Wicked Tenants

 

Derelict vineyard, Wellow (photo David Martin CC BY-SA 2.0)

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 8th October 2023, the 18th after Trinity

The chief priests and elders were absolutely furious when Jesus challenged their authority on their own ground, in the Temple.

After he told them the parable of the wicked tenants which we have just heard (Matthew 21:33-46), ‘They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, (who) regarded him as a prophet’, we are told.

To understand why they were so angry we must delve a bit.

In today’s OT reading, Isaiah (5:1-7) uses a vineyard as a metaphor for the Israelites as God’s people. God ‘dug (his vineyard) and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines’. God ‘built a watchtower … and a wine vat in it’. And God ‘expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes’. So, says Isaiah, God ‘will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns’.

It is a thundering prophecy designed to call the Israelite leaders in Isaiah’s time to repent for exploiting the Israelite people. 

Jesus begins his parable by referencing the opening lines of Isaiah’s prophecy.

The chief priests and elders would surely have understood that the landowner who plants the vineyard stands for God. The wicked tenants mistreat and beat and kill the vineyard owner’s slaves when they are sent to collect the harvest. And finally, when the owner sends his own son and heir, they kill him too, in the hope of inheriting the vineyard.

The author of Matthew’s Gospel, writing a generation later, believes that Jesus is the Son of God. He intends us to identify the son with Jesus. But notice that although Jesus often refers to God as his Father in heaven, he himself never publicly claims to be the Son of God. He leaves that identification for his disciples to make, and he swears them to secrecy. The chief priests and elders, the Jewish leaders of Jesus’s time, would never have suspected Jesus was claiming to be the Son of God, because he didn’t do so. This is not what angered them.

The chief priests and elders felt utterly secure in being good people, quite unlike those Isaiah prophesied against. Long after the days of Isaiah, Jerusalem was laid waste and the Israelites had been carried off as captives to Babylon. But the Jewish leaders traced their ancestry back to the faithful remnant of Israel that returned from exile to Jerusalem. They were utterly confident that they yielded good grapes, not wild grapes.

Jesus asks them, ‘When the owner returns, what will he do to those tenants?’, and they reply, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time’. Just as, they believed, God had returned Jerusalem to their ancestors.

Nothing Jesus has said so far would have upset them unduly.

But Jesus then goes on to quote from Psalm 118: 22-23.

‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’. And he addresses the chief priests and elders directly, ‘Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls’.

Jesus would have been speaking in Hebrew or Aramaic. Notice that in both, the word for son - ‘ben’- sounds like the word for stone – ‘eben’. With this pun Jesus identifies the Son of God with the Cornerstone, which will break and crush anyone on whom it falls.

Jesus is unmistakably telling the chief priests and the elders to their faces that their behaviour is unacceptable to God and that their place as leaders will be given to others – just as Isaiah had to their predecessors. And Jesus has tricked them into pronouncing their own sentence! No wonder they want to arrest him and shut him up…

Over the centuries many Christians have seen this parable as a story about Christianity supplanting Judaism.

In this story, the vineyard’s owner is God. The tenants are the Jewish people. The vineyard owner’s slaves are the prophets sent by God and so often rejected and killed. The Son who came last is none other than Jesus himself, whom the Jews kill. So God will rightly reject the Jews - all of them - and choose another people, Christians, the followers of Jesus. The Jews will be broken and crushed by Christ, the Cornerstone. It is a vivid story of the ultimate doom of the Jewish people. But it is a false and very dangerous interpretation.

This story is false because Jesus - a Jew himself - focusses his criticism on the Jewish leaders in the Jerusalem of his own time, not on the Jewish people. In fact, the Jewish people’s belief that Jesus was a prophet prevented the leaders from arresting him there and then. The Jewish leaders will indeed be broken and crushed, and the Temple destroyed, a generation later, not by Christians, but by the might of pagan Rome when they rise up in revolt. The Jewish people will survive as a diaspora. As the Acts of the Apostles tells us, though the earliest church was a Jewish church, it soon received gentiles into membership through the insights of St Peter and St Paul – both themselves Jews. It is this mixed Jewish and gentile church that Matthew was writing for.

