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Sermon for the week of Lent 2
Isaiah 5:1-7 + Matthew 21:33-46
Turn your thoughts again back to Holy Week, to Holy Monday. Jesus isn’t done with the chief priests and scribes yet. He had just informed them that the tax collectors and harlots are entering the kingdom of heaven before you, because they hadn’t done the Father’s will in listening to John the Baptist, repenting of their sins, and trusting in the Son of God. But He has more to say to them.
He tells them the parable of the landowner and the vinedressers, which begins: There was a certain landowner who planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a winepress in it and built a tower. Now, right away, they should have thought of what Isaiah had said in chapter 5, which you heard a little while ago, the song of God’s vineyard. Jesus’ description is a close paraphrase of Isaiah’s words. My beloved has a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. He dug it up and cleared out its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. He built a tower in its midst, and also made a winepress in it; so He expected it to bring forth good grapes, but it brought forth wild grapes. That was an Old Testament parable about the people of Israel, and all the work God did to nurture them, teach them, train them in the way they should go. But they went their own way. And so, through Isaiah, God foretold their coming destruction and their exile in Babylonia, because they were unfaithful to their God.
In Jesus’ parable, the vineyard isn’t the nation of Israel. The vineyard is the believing people of God, the true Church of God of which Israel and its leaders had been the caretakers, or vinedressers, throughout most of the Old Testament. He leased the vineyard to vinedressers and went into a far country. These were the leaders of Israel, the very people whom Jesus was addressing: the chief priests, the scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and, really, all the Jewish leaders who had come before them, including most of the kings of Judah, with a few exceptions, and, really, the whole, idolatrous, stubborn, unbelieving people of Israel from the time of Moses until the time of Christ.
But those vinedressers proved to be unfaithful. As the grape harvest drew near, the landowner sent one servant after another to collect some of the grapes, but the wicked vinedressers beat them, killed them, and stoned them. He’s talking there about the prophets. Prophet after prophet was sent to Israel to call the people to repentance, and faith in God, and to bear the fruits of repentance with humble and kind hearts, with generosity, and with obedience to God’s commandments. But the leaders of Israel always persecuted the prophets, denounced the prophets, humiliated the prophets, and often killed them, too.
Now, in a real-life scenario, the landowner probably wouldn’t do what the one in Jesus parable did next: Then last of all he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ Knowing the kind of wretches who were running his vineyard, any reasonable landowner would have probably gone in with an army and wiped them out after they mistreated even one of his servants. But this landowner sent many, and then chose to send his son, in person, to collect the fruit.
But when the vinedressers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’ So they took him and cast him out of the vineyard and killed him. Was the landowner being naïve, thinking they would respect his son? If it were a regular landowner, we’d have to say yes. But this landowner is God the Father. He knew how the Jewish leaders would treat His Son. In fact, it was part of His plan for mankind’s salvation, that His Son should die for the sins of the world. But that doesn’t remove the guilt from those who put Him to death or who called for His crucifixion. It doesn’t make them good. God uses the wicked plans and deeds of wicked men to carry out His good purposes for His saints.
There’s an application here to the war in Iran that has recently begun. It appears that it was God’s will to topple a wicked regime in Iran. He would no longer tolerate their violence and open idolatry, because their religion of Islam was worthless and blasphemous toward the Son of God. But that doesn’t mean that the governments that conspired to remove that wicked regime were doing what was right for their part. That’s a different discussion which we won’t get into now. Just be careful not to let anyone convince you that, because evil men died, those who killed them were necessarily “walking with God,” just as the Jews who killed Jesus—which was a necessary part of God’s plan—did not do the right thing for their part. Again, God often uses the wicked actions of wicked men to carry out His good purposes.
Now, after Jesus finished telling His parable, He quizzed the chief priests on it and got them to pronounce their own condemnation upon themselves: Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vinedressers?” They said to Him, “He will destroy those wicked men miserably, and lease his vineyard to other vinedressers who will render to him the fruits in their seasons.” You would think by this point the priests would have seen the meaning of Jesus’ parable, that He was depicting them as the wicked vinedressers who mistreated everyone sent by the landowner, including His own Son. But even that amount of spiritual discernment eluded them, because they belonged entirely to their father, the devil.
Jesus brings the point home: Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This was the LORD’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing the fruits of it.
There it was, staring them in the face, that prophecy from the famous Passover Psalm, Psalm 118, the same Psalm from which the crowds had sung just the day before, on Palm Sunday: Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD! But He who came in the name of the Lord, Jesus the Christ, was also the Stone which the builders rejected. In trying to build their glorious nation, their glorious church, the Jews took one look at Jesus and said, “No, we don’t want this stone. This stone is worthless. We’ll just get rid of it.” But the Psalm foretold a different outcome. Though He would be rejected by Israel, the Christ would become the chief cornerstone in the true temple of God, the Holy Christian Church, while the vineyard of the nation of Israel would be rejected because they rejected the Son of God. And the care for the Church of God would pass away from Israel to the Gentiles.
But Jesus adds one more warning before He’s done: And whoever falls on this stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder. This is an allusion to Isaiah 8, where the prophet said that the Christ would be a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to both the houses of Israel…and many among them shall stumble; they shall fall and be broken. Yes, many would stumble over Him, would be offended by Him, would take offense when He pointed out their sins, would stumble over His offer to reconcile them to God, not believing that He was the atoning sacrifice for their sins. They would stumble, and fall, and be broken. Their connection to the kingdom of God would be severed. That’s bad enough.
But for those who, like the vinedressers in the parable, wickedly persecuted, molested, and killed the servants of God, including the Son of God, and who were never brought to repentance—the Stone would fall upon them and grind them to powder. Jesus is no pushover peddler of cheap grace. He humbled Himself and made Himself obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. He gives men time to repent of their evil deeds and find salvation through Him. But when He comes again, He will come with vengeance against all His enemies. And those who persecuted Him, or any of His servants, or any of His people at all—they will find out that even hell has levels of torment, when they’re cast down into the deepest dungeons of all.
Why is Jesus so threatening toward the chief priests? Well, they were about to kill Him, weren’t they? By the end of the week. They deserved to hear these threats, and should have been frightened by them, to turn away from their evil plans before it was too late. But what you should really take away from this interaction is how profound is God’s love and concern for His vineyard, for His Church. He knows how poorly it was managed in the Old Testament by hypocrites and wicked men within the Church, and the New Testament Church hasn’t fared a lot better, because if we’ve learned anything from Scripture, it should be that, wherever sinners are, there can be no Paradise, and every institution, even the outward Church itself, made up of sinners, as it is, eventually comes to ruin. But the Lord Jesus won’t let His vineyard languish forever in its current state. Just as there was a change in management from Israel to the Gentiles, so there will soon be another, permanent change in management, when Jesus Himself returns to dress the vines of His Father’s vineyard in person. Then there will be no more need for watchmen or managers, because Jesus will be all in all. Amen.
