Now we come to another parable with the common theme of others. The master puts responsibility in the hands of men and then goes away. He expects a return and by not getting what is rightfully his he punishes those who are unproductive.  Again, like we did last week, I want to use Matthew’s version of the parable in Matthew 21:33-46.

Of course, this is a bit different from the parable of the minas in that these are not servants but tenants renting the land from the owner and while they are not unproductive they become arrogant about who owns the land and the produce.

The end is the same.

The point in both is there are rewards for loyalty and faithfulness but the end result of disloyalty and unfaithfulness are drastic and fatal. God is patient – but to a point.

The vineyard the landowner built for them has everything they need for their work. It has a wall of protection, a watchtower which would have been a safe place for them to reside during the harvest, and a wine press for turning the harvest into the end product – wine. It’s too easy to find a symbol for everything in parables but I think we can say that the wall is the Law and Commandments that were given to them for their protection. The watchtower is the safe place for them to abide – what David calls multiple times the Rock. The wine press is where the grapes start to become wine. No one raises grapes for their own sake. They raise them for wine.

In the same way, we have been given a wall to protect us, a place to abide and the expectation is the same – that we would turn grapes into wine. This is a good picture of the Church. Sometimes we get confused and think the purpose is to produce grapes but they are only means to an end. God is not looking for how many books we read, studies we attend, verses we memorize, programs we start or good organizations we create. He is looking for the “wine” of the Christian life. What is that? It is pretty simple, isn’t it? The end product of the Christian life is to love each other and to live lives that are witnesses to the grace of God.  Without the wine we are just grapes and in the end all we produce are dried raisins.

But there is another theme in these parables that is important. In all of them the master or the landlord goes away and often for a long journey.

In the 18th Century there was a religion highly regarded by many, including some of our founders – Deism. It taught that God created the Universe and natural law and then left the rest up to us. There were no interventions or miracles. We are completely responsible for our lives and the world. In some ways that is a good thing because it encourages taking responsibility and not depending on God to micromanage his creation. It produced guides like “Poor Richard’s Almanac” and Benjamin Franklin’s checklist of moral progress. We had to depend on ourselves for the world to work because there was no other source of governing. There were certain principles that God had planted in the world but he was not personally involved. It was not atheism but the belief that he had left us in our own hands to make the best of things.

We could probably use a little more of that today. As we’ve said before, many of us need signs and messages from God all the time before we can make decisions. We need to hear from God about what to do next and if God is silent we get anxious. We would not have done well in the times of Abraham when God had been silent for 1,000 years or the time of Moses when he had been silent for 400 years. We want God speaking and acting all the time now and on demand. We want a God who tweets, posts and chats constantly.

But, of course, there is a downside to that, isn’t there? We begin to think God’s silence means we can do as we please. We own the place. We are no longer tenants or servants or stewards but are in charge. We answer to no one and any attempt on God’s part to claim any of it is seen as interference or obsolete.

Think about decisions that are made today based on the belief that God has somehow gone away or is no longer interested or expecting us to behave in obedience to His ways. We are free to create our own rules, our own morality and standards, our own ethics. That might have worked in the 18th Century when there was at least a residue of a biblical culture but today as the biblical basis for making choices fades from parts of our world we have nothing to back up our choices but our own individual judgment or the will of the people.

We are no longer tenants working for someone else but become people who believe they are responsible to no one but themselves. In fact, it is even worse than that. We resent anyone who tries to impose any other outside expectations. We will cancel them. Destroy their reputations. Throw them out or eventually, do away with them completely. The end of that is a kind of death for a civilization. When we cannot hear a truth other than what we want to hear we are on our way to destruction. In fact, we may have gone one step further than the tenants. As terrible as their behavior was they knew there was a landowner but we have denied even that. We believe we have rid ourselves of Him as well.

When our leaders have no regard for truth and there are none telling the truth that are tolerated this is a world that Jeremiah describes:

From the least to the greatest,

    all are greedy for gain;

prophets and priests alike,

    all practice deceit.

They dress the wound of my people

    as though it were not serious.

‘Peace, peace,’ they say,

    when there is no peace.

Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct?

    No, they have no shame at all;

    they do not even know how to blush.

Further in Jeremiah, God speaks to the leaders and the people who have exchanged the truth for a lie:

Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah who come through these gates to worship the Lord. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.

Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury,  burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, “We are safe”—safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the Lord.

