of your fathers, I’m also the God of your children—and they sometimes like a change. So just sit down again, and you’ll perhaps hear my voice as you’ve never heard it before.”
That, my friends, is a parable. It’s not up to the standard of the parables of Jesus but the purpose is the same. Does anyone need an explanation? As with Jesus’ parables we could argue for hours over the questions it raises but, since I wrote it myself, for once I can say with authority what the chief point of it is. It’s just that occasionally all of us need to be shaken out of our religious routines, however good, so that we can hear God speaking in a fresh and vivid way.
Jesus used parables for exactly this purpose. The people he addressed were accustomed to sermons and expositions of Scripture and formal prayers. He never attacked these religious routines when they were sincerely performed, and was himself a regular worshipper at the synagogue. But to wake people up, to shake them into realizing that the things they professed to believe were really true, really demanding, literally a matter of life and death, he told stories—familiar stories with a new twist, original stories with highly controversial questions in them, stories to make people laugh, stories to make people cry, fascinating stories, crazy stories, simple stories, complicated stories, happy stories, shocking stories. And the parables often got through the defenses of the most sermon-proof class on earth—the ecclesiastics. After he told the story we are listening to this morning, we read that “they saw the parable was aimed at them.”
It’s ironic that we have succeeded in taming the parables of Jesus so that the very stories that should stab us spiritually awake have often been duly classified as the most familiar material in our Bible, whose content we know and whose meaning we know. One of our ways of doing this is to place the parable squarely in its historical setting. Sermon after sermon will explain just what the parable must have meant to those who heard it. We need this exercise, but it should only be preliminary to a brisk attempt to let the parable speak to us. When Matthew wrote “they saw that the parable was aimed at them” I wish he had added: “Do we see that the parable is aimed at you.” These religious leaders had at least the insight to know that they were the target. Do we?
I can give you the historical setting and application in a couple of minutes. The thought of Israel as God’s vineyard, his special possession entrusted to a people who were to be bearers of his message and witnesses to his truth, was familiar to Jesus’ audience. The fifth chapter of Isaiah uses the metaphor dramatically. When Jesus spoke of the neglect of the vineyard by the tenants, he was echoing the constant theme of the prophets. And his hearers would immediately recognize these same prophets in the messengers that the lord of the vineyard sent. Some had even heard Jesus openly accuse them of their rejection of the prophets of old: “Woe unto you for you build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them.”
When he went on to speak of the lord of the vineyard sending his own beloved son his hearers would know that he was making the audacious claim that he was the unique Son of God, and foretelling that they would also reject him and have him put to death.
The parable was spoken at a tense moment when Jesus was in Jerusalem for his last Passover Feast, and among his hearers were those who were planning to get rid of him. So when he indicated that disaster lay ahead for his people, but that out of it would come a new vineyard with new tenants they were stung to the quick. It was indeed a barbed story, told with amazing courage and prophetic insight. So much for the historical setting. Do we leave it there?
Nothing can be more smug and dangerous than to assume that we can leave this parable as a barb directed at the Jewish people of Jesus’ time. We must confess that some of the most hideous pages in Christian history have been written by those who let the blame for the rejection of Jesus fall solely on the Jewish people, and have been deaf to his word of judgment on us all. Every single accusation that has been levelled at the contemporaries of Jesus—their blindness of God’s presence, their evading of his law, their irresponsibility, their hypocrisy, their insensibility to human need—can equally be levelled in every age, including ours, against the community that calls itself Christian. Can we then, by the grace of God, see how this parable is aimed at us?
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