[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints, one of the most fruitful things for us to meditate on as Christians is, as we read and explore the Scriptures, are the pictures that the Bible puts before us of the Church—images, parables, and stories that the Lord uses to describe how it is with us and Him. There’s a lot of them.
One of the most beloved, for example, is that the Lord is our shepherd and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. So many Scriptures reflect that beautiful picture, and we rejoice on meditating on what it means to be the Lord’s flock.
Or another picture of the church is the picture of a husband and wife, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. The Lord is the bridegroom, and we, the Church, are His bride. In fact, the Lord Jesus tells lots of parables about this, and when He wants to picture the joy of the resurrection, He gives the picture of the wedding feast.
There’s one picture, and this is a curious one. There’s one picture of how it is with God and us, one picture of the Church that’s only in the New Testament. It’s not in the Old Testament, and that is that Christ is the head, and we are His body. I spent a couple of years trying to figure out why of all the pictures of the Church, that one was only in the New Testament and not in the Old Testament until it dawned on me one day that it’s in the New Testament that the Lord has a body, that Jesus Himself takes on our flesh and blood. And that picture now starts to make sense.
There’s the picture of the temple and the cornerstone or the foundation, that we are the Lord’s temple being built into a holy habitation for the Lord. Old and New Testament pictures us as bricks in the wall of the Lord’s Church. And in fact, in the parable today, Jesus is going to switch from the image of a vineyard to the picture of a building for the punchline.
But then there’s the picture of the vineyard and the vineyard owner, and that’s really what’s set before us today—that we, the Lord’s people, are His vineyard. It’s the song that Isaiah sings in Isaiah chapter 5, a beautiful text. Isaiah says, “I’m going to sing a love song to my beloved about His vineyard.”
“My beloved has a vineyard on a very fruitful hill.” The beloved is the Lord Himself, and the vineyard is the Church, the kingdom of God in the Old Testament, the Lord’s people who live on Zion. In fact, we don’t need to guess about that. Isaiah is going to tell us the meaning of the whole thing in the end. He says, “My beloved has a vineyard on a very fruitful hill,” and he did all of these things.
He went and he built a wall around his vineyard to prevent the animals from coming in, especially the wild boars, and Israel would get in and root up and eat all the plants. And so you had to build a wall around your vineyard to protect it from all the animals. And they would build a watchtower in the middle of the vineyard, and they would set a watch at night so someone could make sure that no one was breaking in to steal all the grapes.
And they would build a wine vat. They would carve it in the limestone and there’d be a big hole in the ground and when the harvest time was there, they’d throw all the grapes into that vat and stomp on it so that the wine would come out through the stone, and they would gather the grape juice there to make wine out of it. That was the hardest part. I mean, you’re just basically cutting a huge big tank out of the rocks.
And the text, this love song that Isaiah preaches, says the Lord did all of that. He did all of that work. He built the wall, He built the tower, He hewed the vat, and then He went to get grapes. And instead of finding good grapes, He found wild grapes, bitter grapes, grapes that are inedible, you know, just worthless grapes, raisins. He finds these grapes and it sets His teeth on edge and He says, “What am I supposed to do now? You tell me, what am I supposed to do now? I couldn’t do anything else. Everything that you would expect someone to do to have a good vineyard, the Lord did, but the grapes were worthless.”
So He says, “Well, I can’t do anything. I’ll just tear down the wall and let the beasts come and eat the grapes, and it can go back to being wild.”
Now when the Lord preaches this to the people through Isaiah, it’s a preaching of warning. In fact, both of the parables today are parables of warning for us, and we want to heed them in that way. The Lord is saying to Israel, “Look, I did it all. I did everything I could have possibly done for you. When you were nothing, when you were worse than nothing, when you were rebellious slaves in Egypt, I sent and I rescued you. I sent plagues upon the people so that they would let you go. I brought you out to the Red Sea, and you crossed through the Red Sea on dry ground, and you came into the land. I provided for you while you wandered for 40 years through the wilderness so that your shoes didn’t even wear out. And I made bread rain down from heaven, and then when it was time for you to come into the land, I went before you and I cleared out the enemies so that you could live in houses that you didn’t build and you could eat grapes from vines that you hadn’t planted. I did it all for you, and then I come and look for the fruit of righteousness and love, of faith and a beginning of keeping the commandments. I come to look for the fruit and there’s no fruit at all.”