This story is dangerous because over nearly 2 millennia it has been used to justify Christian persecution of the Jews, culminating in the Shoah, the Nazi genocide of European Jews. By their fruits you shall know them, says Jesus of false prophets. And the fruits of those who speak like this is the murder of millions of men and women each made in the image of God. It is an evil blasphemy!

It is better, surely, to reflect on what Jesus’s parable tells us about the nature of God.

It tells us of God’s generosity. The owner provided the tenants with all they could wish for in a productive vineyard. In the same way, God by his grace has given us this wonderful living planet to tend and care for.

It tells us about God’s trust in us as human beings. The owner of the vineyard did not supervise his tenants like a slave driver. He went away and left them with their task. In the same way God entrusts us with his work, and he gives us the freedom to do it however we think best.

It tells us of God’s patience and mercy. The owner did not respond with sudden vengeance when his first messengers are attacked, he sent others. He gave the tenants every chance to respond, even sending his son and heir. In the same way God bears with all our sinning and will forgive us, if we will only repent. We Christians are assured of this by Jesus, God’s only Son, the corner stone once rejected by the builders.

It tells us of God’s judgement. When the tenants carried out their deliberate policy of rebellion and disobedience, God eventually took the vineyard away and gave it to others. In the same way if we continue to refuse God’s forgiveness and fail to repent, we become useless to God. In the end God’s stern judgement on us will be to give the job he made for us to someone else, and we will die of shame. Perish the thought!

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word:

Almighty God,

your Son Jesus was the stone rejected by the builders,

and, by your doing, he has been made the chief cornerstone:

grant that, by the power of his Spirit working in us,

we may become living stones built up into your dwelling place,

a temple holy and acceptable to you;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Amen

The Household of God

In today’s 2^nd reading (Ephesians: 2:11-22), Paul addresses the Ephesian Christians as ‘you Gentiles by birth, called the “uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”’.

Called that is, by Jews – like Paul himself – who were brought up to despise and dislike Gentiles, whom they saw as immoral and unclean.

What sort of people were the Ephesians Paul was writing to? In his time Ephesus was the Greek-speaking capital of the Roman province of Asia, with a population second in the Empire only to Rome itself, perhaps as many as half-a-million. It was as vibrant and cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-faith as any modern European city. And it was rich, as I saw from the amazing archaeological remains when I visited 30 years ago – including an amphitheatre big enough for 20,000 spectators, and a massive public library!

Paul stayed in Ephesus for 2 years on his 2nd missionary journey, according to Acts. His first dozen or so converts had been baptised by John the Baptist – they were surely Jews like himself. Paul re-baptised them in the name of Jesus and they received the Holy Spirit. At first Paul preached the gospel in the Synagogue, but he encountered opposition there, so he withdrew elsewhere with his growing flock of Christians, both Jews and Gentile Greeks. By the time he left 2 years later, he had converted enough followers of the Greek goddess Artemis to threaten the business of local silversmiths who specialised in making shrines to her, provoking them to a nasty riot.

Clearly, by the time Paul wrote his letter the Ephesian Christians were overwhelmingly Greek speaking gentiles.

Paul believes in the continuity of the new faith in Christ that he preached with the old faith of the Jews.

He reminds the Ephesians that before they became Christians they were cut off from the true God that the Jews knew. They were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’.

But he is intensely conscious also of the staggering change that Christ brings. Christ has ‘create(d) in himself one new humanity in place of (Jews and Gentiles), thus making peace, reconcil(ing) both groups to God in one body through the cross’. All Christians, whatever their background or tradition, are made one people in Christ, ‘for through him (all of us) have access in one Spirit to the Father’.

Paul’s insight is just as important for us here today as it was for the Ephesians then. Our town, our country, is increasingly cosmopolitan like Ephesus. Our neighbours come from many countries, speak many languages and hold many faiths. The old divisions of Catholic and Protestant are increasingly irrelevant. All our churches must work together, we must break down the barriers between us, we must move from being exclusive to being inclusive, if we are ever to make a reality of Paul’s vision of one new humanity in Christ.

Only then will we be able to hear Paul’s words clearly, ‘So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’.

The Church, ‘the household of God’, is like a building, says Paul.

This lovely, suggestive metaphor is an alternative to the more familiar metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, which Paul also uses later on in his letter (Ephesians 4:11-16).

It is ‘built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone’, says Paul. ‘In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God’.