That is the situation Jesus describes in the parable. Over time their behavior has become worse. They do not even know how to blush because they have no shame at all. In spite of the landlord’s patience they are hardened against truth. All that matters is power, gain, successful deceit and the freedom to rule in a world with no rules but theirs. There is no room for decency, faithfulness, loyalty and honor. Truth has perished.

And this is the religious leadership Jesus is describing – not the secular Roman rulers.

This is the ever present danger of the church. We profess one thing and practice another.  You may be familiar with Russell Moore who has spoken in our church. He wrote last week about reasons for the decline of people attending church.

“Where a person leaving church in the early 1920s was likely to have walked away due to the fact that she found the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection to be outdated and superstitious or because he found moral libertinism to be more attractive than the “outmoded” strict moral code of his past or because she wanted to escape the stifling bonds of a home church for an autonomous individualism, now we see a markedly different—and jarring—model of a disillusioned evangelical. We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches. The presenting issue in this secularization is not scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism.

The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigorous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings. The problem is not that they reject the idea that God could send anyone to hell but that, when they see the church covering up predatory behavior in its institutions, they have evidence that the church believes God would not send “our kind of people” to hell. If people reject the church because they reject Jesus and the gospel, we should be saddened but not surprised. 

But what happens when people reject the church because they think we reject Jesus and the gospel? If people leave the church because they want to gratify the flesh with abandon, such has always been the case, but what happens when people leave because they believe the church exists to gratify the flesh—whether in orgies of sex or orgies of anger or orgies of materialism? That’s a far different problem. And what if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.

If you look at the context of this parable you will see it comes immediately after Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers.  The house of God has become a den of thieves. The Church has become complicit in the corruption,fraud and departure from the Truth. Some have taken this to mean that Jesus is against business or even religious business. That’s not the case. He is against those who take advantage of people who are vulnerable.

S. Lewis Johnson, the longtime teacher at Believer’s Chapel in Dallas wrote:

“Now the sacrifices were the sacrifices of the lambs and also of the pigeons. It would be possible for a person to bring his own animal, but that would be a great deal of difficulty and unnecessary, because animals could be bought in the city of Jerusalem, but unfortunately, if you wanted to bring your lamb, you had to have that lamb approved by the inspector before it could be sacrificed, and the inspectors had an unhappy way of approving only those lambs that had been bought in the temple area.

And furthermore they charged exorbitant prices for this. For example if you were a poor person and you could not offer a lamb, and you wanted to offer some pigeons, two pigeons ordinarily cost about five cents in our money. But at this time, they cost four dollars which was a fairly good profit: five cents to four dollars. Furthermore, every Israelite had to pay a half shekel tax to the sanctuary for their annual dues, so to speak. This was part of the support of the Levitical ritual.

Now you could do this ahead of time – you could buy them at various places in the land several months ahead of time, but if you waited until the last minute the only place you could buy them was in Jerusalem. And then of course you had to change your money into the money that they accepted and they didn’t accept everybody’s money. They accepted the money of Tyre, because Tyre’s money had a great deal of silver in it, and was recognized as being very good currency. Certain other types of currency they accepted, but even then they had to transfer that into the money of the Israelites, which they alone accepted as valid. So in the course of the changing of the money they also made unusual profit.

Furthermore if you wanted to pay a half shekel, and you gave a shekel for change they charged you extra for giving a larger piece of money than you should have. So it’s no wonder then that this was called “the bazaars of the sons of Annas,” who was the High Priest. The priests had a hand in this. They had a good thing going. They worked with the money changers and with the sellers of the animals and each took a cut of what was paid in by the people of the land.”

Just as Paul in Acts 19 was threatening the business of the idol makers of the goddess Diana in Ephesus, Jesus was threatening not just the theology of the leaders but their under the table business interests. You can see him forcing them into a corner in every area of their lives. He is not giving them any way to back away. They have to get rid of him but, of course, they are afraid of what the people might do and he knows that. He continues to push though.  Look at Matthew 23.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. 

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

“Woe to you, blind guides! 

“You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! 

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 

“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?

From this point on it is clear that the leaders have no choice but to discredit and kill him. It’s personal. They have to find a way that will keep them from being stoned by the people who follow him. It’s important to see that Jesus is forcing them into this because he knows the end game. He is not a victim. He is not committing suicide by Pharisee as some commit suicide by cop. He is fulfilling his assignment to the end and part of that assignment is continuing God’s call of Truth to a generation that refuses to hear and prefers their own lies. In fact, they will kill to preserve them.

Next week we start the beginning of the end.