The Wicked Tenants
Pastor Mathew Magera – 4/10/19 – Sermon 343
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
When I was in third grade,
my aunt who had come to visit from Arizona brought me an aqua green pencil in
the shape of a cactus. It was a souvenir that I just loved. The only problem
with the pencil is that the eraser was essentially unusable. The tip of the
pencil was the base of the cactus, it wiggled around to make the top and two
extensions like a typical saguaro cactus and the eraser was in a place that
would never work. Again, it was a souvenir and probably not meant to be a
serious instrument of writing. But, I brought it to school with me anyway. I
had a back-up pencil next to me to serve as the eraser. Someone in the class
wanted to borrow it one day. I was hesitant to let my prized pencil out of my
possession so I resisted. I even tried to make it less valuable by explaining
that the eraser is worthless. This person told me they were certain they could
get the eraser to work just fine. Well, I gave him the pencil and I wish I
could see his thoughts before I did because his plan to get the eraser to work
was to unbend the pencil so it was straight like a regular pencil, making the
eraser much more useful. Well, if you’ve ever tried to bend a pencil before,
you know it doesn’t bend and when he tried to make my cactus straight, it broke
right in two pieces. I was absolutely devastated. I was sad. I was mad. I could
barely speak and it must’ve had quite the impact on me because I can still
remember it to this day. I should’ve never given the pencil away. I should’ve
never let it out of my hand. But I did and it was broken.
When I think of this parable
of Jesus presented to us tonight I think of how God valued his souvenir cactus
pencil. I think of how someone needed that cactus pencil that God had and I can
imagine God feeling as if he didn’t want to let that special possession out of
his sight. But, I remember that God has compassion. I remember that God loves
and cares for others. So God decides to loan his souvenir cactus pencil to the
one who needs it only to watch it be broken in two right before his eyes. The
pain. The sadness. The rage. There is his prized possession, broken in two in
his hands. No amount of apology can change what happened. No amount of remorse.
In the scheme of Luke’s
Gospel, this parable is found between Palm Sunday and Easter. Jesus has already
made his entrance into Jerusalem but he has not yet shared his last supper with
his disciples. The crowds have already celebrated his coming but they have not
yet cried out for his death. Yet, between the two very different moments, we
find this parable foreshadowing what is going to take place. Here is Jesus in
the temple courts in Jerusalem where the chief priests and teachers of the Law
are questioning his authority, looking for ways to arrest him. In the midst of
that, Jesus tells this parable.
The parable starts out with
a landowner planting a vineyard and renting it out to some farmers before
leaving town for quite some time. Already we might be able to sense some
tension. If you’ve ever rented property or been the landlord of a property you
are renting out, you might know of the ups and downs of the process. Granted,
sometimes things work out really well but other times there is a fair amount of
grumbling on both sides. You can imagine the renters feeling like they are on
their own. You might imagine them out in the vineyard doing their work
complaining about why the landowner did this with his field or did that. What
kind of person would plant this vineyard this way? There are so many things
I’ve got to fix here because the landowner isn’t here to do it himself. This is
so messed up.
Despite the landowner being
far away, he still intends to reap the fruits of the harvest. This probably
heightens that tension even more. The landowner decides to send a servant to
get some clusters of grapes to bring to his master. You can imagine the
frustration of those renters, can you not? This landowner doesn’t seem to care
what we are doing yet he sends a servant so that he can take something back to
his master. Oh, he wants fruits does he? Okay, let’s give him some fruits. But,
of course, instead of giving the servant some grapes, they give him a black eye
instead. The tenants beat him and sent him away empty handed. The renters
wanted to send the landowner a message but it seems he did not get that message.
He sent a second servant. The frustrations from the renters increased and they
reacted the same way and sent that servant away empty handed. The landowner
doesn’t seem to take no for an answer and so he sends yet a third servant to
try to get some fruits from the harvest. Well, the renters don’t seem to take
no for an answer either and they beat the living daylights out of this one.
They weren’t playing nice anymore. They actually wounded him and threw him out
perhaps because he was so hurt he couldn’t move on his own. You want fruits?
We’ll give you fruits. They absolutely hate the landowner. That oughta teach
him to send his servants to get fruits from us.
Well, in a way this was
true. The landowner thought to himself, “what should I do?” Then he gets a
brilliant idea to send his own son. He says, “I will send my son, whom I love;
perhaps they will respect him.” Brilliant idea, right? Umm, no. I think I can
speak for everybody here when I say that with all that has taken place, I would
certainly not be sending my son into this mess. We have three servants who have
had the tar kicked out of them. What kind of a rational decision is this for
the landowner to send his son? You think they would respect him? Are you
kidding? These renters are worthless, evil. They’re going to kill someone
pretty soon, you can just feel it. But, no, the landowner sends his son anyway.
When the renters recognize
the one coming as his son, they quickly come up with a plan. If this is his
son, the heir of the estate, the one who gets the inheritance, let’s kill him
so the inheritance falls to us. That’s exactly what they did. They threw him
out of the vineyard and murdered the son of the landowner. These people are so
twisted, so evil, so worthless they take this guy’s son out and they kill him.
It appears only now does the
landowner get some sense knocked into him. What’s he going to do now? He has
three injured servants and a dead son. What’s he going to do? He’s going to go
after these people and teach them a lesson. Isn’t that what we would do? Isn’t
that the logical response of the 21st century? If someone wrongs you
in this way, you roll up your sleeves, you weigh the consequences and you go in
for the kill. You take matters into your own hands and you kill those worthless
people. Who wouldn’t take these people to court? They should suffer the
consequences, right? They should rot in jail. Community service is far too
easy, they need a much harsher treatment. Finally, this is what the landowner
decides to do. Those people are just tenants. They’re disposable. Kick them off
the land. Kill them. Destroy them. Dispose of them. They’re nothing but
worthless, good for nothing, pieces of garbage.
