Almighty God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that we can, and the wisdom to know the difference ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Why is it that we reject God’s grace? In this morning’s passage from Matthew, Jesus quotes from Psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” It would seem that building on the cornerstone would be the best action, but so often we reject it and it becomes a stumbling block to us. How can anyone hear the beautiful message of the Gospel and say “No thanks, I’m good” or how can Christians say “Well, sure, I watch church online most weeks, but I don’t take my faith with me to work, or to the voting booth, or when I’m making out my budget or calendar”? To be clear, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, “For there is no distinction, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So this isn’t about us versus them righteousness, it’s a serious question – why do we turn away from the grace of God?
That’s a question that the parable Jesus tells addresses. I know that Holy Week was back in early-April, but that’s where this reading from Matthew 21 takes place. Earlier in this chapter, we read about the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, and last Sunday’s reading about the questioning of Jesus’ authority. All this is to say that tensions are high when Jesus tells this parable about the landowner and the tenants.
It’s a fairly straightforward story – a landowner has a vineyard and hires tenants to work it. When it was harvest time, that is, tax season, the owner sends servants to collect the owner’s share of the produce. But the tenants beat and kill them. The owner tries again – perhaps there was a misunderstanding of some sort. The result is the same. So the owner sends his very own son, this would ensure that the tenants were not confused about what was happening. We might think this landowner is foolish for sending his son given the past results, but in an honor-shame culture such as 1st century Israel, there was no reason to expect the tenants to be anything but respectful. After all, they knew that people would hear about what happened and they’d not be allowed to keep the land which they effectively have stolen. But, likewise, these wicked tenants kill the son. It doesn’t take an expert to figure out what Jesus is getting at, as Matthew records “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.”
Part of what is going on in the telling of this parable is that everyone involved would be familiar with Isaiah 5. Here, the prophet records a song from God about a vineyard that is planted with choice vines, has a watchtower built in it, and a wine vat ready to process the grapes. In Isaiah however, the problem is not the tenant, but the vines. Wild grapes are growing from the chosen vines. Isaiah tells us that “God expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry.” The result was that God planned to destroy the vineyard since the harvest was bad. Jesus is playing with this image from Isaiah in his parable. The issue though is not a bad harvest, but rather bad tenants. Instead of it being a parable about society in general, it is a judgment against the religious leaders who had been entrusted to care for the vineyard of God.
Now we would only be fooling ourselves if we think that this parable does not implicate us as it did its original audience. One look at our society, or an honest look in the mirror, reveals that the fruit of the Kingdom is not the only fruit that is harvested and that we consume. The rejections of God that we see in this parable are the same that we find in our lives. The first rejection comes when the servants come to collect the owner’s share of the harvest and the tenants violate the established agreement. We reject God when we, like these tenants, say “The rules don’t apply to us.” It’s a story we see from the very beginning in Genesis – the way the serpent tricks Adam and Eve is by saying “Did God really say that you could not eat of that tree?” In other words, “Who is God to tell us how to live our lives?”
Having the Ten Commandments read as our first reading this morning helps us to see how this happens. Take, for example, the sixth commandment. In the Hebrew of Exodus, it’s just two words – no murder. And yet we can find essay upon essay throughout the centuries that try to split the hairs between murder and killing, with some arguing that there’s a difference. And while it’s true that there is a whole range of words that we can use for the action of taking life from another person, all of those mental gymnastics are a way of rejecting God and saying “Those rules don’t really apply here.” Or how about not coveting your neighbor’s house, or wife, or donkey. Well, it doesn’t say anything about coveting those things if they don’t belong to my neighbor, now does it?
The first rejection comes when we don’t think faith has any bearing on our lives outside of our personal salvation – which is a relatively modern heresy in the Church. The idea of personal salvation really is a new and foreign idea in Christianity. Instead, faith has always been about how our trust in God shapes and transforms our priorities and relationships. But in an attempt to make faith subservient to our other priorities, we turned faith into something we feel and think instead of something that we embody.
