Sermon Notes on Matthew 21:33-46

How to get thrown out of God’s vineyard.

This would have been a very common and well-understood arrangement in the minds of Jesus’ hearers. Many of them had probably met landowners or tenants who had property arrangements of this kind. The expectation was that a share of the crop (usually at least 25%) would be paid to the landowner as rent. This might sound a little steep, but remember, the landowner provided everything, including the plants, for the tenants. The landowner is taking all the risks. All the tenants are providing is the labor and the management for the vineyard.

It’s also important to remember that this arrangement was not ambiguous or implied. A good landowner would have made the terms absolutely clear to the tenants. There would be no surprises at harvest time.

There is another important thing to understand; Jesus was not speaking this parable against the Jewish people. You may have heard some Christians say that Jesus was equating the evil tenants to the Jews and that we Christians are the ones to whom the vineyard was given after they killed the Son of the landowner. This is definitely NOT the case.

Jesus was speaking this parable against the religious leaders who were supposed to be serving God’s people. God’s people were the vineyard. Many of Jesus’ hearers would have remembered the passage from Isaiah in which he refers to Israel, the Jewish people, in this way. The corrupt and legalistic leadership of the religious establishment were the tenants who were attempting to cheat the owner out of the fruit that was due.

So what exactly had these religious leaders done wrong in God’s eyes? What was Jesus accusing them of withholding from God?

They had put together a well-oiled machine. They had a hierarchy and a huge organizational structure, they had created all kinds of formulas and laws for the people to follow, they had traditions and rituals and scholars and lawyers and every manner of staff member and employee to keep things running smoothly. But they had forgotten what their faith was supposed to be about.

As the leaders of God’s people their mission, their primary purpose for existence, was to empower God’s people to love God with all of their being and to love their neighbors as they loved themselves. This is the fruit that God expected from them and this is what was they hoarded for themselves.

You see, the whole system had become something that only existed to feed itself. All of the offerings, the structure, the rituals, the laws…they had all become so turned in on themselves that the awe and the love and the energy and the service of the people was directed at the religion and the religious leaders, rather than God. Instead of empowering people to love God and to serve and love one another, the leaders were using people’s devotion to God for their own purposes.  They took the love and the energy that should have been God’s and poured it into the religion they controlled. Even worse, they convinced the people that by serving the religious system they were actually serving God.

When God sent prophets to point out that they had deserted the God who loved them, they rejected those prophets. Perhaps they had become convinced by their own lies. Maybe they had begun to believe that loving and serving the religious establishment really was the same as loving and serving God.

When the only Son of God came to confront them and ask them to give to God the love and devotion that was rightfully God’s, they felt so threatened by his challenge that they killed him, thinking that this would make devotion to their religion the winner in the sight of the people.

The biggest problem with this was that their religion was still only a religion. What people’s hearts longed for, what they still long for, is to know, to love, to serve, and to obey the God of the universe. No religion can ever fill the God-shaped hole in the human heart. And in the risen Christ, the God of the universe has been revealed in a way that makes religion look pale and sickly in comparison.

It’s easy for us to sit here and shake our heads at the religious leaders in Jesus’ day, but I have to tell you, I think we fall into the same trap. I fall into it every day.

Every time I skip, or cut short my time with God so that I can get more tasks of “ministry” done, I am holding back the fruit that God expects from my life.

Take a look sometime at our meetings and activities around here. We throw a little nod God’s way through a devotion or a prayer and then we get on to what we obviously believe is the really important stuff.

Even in our worship, we tend to spend a lot of time making it the way we like it or tweaking it so that it conforms to the rules of our religious ideas. We don’t seem to worry too much about what is going on in the hearts of God’s people. We don’t ask often enough, “Is this worship empowering people to love God?”

We have to ask ourselves a hard question. Are we hoarding people’s energy, time, talents, treasures, and especially their love and pouring them out for the sake of our organization? Are we putting too much of ourselves into All Saints Lutheran Church and not enough into our relationships with God?

Today, Jesus comes to us and says, “My Father deserves the love and the devotion that you are pouring into your religious organization. What are you going to do about it?”

What are we going to do about it? What would our meetings, our activities, our worship services, everything we do look like if we were committed to giving our hearts to God and insuring that our devotion to God took precedence over everything else?

It’s something to think about. Jesus Christ has made us children of God. We have been trusted with an amazing vineyard. Let’s commit ourselves to figuring out what it would look like if we were giving God the love, devotion, and service that God deserves. Amen