What’s interesting at this
point in the parable is that the people Jesus is speaking this to are really
listening. Jesus has grabbed their attention. So, when he gets to this point in
the story, his audience already has sympathy for those renters. “God forbid!”
they say. Jesus says the landowner will kill the renters and his listeners are
like, “Say it ain’t so, Jesus. Say it ain’t so!” That’s not right Jesus. It’s
as if they prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” Sound
familiar? The reason I think they reacted this way is not because they are
rooting for mercy in this story, but because they have already figured out that
Jesus was speaking about them. Jesus, the landowner should forgive those
renters. They just don’t understand. Maybe if they had a little heart to heart
with the landowner everything will be fine. Just don’t kill us, I mean them.
Don’t kill them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Let’s take a step back for a
moment here. Let’s look beyond this parable at what Jesus is talking about.
This is a parable that reflects the current situation. The language Jesus uses
triggers us to immediately start giving names to the characters. God planted a
vineyard and he rented it to the people of the world. He sent Moses. The people
didn’t want him. God sent Isaiah. The people didn’t want him. God sent Jeremiah.
The people didn’t want him. God sent Jesus. Can you imagine how God feels? When
we think of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, we tend to look at it as a
salvific moment. There’s Jesus taking on our sin, dying and then rising again.
How often do we look at this from another perspective, perhaps a more human
perspective in which we imagine God grieving and saying, “You killed me son?!
You killed my son!” Can you imagine how God must feel? The sadness. The anger.
The rage.
When I was in high school, I
would spend my spring break with my cousins in Arizona. My cousin’s husband was
a police officer for one of the suburbs of Phoenix and he was also on the SWAT
team. I remember him taking me out to the desert for some target practice. I
remember setting up a target we made from some PVC pipes and I remember holding
in my hands some of the most powerful forces on our planet. I’ve stood on the
trigger side of some of the most deadly assault rifles, the ones used to help
keep our nation safe, but also the same ones used to shoot up schools and
churches, the same ones that have taken countless innocent lives. I know what
it is like to have such power in my hands, how easy it can be to change the
world with the tiniest twitch of a muscle in a moment of rage. I can only
imagine how difficult it is to overcome those pressures to take the shot.
Here is God, ready to take
the shot, ready to end the threat that took the life of his Son. Can you
imagine how God feels now? Hand on that trigger. Rage. Anger. Resentment. Take
the shot, God. Take the shot. But, does he? No. Instead of death comes life. Instead
of wrath, mercy. Mercy that our sin prevents us from displaying. Mercy that
relents from wrath. Mercy that ushers in love. Mercy that saves the lives of
those who took the life of the one and only Son. God chooses not to take the
shot.
You might be breathing a
sigh of relief or say this parable shows us just how lucky we are. It’s not
about luck. It’s about a God who cares about us so much that even with that sacrifice,
even with the twisted evil that we are capable of, God still says, I love that
sinner. I love them. We are the renters of the vineyard. We are the ones who
refused to share the fruits of the harvest. We are the ones who have badly
treated the servants whom God has sent to lead us. We are the ones who were
looking after ourselves and our hopes for inheritance. We are the ones who
brutally murdered His Son. We did it.
Two weeks ago in Ron
Petersen’s garage, our boys and men’s group were building more yard crosses to
give away. My job that day was to nail the two pieces together, to put nails
into each cross. It may have only taken three nails to hang Jesus on his cross
but for the 186 nails that I drove into those yard crosses that day, it reminded
me of the many of my own transgressions, sins, the many ways I have taken
advantage of God. I was the one that nailed Jesus to the cross. I was the one
who killed the son of the landowner. I could just hear the cries of pain Jesus
screamed each time I forced another nail into those tiny crosses. I killed the
Son. And so did you. Do we not deserve what the landowner plans to do? Do we
not deserve to be taken out of the vineyard and wiped out? We absolutely do.
But, Jesus changes the
outcome. Jesus, the very one whom we rejected, becomes the strongest one and
overcomes death so we would not be punished. For even on the cross we hear
Jesus says, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The renters
of the vineyard may not have known what they were doing when they mistreated
the servants and killed the son. And neither do we. But, Jesus hung there and
prayed forgiveness on our behalf, died to grant us forgiveness on his behalf,
and was raised to give us new life. We are the recipients of that forgiveness.
We have been granted release. We have been given freedom. All thanks to Jesus.
We may not yet have reached
Palm Sunday yet, but when we enter Holy Week next week, between the celebratory
shouts of his entry into Jerusalem one on side and the cries for his death on
the other side, in those days between Palm Sunday and the beginning of the end
that seems to begin on Thursday, take time and think about what we have done,
what we deserve. Think about what God did and how he changed that outcome.
Think about how that changes how we live and why Holy Week matters.
We live in a messed up world
where renters would kill a landowner’s son, where kids break souvenir cactus
pencils, where evil people take the lives of the innocent, where sinners kill
their savior. But we also live in a world where God’s love is steadfast,
trustworthy, and true. We live in a world where forgiveness is given to the
renters, to the ones whose hands have broken pencils, pulled triggers, and
hammered nails. We live in a world where we have been saved from death by a
loving God. Thanks be to God. And to God be the glory, now and always. Amen.