Without the right foundations a building is unstable – as unfortunate people living in new housing estates discovered, when foundations made from unsuitable pyrites rock swelled and cracked. The right foundation for the church is the teaching of the apostles – those Jesus sent out, of which Paul understood himself to be one – and the prophets – no doubt Christian as well as Hebrew prophets. As the Church we must be grounded solidly in scripture before we can build anything worthwhile using tradition or reason.

In Paul’s day builders made sure the walls of a building were true by carefully aligning them with a cornerstone – Jesus serves that function for the church. Jesus joins all of us together into a structure worthy of God, in which we can find God present.

Can we recognise today’s Church in Paul’s description?

Or do we see instead a building site with a higgledy-piggledy jumble of jerry-built shacks and lean-to extensions, a place where the architect’s plans have been ignored? Maybe we need to take lessons in construction!

Even if we can’t feel proud of the Church we see about us today, we should not be fearful for its future. We should listen, to what the prophet Nathan says to King David in today’s 1^st reading (2 Samuel 7:1-14). Nathan advises David that the time is not yet right to build the Lord God a great Temple to live in. God is content to live in the portable tabernacle inside a tent which the children of Israel have carried with them since the Exodus. But, says Nathan, your offspring shall build such a Temple. David’s son Solomon was to build the first Temple in Jerusalem, we are told, but that of course was destined to be destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again.

Perhaps it does not matter so much that the Church does not yet live up to Paul’s vision of the holy temple, because it is what it always has been - a work in progress, one that is being built generation by generation - by us, by our children, by our children’s children, and by generations yet to come.

What does matter, though, is that we are all members of God’s household, whoever we are, wherever we come from, and however we worship. We are the Church, in all our glorious variety, founded on the apostles and the prophets, with Jesus Christ as our corner stone.

Wicked tenants

Address given at Templederry, St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 8th October 2017, the 17th after Trinity

Jesus really, really upset the chief priests and elders when they challenged his authority to teach in the Temple.

After he told them the parable of the wicked tenants - that is the name given to the reading from Matthew's Gospel which we have just heard (Matthew 21:33-46) - ‘They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, (who) regarded him as a prophet’, we are told.

Why were they so upset, I wonder? To understand, we must delve a bit.

The prophet Isaiah uses a vineyard as a metaphor for the Israelites as God’s people. God ‘dug (his vineyard) and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines’. God ‘built a watchtower … and a wine vat in it’. And God ‘expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes’. So, says Isaiah, God ‘will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns’.

It is a thundering prophecy designed to call the Israelite leaders in Isaiah’s time to repent for exploiting the Israelite people.

In his parable Jesus begins by quoting the opening lines of Isaiah’s prophecy almost word for word.

The chief priests and elders would surely have understood that the landowner who plants the vineyard stands for God. Jesus goes on to describe how the wicked tenants mistreat and beat and kill the vineyard owner’s slaves when they are sent to collect the harvest. And finally, when the owner sends his own son and heir, they kill him too, in the hope of inheriting the vineyard.

The author of Matthew’s Gospel, writing a generation later, believes that Jesus is the Son of God. He intends us to identify the son with Jesus. But notice that although Jesus often refers to God as his Father in heaven, he himself never publicly claims to be the Son of God. He leaves that identification for his disciples to make, and he swears them to secrecy.

The chief priests and elders, the Jewish leaders of Jesus’s time, would never have suspected Jesus was claiming to be the Son of God. They felt utterly secure in being good people, quite unlike those Isaiah prophesied against. Long after the days of Isaiah, Jerusalem was laid waste and the Israelites had been carried off as captives to Babylon. But the Jewish leaders traced their ancestry back to the faithful remnant of Israel that returned from exile to Jerusalem. They were confident that they yielded good grapes, not wild grapes.

Jesus asks them, ‘When the owner returns, what will he do to those tenants?’, and they reply, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time’. Just as, they believed, God had returned Jerusalem to their ancestors.

Nothing Jesus has said so far would have upset them unduly.

Jesus then goes on to quote from Psalm 118: 22-23.

‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’. And he addresses the chief priests and elders directly – we can imagine him looking them in the eyes: ‘Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls’.

Jesus would have been speaking in Aramaic, or perhaps Hebrew. Notice that in both the word for son - ‘ben’- sounds like the word for stone – ‘eben’. With this pun Jesus identifies the Son of God with the Cornerstone, which will break and crush anyone on whom it falls.

