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The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 23)
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The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 21:33-46
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Matthew 21:33-46
✛
The Gift of Grace
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Supposedly we have left summer behind by the first week of October, though you can hardly tell from the temperature outside. The autumn equinox was back a couple of weeks ago. Fittingly for the modern world, it was marked not so much by a change in weather as the advent of pumpkin-spice everything. Welcome to fall. The lectionary, which is our three-year cycle of readings, does not listen to the weather report when it makes its assignments, and so recently we have heard on Sunday mornings these gospels that draw frequently on autumn imagery. That is what we hear in today’s parable as well.
It is a confrontational Jesus that is found in the twenty-first chapter of Matthew. That is clear from the parable alone, but it is worth noting that the story is preceded by what may have been the direct cause of Jesus’ eventual crucifixion, which was his so-called “cleansing” of the Temple, driving out the moneychangers, who probably did not experience it as particularly cleansing. According to Matthew, the next day he cursed a fig tree for not producing fruit and it withered. Then he went back to the Temple and got in an argument with the chief priests and elders, which included telling this parable and several others that made them look pretty bad. It is indeed harsh. You can understand why they were upset.
Hear the parable: a landowner planted a vineyard, had it all set up, with a fence around it, a watchtower, and a press that was ready to make the wine once the fruit was ripe. He put the farm in the hands of tenants, and went off to another country. When it was harvest time—presumably some time after the autumn equinox—he sent three of his servants to collect the produce. But the tenants would not turn it over: they beat one of the servants, killed the second, and stoned the third. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, so the owner sent some more servants. The same thing happened. So the landowner sent his son, figuring that with the authority of sonship, the tenants would come around and do the right thing, but they did not. They figured, wrongly, that if the son was dead then they would get his inheritance—the land itself—so they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. And, abruptly, the parable ends.
Jesus asks those listening to him, “What is the owner going to do now?” They say, “Well, he will kill them, and he will find better tenants, preferably less homicidal, who will do the work that they’ve agreed to.” Jesus asks them further, “You know how it is said in the scriptures, ‘The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner?’” Yes, they know it. Then the confrontational Jesus answers, “Therefore I say unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to [another] nation [that is] bringing forth … fruits…. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.”
The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and it will be given to someone else, who is not you. The money changers have already been driven out; they do not a place in those sacred precincts anymore. The chief priests and scribes though—it is their Temple. They are in charge of it. But the Kingdom will be taken from them and given to a nation that will bring forth fruit. The religious folks, who are not bearing fruit, will wither away like the fig tree that Jesus saw, and cursed, on the way into town.
It seems to me that this a good reminder for us, in how we think about our faith. One of the things it means is that the gospel—the saving good news of God in Christ—has been given to us, but, if it can be taken away, then it does not belong to us. It comes from outside of ourselves. The saving good news is God reaching into time and space to let us know about the possibility of salvation for all people, telling us of the reconciliation with one another and with our creator, who comes to bring life and bring it abundantly. That is given to us … and it can be taken away.
In the parable, the landowner sets everything up for them: he plants the seeds; he makes a nice hedge around it to make the boundaries clear and provide some protection; he sets up a watchtower; he even gets the winepress ready for when the grapes come in. It has all been given to them. Everything is ready. It has been given, but they do not own it.
What we see here operative here is what the Church calls grace, which is our word for an unearned, unmerited, gift. The gift of grace is not something we come up with on our own and for that reason we cannot possess it. It is not the result of our ingenuity or diligence. It is not ours by right. We live in the vineyard and enjoy the fruits of it, but only because it has been given to us and we are sustained in it by the Spirit.
That is the other side of grace. When the tenants of the parable presume that they do own the vineyard—when we presume that we have earned it—when the tenants kill the servants and the Son—when we stop producing the fruits of the Spirit—then it can be taken away. Reconciliation with God is ours only because of his grace and, because of grace, the word of the Lord can travel anywhere God wants. It can come. And it can go.
The people writing these gospels down knew about these possibilities. The Church in the first century was on the move. Without being taken away from one place, the Gospel spread throughout the Mediterranean, and eventually throughout the world, given as the gift of God. But that gift comes with the requirement of being received as a gift, and this requires remembering that it does not belong to us, just as it did not belong to them. This gospel is proof that they knew that. Think of their first-century world and the characters populating these stories. The apostle Peter was the first bishop of Rome. It is hard to have better credibility than Peter, when it comes to discipleship, apostolic authority, and things like that. Mary Magdalene was the first person to meet the risen Christ, who called her by name, and she was the first evangelist, telling the frightened disciples that Christ was risen. James was the very brother of Jesus, and the first bishop of Jerusalem, and could presumably have been able to claim that he had known Jesus longer than any of the rest of them, their mother excepted. This group—and there were others with solid claims—were as close to Jesus and those founding historic events of the Church as anyone else. They had the authority of personal familiarity with the Christ himself.
And they had heard Jesus say—and at least Matthew had written down—that the Gospel could be taken away from them, and sent elsewhere, if they were not fruitful, if their lives did not reflect their faith. If that happened, then all the familiarity in the world, all of the historic authority they had, would not be able to stop it.
Many of us here have been baptized. (Some have not; please consider it.) Many have received a candle representing the light of Christ. As have our forebears: this parish has been worshipping as a community of the baptized for nearly two centuries. Anglicans came to New York City in the late 1600s, and Christianity had been in England for a thousand years before that. This can all be taken away, “and given [instead] to a nation bringing forth … fruits.” It is not ours and it does not belong to us. It comes from the outside, and we do not own it.
This is good news. It is good news that the Gospel comes by grace from outside of us. Why? Because our attempts at kingdom-making are inferior, inevitably sinful, and often cruel. Our efforts at personal self-improvement or self-actualization are never to be realized fully, on our own. However many tens of thousands of years of human civilization we have had have resulted in this, this world we live in today, scarred by violence and bloodshed, poverty and deprivation. “Advanced civilization,” it is called, but surely only by those who do not watch the news.
This does not mean that we should not try to make the world a better place. Of course we should. Being fruitful, as peacemakers, reconcilers, and witnesses, is what Christ is calling for. The Bible is chock-full of imprecatory language aimed at those who would forget the poor. We should hear that language as aimed at us, because it is aimed at us. We should do everything we can to be doers of the word and not hearers only. But that word is a gift, too. It, too, is good news.
We find a confrontational Jesus, telling stories about autumn, in Matthew 21, but that is only because we consider the telling of the truth to be a confrontational act. It is a confrontational Jesus there, not in spite of the fact that Jesus is the salvation of the world, but because of it. The Son of God comes with the Holy Spirit and with fire, not in spite of the fact that God is love, but because God is love, and God’s love is so beyond our comprehension that we experience it as uncomfortable as best, and painful at worst, but always foreign and strange. It comes to us from the outside, so it can be taken away, and, if it could not, then we would have no hope.
But hope is one thing that we do have. Because the stone that the builders rejected—the stone that the builders still reject, the stone that the world rejects, the stone whom we reject—he is the Son of God, and the king of the world, the ruler of rulers, and the lord of all history, and he is alive. He is alive. In his outstretched hand he continues to offer that gift that is himself, his death and his life for us, to be received and cherished. If we receive his gift as a gift, with thanksgiving, with a response of fruitful and joyful discipleship, then we will find that gift to be life itself.