So the Lord is warning the people. In fact, here’s how it ends. It’s really quite stunning. “I came looking for,” what does He say here, “I came looking for justice and instead I find bloodshed? I came looking for righteousness but behold, an outcry?” So the Lord hands His vineyard over to the enemies, to the Assyrians, to the Babylonians, to the enemy kings.
Now this is a tough text. It’s a text where the Lord is preaching repentance for us. I mean, He’s saying, “Look, you need to bear fruit in keeping with repentance,” that when the Lord looks at His Church, He should find faith and love, not faithlessness and lovelessness. He should find us trusting His promises and trying at least to keep His commandments. It’s what He should find, but He doesn’t.
But here’s the hope in the text, and in every time we see texts like this in the Old Testament, we want to remember that the Lord always warns us of destruction before it comes. In other words, the Lord sends Isaiah to sing this love song at the vineyard to preach this word to the people so that they would repent, and the walls wouldn’t be torn down. The word of warning comes by the prophet before the destruction comes so that the people would repent and the Lord wouldn’t bring destruction.
In fact, Jeremiah gives—the Lord gives this beautiful picture to Jeremiah. It’s quite stunning. He tells Jeremiah to go down to the potter’s house. Remember this? He says, “Now watch the potter as he’s potting.” And Jeremiah is watching this potter. He must be turning something on a wheel, you know, a vase or a bowl or something like this. And the potter is making something, and then something goes wrong with the clay. There’s some imperfection or something like this. And so the potter changes his mind. He goes from making a bowl to making a vase or from making a pot to making a plate or something like this. In other words, the potter changes his mind and the Lord says, “That’s how I do it. When I go and I preach destruction and say, ‘I’m going to come and lower the boom on you, bring destruction, tear down the walls and send the enemy armies to wreak havoc in the place,’ when I promise destruction, I’m doing it so that you would repent and I would change my mind and not bring destruction. And when I promise blessing, the same thing goes. If I promise blessing for you but you go on living in your sinful ways and don’t repent, then I will change my mind and bring destruction. But the reason why the Lord preaches destruction, the reason why He preaches warning is so that we would repent and avoid that destruction, you see?”
So it is with Jesus. Now think about this. Jesus takes up this parable of Isaiah and preaches it on Holy Tuesday. It’s just three days before His death on the cross and His last day of public teaching in the Gospel, in the temple in Jerusalem. In Matthew 21 is where we find the text. But you’ve got to think that Jesus is there surrounded by the Pharisees, surrounded by the Sadducees who are intent on killing Him. They want to destroy Him. They’ve been plotting ever since Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. They’ve been plotting on how to do it, and they can’t figure it out because they don’t know where Jesus stays at night. Otherwise, they would have gone and kidnapped Him in the middle of the night. The only time they can find Him is in the day, and it’s because He was staying over in Bethany with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. The only time they find Him in the day, and they’re afraid to seize Him because the people love Him and think He’s a prophet, but they’re still trying to figure out how they can be done with this guy.
And so Jesus comes and He tells them this parable. “Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a wine press and built a tower.” That sounds just like Isaiah 5, but here’s where something new comes in. “And then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.” The tenants are the Pharisees. The tenants are the Sadducees. The tenants are the rulers of the people. They are there to tend to the Lord’s vineyard, to look after it, to make sure that nothing bad happens.
But what happened? “When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get the fruit. And the tenants took his servants, and they beat one, and they killed another, and they stoned another one. So he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did the same to them.” This is the prophets that the Lord constantly was sending to His people, calling them to repentance. But what did the Lord’s people do to the prophets? They beat them and killed them and stoned them.
So finally, verse 37, this vineyard owner sent His Son to them, saying, “They will respect my Son.” But when the tenants saw the Son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” And so they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.”
Now, just think of it. Jesus is telling this parable about how the owner of the vineyard had sent His Son to harvest His fruits, and the tenants are rejecting the Son and about to put Him to death. Jesus is basically telling a parable on Tuesday about what’s about to happen on Friday. He’s telling them what they are doing and what they’re thinking, and He’s putting their wickedness on display to them, and why? So that they would repent and be saved.
