Heaven Forbid! (A Sermon on Luke 20:9-19)

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Introduction - Parables

One of the best descriptions of parables I’ve come across comes from a book called Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus by Robert Capon. I wanted to start us out with that quote today, because it helps give us a better handle on what we come across in Jesus parables:

“Most people, on reading the Gospels’ assertion that ‘Jesus spoke in parables,’ assume they know exactly what is meant. ‘Oh, yes,’ they say, ‘and a wonderful teaching device it was, too. All those unforgettable stories we’re so fond of, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.’ Yet, Jesus use of parables can hardly be limited to the handful of instances we remember as entertaining, agreeable, simple, and clear. Some of his parables are not stories; many are not agreeable; most are complex; and a good percentage of them produce more confusion than understanding.”

It’s true: the parables at times were as much about putting folks off-balance as they were at helping them walk straight. We might ask, Why would Jesus do this? Well, much of the work Jesus had to do in his teaching was about clearing the way for an “unknowing” or a deconstruction of the way people thought about God. Many times, we think we know a thing, but we have not yet even begun to understand. G.K. Chesterton had some advice about the use of parables. He said that if you give people an analogy that they claim they do not understand, you should graciously offer them another. If they say they don’t understand that either, you should oblige them with a third. But from there on, if they still insist they do not understand, the only thing left is to praise them for the one truth they do have a grip on: “Yes,” you tell them, “that is quite correct. You do not understand.”

This was true about the people in Jesus day: Mention “messiah” to them, and they would picture a king on horseback, not a carpenter on a cross; mention “forgiveness” and they would start setting up rules about when it ran out. From Jesus point of view, the sooner their misguided minds had the props knocked from under them, the better. After all their yammer about how God should or shouldn’t run his own operation, getting them just to stand there with their eyes popped and their mouths shut would be a giant step forward. Another author says it this way:

“As we read parables, we shouldn’t focus on mining the text for doctrine or sifting for one-liner life lessons. Jesus is concerned with the power of creative imagery, symbolism, and beauty, and we should be too. He wants his audience to do more than listen and think; he wants them to imagine and feel, to be challenged and provoked.” (Josh Porter, “Are the Parables of Jesus Confusing on Purpose?”)

The point, then, of parables is not to quickly and succinctly land at pat answers but to challenge us, to engage the mystery so that we might come to a deep and lasting understanding, an understanding that, admittedly, includes some uncertainty, doubt, and certainly some unknowing of what we thought we knew before. So, would you join me today in popping our eyes open to see what glimpses we might catch in today’s parable?

Luke‬ ‭20:9-19 MSG

Friends, hear the Word of the Lord:

9-12 Jesus told another story to the people: “A man planted a vineyard. He handed it over to farmhands and went off on a trip. He was gone a long time. In time he sent a servant back to the farmhands to collect the profits, but they beat him up and sent him off empty-handed. He decided to try again and sent another servant. That one they beat black-and-blue, and sent him off empty-handed. He tried a third time. They worked that servant over from head to foot and dumped him in the street.

13 “Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘I know what I’ll do: I’ll send my beloved son. They’re bound to respect my son.’

14-15 “But when the farmhands saw him coming, they quickly put their heads together. ‘This is our chance—this is the heir! Let’s kill him and have it all to ourselves.’ They killed him and threw him over the fence.

15-16 “What do you think the owner of the vineyard will do? Right. He’ll come and get rid of everyone. Then he’ll assign the care of the vineyard to others.”

Those who were listening said, “Oh, no! He’d never do that!”

17-18 But Jesus didn’t back down. “Why, then, do you think this was written:

That stone the masons threw out— It’s now the cornerstone!?

“Anyone falling over that stone will break every bone in his body; if the stone falls on anyone, he’ll be smashed to smithereens.”