Jesus is unmistakably telling the chief priests and the elders - to their faces - that their behaviour is unacceptable to God and that their place as leaders will be given to others – just as Isaiah had to their predecessors. And Jesus has tricked them into pronouncing their own sentence! No wonder they want to arrest him and shut him up…

Christians have often interpreted this parable as a story about Christianity supplanting Judaism.

In this story, the vineyard’s owner is God. The tenants are the Jewish people. The vineyard owner’s slaves are the prophets sent by God and so often rejected and killed. The Son who came last is none other than Jesus himself, whom the Jews kill. So God will – rightly - reject the Jews and choose another people, presumably Christians, the followers of Jesus. The Jews will be broken and crushed by Christ, the Cornerstone. It is a vivid story of the ultimate doom of the Jews - but it is a false and very dangerous story.

It is false because Jesus - a Jew himself - focusses his criticism on the Jewish leaders in the Jerusalem of his own time, not on the Jewish people. In fact, the people’s belief that Jesus was a prophet prevented the leaders from arresting him there and then. The Jewish leaders will indeed be broken and crushed, and the Temple destroyed, a generation later, not by Christians, but by the might of pagan Rome, when they rise up in revolt. The Jewish people will survive as a diaspora, as they have to our own day. As the Acts of the Apostles tells us, though the earliest church was a Jewish church, it soon received gentiles into membership through the insights of St Peter and St Paul – both themselves Jews - in today’s Epistle reading we hear Paul boasting of his Jewish heritage. It is this mixed Jewish and gentile church that Matthew was writing for.

I said that this story is dangerous. It is dangerous because over nearly 2 thousand years it has been used to justify Christian persecution of the Jews, culminating in the Shoah, the Nazi genocide of European Jews. By their fruits you shall know them, says Jesus of false prophets. And the fruits of those who tell this story is the murder of millions of men and women each made in the image of God, just like you and me – this story is an evil blasphemy.

It is better, surely, to reflect on what Jesus’s parable tells us about the nature of God.

It tells us of God’s generosity. The owner provided the tenants with all they could wish for in a productive vineyard. In the same way, God by his grace has given us this wonderful living planet to tend and care for, and to feed us.

It tells us about God’s trust in us as human beings. The owner of the vineyard did not supervise his tenants like a slave driver. He went away and left them with their task. In the same way God entrusts us with his work, and he gives us the freedom to do it however we think best.

It tells us of God’s patience and mercy. The owner did not respond with sudden vengeance when his first messengers are attacked, he sent others. He gave the tenants every chance to respond, even sending his son and heir. In the same way God bears with all our sinning and will forgive us, if we will only repent. We Christians are assured of this by Jesus, God’s only Son, the corner stone once rejected by the builders.

It tells us of God’s judgement. When the tenants carried out their deliberate policy of rebellion and disobedience, God eventually took the vineyard away and gave it to others. In the same way if we who are sinners continue to refuse God’s forgiveness and fail to repent, we become useless to God. In the end God’s stern judgement on us will be to give the job he made for us to someone else. And we will die of shame. Perish the thought!

Let me finish in prayer with a Gospel Collect:

Almighty God,

your Son Jesus was the stone rejected by the builders,

and, by your doing, he has been made the chief cornerstone:

grant that, by the power of his Spirit working in us,

we may become living stones

built up into your dwelling place,

a temple holy and acceptable to you;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Members of God's household

The 3rd of 5 addresses I am giving on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 20th February 2011, the 3rd before Lent.

Today we take the 3rd of 5 bites at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
Taken as a whole the letter is, I think, the finest expression of Paul’s vision for his churches. It is an answer to the question, ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s Church’.

In the 1st and 2nd bites we reflected on the themes ‘We must start with Christ!’, and ‘In Jesus Christ, God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’.

This Sunday we look at the 2nd half of chapter 2, and a bit of chapter 3 (Ephesians 2:11-22, 3:8-13). The theme is ‘We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church’.

What sort of people were the Ephesians to whom Paul wrote?
In Paul’s time Ephesus was the Greek-speaking capital of the Roman province of Asia, with a population second in the Empire only to Rome itself, perhaps as many as half-a-million. It was as vibrant and cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-faith as any modern European city is. And it was rich, as I saw from the amazing archaeological remains when I visited it 20 years ago, including an amphitheatre big enough for 20,000 spectators - still used for concerts.

