Proper 22, Year A, Track 1
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46
"In 1970, singer Joni Mitchell recorded one of her best-known songs, “Big Yellow Taxi,” while on a trip to Hawaii. She recalled in an interview years later that the inspiration for the song came when she opened up the curtains in her hotel room to see gorgeous green mountains in the distance—and down below, a parking lot stretching as far as the eye could see. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot,” she sings. Her lament was born from the same concern that, in the same year, led to the creation of the first annual Earth Day. There are a wide array of political opinions related to how we should care for creation, but there is only one scriptural theme that we as Christians are called to follow. It is established in the creation account in Genesis 2:15: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” If we are honest with ourselves about the state of the Earth today, and our role in that state, how well can we say we’ve accomplished that goal?
The role that God gives Adam in the Garden is one of stewardship. That’s a word that comes up a lot around October and November here at St. Luke’s as all of us consider how we can give of ourselves and the blessings we’ve received to ensure that this special place is able to continue its ministry to the community. But this is not the only way in which God calls us to be stewards, and it’s not even the most important way. Consider that creation care is not only about the bees and the whales and the spotted owl. Creation care is about the air we breathe, the water we drink, the crops we grow, and the weather we enjoy—or suffer through. Creation care is about the well-being of us here today and of generations to come and is thus inseparably linked to Jesus’ command that we love our neighbors as ourselves.
Our reading today from Matthew is set in the Temple in Jerusalem just a day after a dramatic episode in which we see a rare glimpse of Jesus’ anger. That previous day in the Temple Jesus had driven out the peddlers and overturned the tables of the moneychangers declaring, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer;’ but you are making it a den of robbers.” Jesus then heals the blind and lame who came to him—an act significant not just for physical reasons, but also social ones. Those disabilities would have been a barrier to full participation and inclusion in social and religious life in Jesus’ time. Jesus disrupts the entire social order with these acts and builds in its place the foundation of a radically egalitarian space centered on the singular purpose of worship. This new Temple has no inner and outer courts, no barriers based on ethnicity or ability, or any other arbitrary division.
The next day Jesus returns and tells the Parable of the Wicked Tenant. He uses specific imagery to set the scene: a landowner who plants a vineyard, complete with a winepress, wall, and tower. This language is nearly identical to the Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard in Isaiah 5, a warning from the prophet to the people of Israel condemning their squandering of God’s blessings and the rampant injustice that had taken hold of the land. Isaiah says in that chapter, “My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it out and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded rotten grapes…For the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his cherished garden; he expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!” No doubt this would have caught the attention of the teachers and Pharisees in the audience.
Jesus then speaks of the landowner sending out his servants to collect the harvest, only to have the tenants exact escalating brutality on them. This is one of several references Jesus makes in the Gospels to the notorious treatment of prophets throughout the history of Israel—Jeremiah who was beaten and jailed, Zechariah who was killed in the Temple courts, Isaiah who is alleged in extra-biblical texts to have been sawn in half, and Jesus’ own cousin, John the Baptist, beheaded by Herod Antipas. Finally, the landowner sends his son and heir—a clear reference to Jesus himself—and then tenants conspire to kill him and take his inheritance.
After all this bloodshed, Jesus asks his listeners what the landowner will do when he comes to the vineyard himself, and his audience gives a predictable response, the one that to us seems the most rational: “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end…and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.” This seems to be a consensus answer perhaps because everyone present could cast themselves as the landowner in this tale. The Pharisees and teachers by virtue of their social-political status would naturally see themselves as the landowner charged with upholding the letter of the law and punishing wrongdoing. The cast-off people Jesus brought back from the fringes of society the previous day might have seen the Pharisees as the tenants of God’s vineyard, charged with upholding justice but instead producing the rotten grapes of oppression and killing those who dared speak out against them.
Jesus’ answer shows they, and perhaps we as well, have missed the point. “Have you never read the Scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes?’” Jesus quotes directly from the victorious words of Psalm 118, likely composed by King David, which according to Ezra 3 may have been sung at the consecration of the very temple in which Jesus stood, the same temple that would be razed to the ground by Roman armies some 40 years after his crucifixion. Those who saw Jesus as the Messiah perhaps believed that Jesus’ mission on earth would culminate in casting out the wicked tenants of the Temple and overseeing its restoration as the vehicle for righteous administration. But Jesus knows that that will not break the cycle of bad stewardship and rotten harvests. The whole system must be rebuilt, a new Kingdom of God with Jesus as the chief cornerstone.
If we read this parable in the context of creation care, its conclusion might prompt us to ask the age-old question of why we should care about this vineyard we are in now, if it is only a passing thing. What is the point of being a good tenant if working this vineyard is only a temporary job? There are far too many ways to answer this question than we have time to explore today, but I will offer one: we are the tenant, not the landowner. We are each called by God to be stewards of this creation, so what kind of stewards will we be? If we destroy all that God has placed in our care, how can we represent ourselves as sincere and committed servants prepared for our place in the Kingdom of God? Each of us only has a short time on this fragile earth, our island home, and it is meant to be a preparation, not just for ourselves but for all those who come after us, each soul known and cherished by God and created to do his holy work until Christ comes again. Amen."