and she left a gift to St. Matthew’s. Fruit bearing fruit. Quietly in the yards of this neighborhood.
Perhaps justice is living and acting in the constant awareness of God’s longing for all of us, to love in God’s abundance? God expects us to bear fruit…not so that God will love us, but because we are already loved. Our Divine parent passionately desires to give us all good things, and not just a few of us, or some of us, but ALL of us…the Jew, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Wicca, the unbeliever. And I bet the longer, more expansive we make that list, the more angry we will get at just how much God will love. But that’s the Gospel. God desires that we help those whose stories would never be worthy enough to make television, the completely unworthy, those for whom Jesus died.
Marian Wright Edelmen once said, "Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time." May God’s Spirit so move us to offer our lives in fruitful abundance. Amen.