Paul stayed in Ephesus for 2 years on his 2nd missionary journey, according to Acts. His first dozen or so converts had been baptised by John the Baptist – they were Jews like himself no doubt – Paul re-baptised them in the name of Jesus and they received the Holy Spirit. At first Paul preached the gospel in the Synagogue, but he encountered opposition there, so he withdrew elsewhere with his growing flock of Christians, both Jews and Greeks. By the time he left 2 years later, he had converted enough followers of the Greek goddess Artemis to threaten the business of local silversmiths who specialised in making shrines to her, provoking them to a nasty riot.

By the time Paul wrote his letter it is clear the Ephesian church was overwhelmingly Greek.

Paul addresses the Ephesians as ‘you Gentiles by birth, called the “uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”’
Called that is, by Jews – like Paul himself – who were traditionally brought up to despise and dislike Gentiles, whom they saw as immoral and unclean.

Paul believes absolutely in the continuity of the new faith in Christ that he preached, with the old faith of the Jews. He reminds the Ephesian Gentiles that before they became Christians they were cut off from the true God that the Jews knew. They were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’.

But he is intensely conscious also of the staggering change that Christ brings to all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. Christ has ‘create(d) in himself one new humanity in place of (Jews and Gentiles), thus making peace, reconcil(ing) both groups to God in one body through the cross’. All Christians, whatever their background or traditions, are made one people in Christ, ‘for through him (all of us) have access in one Spirit to the Father’.

Paul’s insight is just as important for us in Nenagh today as it was for the Ephesians then. Our town, our country, is increasingly cosmopolitan like Ephesus. Our neighbours come from many countries, speak many languages and hold many faiths. The old divisions of Catholic and Protestant are increasingly irrelevant. All our churches must work together, we must break down the barriers between us, we must move from being exclusive to being inclusive, if we are ever to make a reality of Paul’s vision of one new humanity in Christ.

Only then will we be able to hear Paul’s words clearly, ‘So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’.

Paul goes on to describe the Church as being built like ‘the household of God’.
The Church as a building is a lovely, suggestive metaphor. It is an alternative to the slightly more familiar metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, which Paul also uses later on in the letter (Ephesians 4:11-16).

It is ‘built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone’, says Paul. ‘In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God’.

Without the right foundations a building is unstable – as unfortunate people living in new Dublin housing estates have recently discovered, when foundations made from unsuitable pyrites rock swelled and cracked. The right foundation for the church is the teaching of the apostles – those Jesus sent out, of which Paul understood himself to be one – and the prophets – no doubt Christian as well as Hebrew prophets. As the church we must be grounded solidly in scripture before we can build anything worthwhile using tradition or reason.

In Paul’s day builders made sure the walls of a building were true by carefully aligning them with a cornerstone – Jesus serves that function for the church. Jesus joins all of us together into a structure worthy of God, in which we can find God present.

Is today’s church recognisable in Paul’s description? Or do we see instead a building site with a higgledy-piggledy jumble of jerry-built shacks and lean-to extensions, where the architect’s plans have been ignored? I rather think we all need some lessons in construction!

We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church - whoever we are, wherever we come from!
Paul believed that by God’s grace he was chosen ‘to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God’.

God’s plan, in Paul’s words, is ‘that through the church’ – through God’s household, of which we are all members – ‘the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known … in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

This is the heavy responsibility we bear as Christians, as members of God’s household, built into Christ’s church – to make known the wisdom of God in all its rich variety.

Let us pray through ‘Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him’, that we may together play the parts God has given us in his plan as he intends we should play them.

Eternal God and Father,
whose Son at supper prayed that his disciples might be one,
as he is one with you:
draw us closer to him,
that in common love and obedience to you
we may be united to one another
in the fellowship of the one Spirit,
that the world may believe that he is Lord
to your eternal glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen

There are printed copies of the first 3 addresses at the back of the church, if you missed any or want to look back at them. But there’s no substitute for reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself, so you might like to read a chapter or so of Ephesians each week to keep pace with me. If you want to read ahead we will be looking at Ephesians 4:22-5:14 next Sunday, with the theme ‘In God’s household we must be kind and forgiving and live like children of light’.