This is where doubt comes into play. The opposite of doubt is not certainty; instead doubt, in the language of the New Testament, is about being estranged from God, which is always our move, not God’s. We say “That vineyard doesn’t belong to the landowner. Nobody has even seen this supposed landowner. And after all, we’re the ones doing all the work, so it’s all ours.” The parable speaks to what theologians sometimes call “the hiddenness of God.” The landowner lives elsewhere and it can be easy for us to live our lives as functional atheists. And so we see our lives as our own and not gifts; we end up putting too much stock in our accomplishments.
This is where St. Paul’s words from Philippians are helpful – “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish.” Today, we might diagnose St. Paul as having self-esteem issues. But that’s not what’s going on. Instead, he knows that the more he thinks of himself, the less he will think about God. St. John the Baptist said the same in speaking about Jesus – “He must increase and I must decrease.” But our culture is so bent on building and selling our brand, which leads us to reject God in the quest for self-righteousness and self-fulfillment.
The next rejection comes when the next group of servants come. These servants have been interpreted as the prophets, God’s messengers. And we certainly reject them as well. The alarm has been sounded on climate change, but, largely, we’ve not responded to the landowner’s prophets who tell us to change our ways. We had a conservative and Republican President, Eisenhower, warn us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex – and we’ve done nothing to address his warning. We’ve had Martin Luther King call us to the Beloved Community, and just as happened in the parable, we killed him. We know about the ever-growing wealth gap and inequity in our economy, but we largely do nothing about it. That’s the thing about prophets – they remind us that our ways are not God’s ways, which means that we need to change our ways, and change is not something that any of us really like.
Another way that we reject God is in rejecting each other. We know that humankind is made in the image and likeness of God. This means that how we look at others is how we look at God. And as we’ll see in a few more weeks when we get to Matthew 25, how we treat others is how we treat God. In the world of the parable, this is how the servants and son would have been viewed as well. As emissaries of the landowner, they are to be treated with the respect due to him. But by committing violence against them, they are rejecting the landowner as well. We do this when we make people into “others.” We call them names to rob them of their humanity, which is also to rob God of divinity. We view people as less than the beloved children of God, as something other than our brothers and sisters. Once we’ve done that, then we are able to do things like beat, kill, and stone them. And in rejecting the image-bearers, we reject God.
In these, and many other ways, we reject God. Sometimes the rejection is intellectual, sometimes it comes through how we practice our faith, sometimes its seen in how we treat others and God’s creation. And what might we expect the result to be? When Jesus asks the question “What will the landowner do to those tenants?” the answer comes, “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.” That seems like justice, right? They’ll reap what they sowed and their scheme to take over the vineyard will fail. This is what the chief priests, Pharisees, and we expect to happen. But notice that Jesus does not affirm their assessment.
Instead, Jesus quotes Psalm 118 and says that “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” And then his life becomes an enacted parable, as just days later the son of the landowner is thrown outside the walls of the city and is beaten and crucified. The son who is rejected becomes the cornerstone. His death, not the landowner’s vengeance, becomes the cornerstone of our faith. Though we reject God, God does not reject us. Punishment might be expected, but grace is given.
And though this sounds like an amazing offer – we still reject grace for all of the reasons I’ve mentioned already. If we receive the gift of grace, it means that we need it. And so we have to acknowledge and own our imperfections and brokenness. We have to admit that our lives have become unmanageable and seek help from a higher power. Grace means that we can’t fix our own problems, that we can’t just decide to be better. This is offensive to us who live in a culture focused on self-actualization. Furthermore, grace is notoriously promiscuous and prodigious, as it’s offered to everyone without any regard as to whether or not they’ve asked for it or deserved it. And we see that grace comes not through power and might, but through humility, weakness, and death borne out of a love that defies explanation or boundaries.
So how do we not reject God and instead enjoy the fruits of grace? Well, today, October 4th, is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. I’ll close by praying the prayer attributed to him, as it testifies to what it means to embrace the graciousness of God in our lives.
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