19 The religion scholars and high priests wanted to lynch him on the spot, but they were intimidated by public opinion. They knew the story was about them.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

The Vineyard in the Bible

If we spend any time with Jesus, we’re sure to find him in the middle of controversy, with people who hate him and are plotting to kill him. This has been true for Jesus since the very first time he starts teaching in Luke 4. There, after reading from the scroll of Isaiah, his audience takes him to a cliff and tries to throw him to his death. Jesus miraculously slips away. In today’s story, the religious leaders want to “lynch Jesus on the spot” but don’t do it because of Jesus popularity. It’s not a huge surprise why - Jesus had just entered Jerusalem in the previous chapter, throwing out moneychangers who were making money in the Temple. Basically, Jesus starts really shaking things up at the epicenter of political and religious power in Jewish society: Jerusalem. He then gets to work on telling stories that challenge and embarrass the religious leaders. The characters in today’s parable act as stand-ins for different people in Israel’s history: the vineyard owner is God, the farmhands represent the corrupt leaders of Israel, the servants are the prophets God has sent over the years to try to correct the leaders of Israel, and the son is Jesus.

Just like the farmhands in the parable beat up and turned away all the servants, Israel had turned away the messengers God had sent in the prophets, people like Jeremiah, Amos, and Isaiah. In fact, our parable today mirrors another Old Testament parable that all of Jesus hearers would have been familiar with: the Song of the Vineyard from Isaiah 5. In that parable, God is compared to a farmer who plants a vineyard and sets it up with everything it needs: a fence to protect it from outsiders and animals, well-cultivated soil, and the very best vines on the market. However, despite all of that effort, the vineyard would not produce good fruit. The last words of the song really drive home the ugly picture: “God looked for a crop of justice and saw them murdering each other. He looked for a harvest of righteousness and heard only the moans of victims.” Just like Jesus parable, Isaiah asks his audience, “what should the farmer do now?” The answer comes as the farmer removes the fence, all of the vineyard’s protection, and stops maintaining it. God can no longer stomach enabling people who actively harm their neighbors and refuse to help those crying out in need.

In the same way, Jesus clashes over and over again with the religious leaders over anyone else. He pulls no punches in telling them how wrong they are for focusing on their own pride as good upright God followers rather than actually helping those around them experience the grace and goodness of God.

The Vineyard Today

So, honestly, as a church leader today, these sorts of parables get me a little on-edge. The temptation is to quickly clear my conscience, thinking oh I’m nothing like those awful people, but that’s the tricky thing about human nature. We tend to absolve ourselves of wrongdoing and defend ourselves even when we are the wrong ones. Psychologists talk about cognitive dissonance, it describes this dynamic when our behavior does not match our own values. What we think we should do and what we actually do are at odds and it leads to an uneasiness, a dissonance that, if listened to, can help us navigate towards doing the “next right thing” in our lives. In a counselor’s office, the counselor tries to help their client face the music of their own lives - to seek to resolve the dissonance and to live the type of life they seek to live. However, throughout human history it has been easier to drown out and even kill the voices of the prophets than to heed them, just as it’s easier to drown out our own internal dissonance with entertainment, with drugs and alcohol, even with achievement and success to keep the volume down on our own sense that things are not right.

A week and a half ago, during the heatwave, I was able to retreat into a movie theater with A/C and finally see Barbie, the movie that all the youth group kids have been talking about. It is a really fun, funny, and poignant movie that has lots of themes of taking down the Patriarchy and addressing sexism. What was unexpected was the existentialist vibe it had as well - there’s a now iconic scene in which Barbie, in the midst of a fabulously pink dance party asks, “Do any of you guys ever think about dying?” The music screeches to a halt, everyone turns and stares at Barbie in disbelief until she gets back to dancing and everyone is put at ease again. This rude awakening, this disruption, is what ultimately leads to Barbie entering the real world and seeking to put to rights what has gone so horribly wrong there.

In some ways, this is a lot of what Jesus did throughout his ministry: he was a disruptor and ultimately a reconciler and healer. He asked the questions and said the things that brought to the forefront people’s main concerns, their late night anxieties, their spoken and unspoken hopes and dreams. He was also constantly spending time with those people other religious leaders would have nothing to do with: children, people with diseases, people with unsavory jobs and reputations, people from a lower social status. As he preached his message about the Kingdom of God, he emphasized how the Kingdom of God was here and yet still coming. And, as the story of the Church moved forward in the book of Acts, evangelism and justice went hand in hand, as the early church helped the neediest among them, shared their belongings in radical fashion, and had meaningful relationship and fellowship across lines of race, gender, class, and social status. Jesus was the centerpiece, the “cornerstone” of all of that.

Having had the words of Jesus with us for over 2,000 years, we would hope that the modern day Church would be leading the charge to address the things that just aren’t right, “to preach the message of good news to the poor, to announce pardon to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the burdened and battered free, to announce, ‘This is God’s time to shine!’”

