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Introduction

      This Advent sermon holds ecological as well as Christological meaning for us today. When the owner’s “own dear son” comes round to the vineyard to collect the rent from the vine-growers, they kill the son even as they had earlier killed the owner’s messengers. What can the owner do now but come himself and put the tenants to death, giving the vineyard to others?

      Ecological insensitivity is clearly one of the most obvious ways in which we prove today that we are irresponsible tenants of God’s vineyard. And that irresponsibility, as we are slowly but surely learning from climate disasters, carries a death sentence for the offending vine-growers.

      The climax of the parable, however, leaves us with the picture of the landlord shaking his head and saying “Surely they will reverence my son.” Advent prepares the way for “the pleading of the Father who not only reminds us of our responsibilities, but offers us the companionship of his Son, and the renewing influence of his Spirit.” Again the question is put to the vine-growers: “Surely they will reverence my son.” David Read concludes this Advent sermon with the reminder of an even more basic question put to us at Christmastime: “Do you?”

      Advent Parables: The Case Of The Troublesome Tenants

      A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on December 8, 1974, Advent

      Text: Mark 12:1–12

      Readings: Isaiah 5:1–7; Mark 12:1–12 (NEB)

      There was once a church member who liked to come to worship every Sunday morning and always sat in the same pew. He loved to sing the most familiar hymns and to stand up and sit down at the usual times. Since he lived in a city where old buildings were always being torn down, in a country where old ways of thinking and behaving seemed to be rapidly disappearing, and in a world of great instability and insecurity, he liked to feel that there was one place at least where everything was as it used to be. So week by week as he worshipped the God of his fathers he expected to see the choir in the stalls, the Communion Table in the middle of the chancel, and the preacher, at the right time, in the pulpit. Then one day he came into church and found that everything was topsy-turvy. The choir had disappeared and their voices came floating down from the balcony behind him. The chancel was swept clean of the familiar objects and strange trappings confronted his indignant eyes. He had barely time to absorb all this when he found himself required to sing a hymn he had never heard before, and then, worst of all, to listen to a sermon delivered from his left and not his right, from a lectern and not a pulpit. At this point he reached for his coat to depart in protest when suddenly God said: “Just a minute. I fully understand that you like to worship me according to your habits and don’t want to be distracted. We’ve a lot of good habits in heaven too, you know. But sometimes, just once in a while, it’s good to break the routine. Even angels can get bored. I’m not just the God 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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