I mean, it’s a crazy idea to think… I mean, which of us have ever thought, “You know what I want to do? Here’s some guy, and he has a big house, and I would… I want to have his big house, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to go and murder his son so that I can be the heir.” It’s just a foolish idea. It’s wildly irrational. It’s crazy. It doesn’t make any sense. Killing the heir doesn’t make you the heir. It just makes you a criminal.
But this is the wild insanity of the Pharisees that they were plotting to destroy Jesus so that they could somehow benefit from God. And Jesus is saying, “Repent.” They took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed them. And look how this goes, verse 40, Jesus is going to put their own condemnation on their own lips.
I think if I remember right, this is the only parable that Jesus Himself does not finish. He doesn’t… Jesus doesn’t deliver the punchline. Jesus is going to end with a question, and the Pharisees themselves are going to deliver the punchline of the parable. Jesus says, “When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” And they said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give them the fruit in their seasons.” You yourself have said so.
I mean, this is incredible. Jesus has put their own verdict, the verdict of their own guilt, in their own mouths. Indeed, the Lord will take the vineyard from those faithless tenants and give it to faithful ones. Jesus will take the kingdom of God from the descendants of Abraham, from Israel of the flesh, and give it to those who trust in His promises.
Jesus in the parable, or in the text now, actually switches from the story of the vineyard to the picture of the temple. And He goes and quotes one of His most famous Bible passages, His most favorite psalm, Psalm 118 verse 22. Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scripture, ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone? This was the Lord’s doing. Is it marvelous in our eyes? Therefore, I tell you, the kingdom will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.'”
Now again, I just want to make sure we don’t miss this. Why is Jesus preaching this on Holy Tuesday to the people gathered there? Precisely so that they would repent, that they would abandon their wicked and godless plans, that they would forsake their unbelief and trust instead in the Lord, that they would find themselves not crying out for Jesus’ death, for His crucifixion, but rather praying for mercy.
And this is why Jesus gives this little riddle, verse 44. It’s kind of a tricky one. I thought about sending you home trying to discern what it meant, but I think we’ll talk about it now because Jesus ends this whole conversation with this… with the riddle of falling on the stone. At first, it doesn’t make any sense. Jesus says, “And the one who falls on the stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.” There’s a stone and there’s falling. That’s what Jesus says, but there’s two ways to go about it.
Option one is you can fall on the stone or option two is the stone can fall on you. Option one is repentance, what Jesus is trying to achieve, that you would fall on the stone repenting of your sins, trusting not in your goodness but in His mercy, and that you will be broken, like it says in Psalm 51, “A broken and contrite heart, O God, these you will not despise.”
Jesus is crying out to the Pharisees and to all who will hear, including us, saying, “Fall on the stone, repent of your sins, cry out to the Lord for help, abandon your own righteousness, trust not in yourselves but in me. Fall on me, you will be broken and crushed in repentance, but you will at last have life. But if you do not fall on me, then I will fall on you, and you will be crushed.”
This is the judgment, the last day when the Lord returns to judge the living and the dead. If it falls on anyone, it will crush them.
So, this text also is a warning for us, that we would be found falling on the stone. In fact, that’s what we do every time we come to church. It’s why we have kneelers, so that we can kneel, so we can fall on the stone, that by repentance we would abandon again all of our self-love and self-pride and the thought that we can be good enough for God, that we would toss it all aside as poor, miserable sinners and trust in the Lord and His mercy.
That we would be the repentant vine in His vineyard, under His protection and given His life.
There’s one more time—we’ll end with this—there’s one more place where Jesus reflects on this picture of the vineyard, that He is the vineyard owner, and we are the vines. But Jesus says it like this: He says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.”
I think of all the times that the vineyard is mentioned, this is the most beautiful. And Jesus says to us, “Abide in me and I will abide in you, and you will bear much fruit.” We, it turns out, are still the Lord’s vineyard. He is still tending to us, pruning, protecting, caring for us. He looks for the fruit of repentance and faith.
And by the Holy Spirit, when He looks at you, He sees it. Because you are those who fall on the rock. You are those who repent of your sins. You are those who abide in Christ unto life eternal.
May God the Holy Spirit keep us in this gift of repentance and faith. Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
