Homily

Just a few reminders about some of the details in today's parable: The owner planted a vineyard, and he built a hedge around it to protect the grapes from being eaten by animals. He dug a hole for the winepress, and he set up a small building, a little tower that could serve as a watch post and a shelter for those who might be working in the vineyard. People who lived in the first century A.D. in Palestine and the area would have been familiar with men who were absentee landlords, men who owned farmland and vineyards and hired tenant farmers to take care of growing and harvesting the crops. The landlord-owners would give these sharecroppers a certain percentage of the harvest but they, as owners, would take the biggest share of the profits, of course.

Jesus, in telling this parable, is almost certainly thinking of the 5th Chapter of Isaiah where he writes, "My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines; he built a watch tower in the midst of it and carved out a wine vat in it. Isaiah then makes it clear that "the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel." And no matter how much effort the Lord puts into the vineyard it only produces wild grapes, so the Lord decides He will destroy it.

In the parable, the tenant farmers think that if they kill the owner's son, somehow they will be able to gain control over the whole piece of property. Do they think the owner will just walk away because they have killed his son? When Jesus asks the chief priests and elders, whom He is talking with, asking them what the owner will do, they understand that the owner will bring justice down on the heads of the murderous tenants.

Jesus tells this parable in light of His own coming. The Lord God has sent His servants, the prophets, to Israel over and over again throughout history, but they are always treated shamefully and, in the end, they are usually killed. Now in this parable Jesus predicts how He Himself will be killed by those who work in the vineyard. The chief priests and the elders, in reply to Jesus' question, blurt out the judgment that they will soon bring down on their own heads. And in the couple of verses right after today's Gospel reading Jesus says in Matthew 21: 43-46, "Therefore, I say to you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from them and given to a nation bearing fruit." When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they knew that He was speaking about them. And they sought to arrest Him but were afraid of the crowds, since they regarded Him as a prophet."

So what is in the minds of the Jewish leaders? Are they interested in the message of Jesus? Are they willing to think about His teaching and learn from Him? Do they wonder if He could be sent by God as a prophet for them, especially since the people consider Him to be a prophet? Shouldn't they see the miraculous cures and signs He has accomplished as a proof of His divine mission? For most of the Jewish leadership the answers to these questions are no, no, no, and no. They simply want Jesus dead because 1) He is more popular with the people than they are, and, even more importantly, 2) Jesus denounces them as leaders because they do not lead the people to follow the true commandments of God and they have in their desire for power and prosperity placed themselves and their own ideas and teachings above the Word of God. Since Jesus threatens their position, they have to get rid of Him. They just must get rid of Him.

And so, dear friends, as we look around in our society today, I certainly think there are many leaders and people in prominent positions, who have the eyes and ears of the media, who believe that in order to hold power they must get rid of Jesus. Now of course they can't get rid of Jesus by killing Him—that's already been done. I suggest an additional way of looking at this parable for today.

Those who oppose Jesus generally are not going to say one bad word about Jesus Himself because that would seem crude. They would never claim they want to get rid of Jesus. Instead their way of cancelling Jesus is by getting rid of those who carry His teaching within their hearts, and who follow His Gospel of peace, His servants. They can't get rid of His servants by killing them, at least not in the USA (although in other countries of the world there are many, many martyrs.) No, don't kill the servants. Instead treat them as inferior, backward, out of touch, unenlightened, divisive, and hostile.

Such people repeatedly proclaim that the servants of Jesus have no compassion or feeling for the hardship and suffering of people, certainly not as they do. When Jesus' servants work for peace, they claim they are making war on others. When the servants ask to be heard, they try to shout them down. When the servants claim a right to practice their faith in freedom, they are told that they are bigots and bigots have no rights. When they speak from a rich, continuous tradition of Christian scholarship in ethics and morality, they are answered with a quote an editorial from the New York Times or some actor's speech at a United Nations' committee meeting. When the servants explain that genuine freedom is only about the freedom to do what is right, they respond that American freedom is the freedom to pretty much do whatever you want. That idea of freedom is very attractive, of course. Not the freedom to do what I should do, but the freedom to do what I want to do.

And, bit by bit, the resolve and the courage of even some of the followers of Jesus begins to break down. As, bit by bit, people start to question whether "all" of that Christian teaching of 2,000 years is actually good and true. Maybe that 2,000-year history of belief, the faith of the martyrs, the saints, the faithful Christian men and women of so many, many generations, maybe it’s wrong. Maybe it's better just for me to decide on my own what is good and what is evil. I still follow Jesus; I just follow Him the way I decide to follow Him.

You can't kill Jesus today. But you can try to kill His Gospel by targeting His servants. Just a few days after Jesus told the parable the people who thought He was a prophet changed their minds at the urging of the priests and elders and called for Barabbas to be released instead of Jesus. How easy it can be sometimes to sway people. And they cried out, as many leaders in our society do today, if not by their exact words, certainly by their actions, "We have no king but Caesar!" …the political power of the day. (And we can always get another Caesar!)

Those who promise all good things in this world offer only temporary rewards, and even these can never be guaranteed. Let us not be swayed in our devotion to serve in our Master's vineyard, and work as His faithful servants, for we will indeed receive from Him our promised share of eternal glory at harvest time. And if we must struggle to uphold His Gospel in a society where so many would rather have Barabbas, let's do it with courage, dignity and under the power of grace which only our Master can provide, for He is the only Lord forever and ever Amen