10-2-17 - Kill the Messenger?

Another week, another vineyard. In this week’s parable, Jesus continues the conversation he was having with the priests and Pharisees we looked at last week. On a roll after putting them in their place with the tale of the two sons, he says, “Listen to another parable.” This time, he borrows from Isaiah 5:1-7, starting his story almost the same way.

A landowner plants, fences and equips a vineyard, and then leases it to others to run. As rent they owe a portion of the harvest. At picking time, he sends collectors – but the tenants won’t pay: “But the tenants seized his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.” They do the same to the next delegation, so the owner decides to send his son to collect the rent, “saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” 

Jesus is laying another trap for the religious leaders. In not-so-thinly-veiled language, he alludes to the reception which Israel’s leaders have traditionally given God’s prophets. Most often, when they didn’t like what the prophets had to say, they tried to silence or even kill them. And what were the prophets usually saying? “God doesn’t want your sacrifices and your legalistic rituals. God doesn’t want your lip-service about holiness while you cheat the orphan and the widow and dishonor God’s Sabbath. God wants your heart, your repentance, your compassion.” Or, as Isaiah says of the vineyard, “When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?”

It is human nature to turn away from messages that challenge us to change. In this season of unprecedented devastation from “super-storms,” we are reminded of the failure over the past fifty years to get people to take seriously the ravages of climate change. On a smaller scale, think how hard it can be for an addict to take that first step in recovery, or for people to begin a weight-loss program. Often we wait until we see the effects of what we’ve been warned about – and then it can be too late. And sometimes, seeing the danger we’ve feared come to pass drives our heads further into the sands of denial and over-consumption.

Are there messages you have you been trying to ignore? Messages from God, from the Bible, from friends, from your own gut? Take some time in quiet today and ask that question of yourself and the Spirit, and see what emerges. “What am I pretending not to know?”

Are there issues on which you feel called to speak prophetically – i.e., messages that you believe God wants you to deliver? Are you offering them? How are they being received? Is there another way to communicate them?

This parable was a direct condemnation of the religious leaders of Israel in Jesus’ time. But its imagery resonates for us in many ways today, as citizens of the world and citizens of God’s realm. Isaiah tells us, "For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!"

God’s call to us to be people of justice and righteousness still sounds. May we not leave those cries unheard.