Yet, more and more, it seems that people associate the Church with hypocrisy, moral failure, narrowmindedness, and mean-spiritedness. My generation, Millennials, have veered strongly away from the Church, and Gen Z’ers, the young people I hang out with at youth groups, are even more wary of the Church. It’s getting to the point that some sociologists have called America a “post-Christian” nation, while others wonder how Christian we ever were as they point to Christians’ complicity in things like slavery, Jim Crow segregation, oppression of women, the mistreatment of the planet, etc. Setting American history aside, it seems that every couple months, there’s another expose of a prominent Christian leader who, behind closed doors, was nothing like the person they presented on stage.

I just wonder what Jesus would say about the state of the “vineyard” and its keepers today. Why is it that religion can so easily be used to, as Jesus puts it in another passage, “clean the outside appearance, but leave the inside filthy?” It’s like, instead of allowing God to work deeply in our lives and renovate the spaces that desperately need attention, we just let God help give us a facelift, yet we stay basically the same inside.

Spiritual Bypassing

In the 1980’s a psychologist named John Welwood noticed in his interactions with clients that some people resorted to spirituality to avoid difficult or painful emotions or challenges rather than to address them, which kept them locked up in their problems. They couldn’t move forward in what they were facing in life, because they were basically short-circuiting the process with what Welwood called “spiritual bypassing.”

In a study in the Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 3 psychologists showed how spiritual bypassing leads to the following:

• “the need to excessively control others and oneself

• shame, anxiety, dichotomous thinking

• emotional confusion, exaggerated tolerance of inappropriate behavior

• codependency, compulsive kindness, obsession, or addiction

• spiritual narcissism

• blind allegiance to charismatic teachers

• And, a disregard for personal responsibility.”

Sign you up, right?! Thankfully, this is not how it has to be. Like Barbie, we don’t have to keep dancing to that music. Instead, we can be drawn into something better, something life-changing, something real. This is because, when the real Jesus comes into view, he welcomes us into loving mercy and doing justice. And, he welcomes you as you are, not as you wish you would be, speaking truth to the areas of our lives where we desperately need it, and applying balm to the wounds we carry. The Church can be a community of people who lean in to listen and walk alongside you, instead of dismissing you, ignoring your pain, and discouraging your questions.

God of the Oppressed

The reason it can be like this is because of the God we encounter in Jesus. The parable today paints a picture of a patient, loving, and long-suffering God. One who sent messenger after messenger and finally his own son to try to reason with people who had already wronged him and had no intention of changing their ways. And, then, after all of this, God the vineyard owner doesn’t abandon the idea of partnering with people to accomplish his purposes. No, at the end of the parable the vineyard owner will hand it off to others. He risks and trusts again. This is our God, the One who not only sides with those who are mistreated, ignored, and put down, but who, in Jesus Christ, actually identifies with the needy ones and partners with the ones the world would normally never give a chance.

It was God in Jesus who suffered the Cross, who endured the abuse of the political and religious leaders, who faced mockery, humiliation, and pain. And the miracle of the Gospel is that it’s Jesus, the rejected one, who ultimately is resurrected after being crucified, who is vindicated and is seated on the throne! This is the story of our God: God did not bypass the pain and the injustice of the world, he went right through it. He suffered it. This is what Jesus is referring to when he talks about the cornerstone that the builders rejected. Jesus is the rejected one, the mistreated one, the one who doesn’t fit with the whole project the religious leaders are busy working on. He is the one who was humiliated, mocked, and killed, and who, by God’s resurrecting act, is the one that the Kingdom of God is built upon.

Conclusion

The scandal and gift of the Gospel, the thing that can either drive you nuts with resentment or send you into giddy joy, is that our accomplishments, social status, and ways in which we can appear better than our neighbor, more holy than our enemy - all this stuff doesn’t ultimately matter, because we’re welcomed into the house of God through the shame of the cross. God identified with the lowest of the low in order that no one would be left out of the Kingdom.

May we, who call ourselves Christians reflect God’s radical hospitality to others.

May we, who are charged with caring for God’s vineyard, be quick to open our hearts and our hands to those in need.

May we, who follow a crucified and risen Jesus, be willing to go to the lowest of the lows for others. Amen.