Luke 20:9-19
The Parable of the Ungrateful Tenants
March 25, 2007
He went on to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed. He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out.
“Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.’
“But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
“What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them?He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.”
When the people heard this, they said, “May this never be!”
Jesus looked directly at them and asked, “Then what is the meaning of that which is written:
”‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone’? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”
The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people. (NIV)
There’s a principle of reading the Bible that would almost seem to go without saying, but in fact the principle is often not followed. The principle is this: When reading a portion of the Bible, be sure you are reading it in context. That is, be sure you know who is writing or speaking, be sure that you know when they are writing or speaking, be sure that you know who they are writing or speaking to, and see what happened prior to this that may have caused the individual to write and speak the way they do.
In our reading for this morning, Jesus is doing the speaking, and he is speaking to “the people.” But while there was a crowd of people around, the context makes it clear that Jesus is directing this parable especially at the Jewish religious leaders. It’s Tuesday of Holy Week—just two days before Jesus is arrested—and the Jewish religious leaders have been increasing their hassling of Jesus gradually over the past three years.
Jesus was teaching people in the temple courts that day, and the religious leaders weren’t real thrilled about it. After all, he hadn’t asked their permission to do so. Who in the world did he think he was, not checking with them first? And what made it worse is that he was saying some things they didn’t really like to hear. So they asked him, “Tell us by what authority you are doing these things. Who gave you this authority?” (Luke 20:2)
A brief conversation ensues, the result of which is that Jesus refuses to bother answering their question. After all, if they didn’t know the answer to this question by now, after seeing his miracles which proved he was from God and hearing his words in which he said very clearly that he was the Son of God
Jesus knew that they weren’t looking for information. Jesus knew that they had made up their minds, and he knew that their minds were set against him. So instead of answering the question they’re asking, he tells them this parable.
A man plants a vineyard. Mark tells us that the man not only planted the vineyard but that he also “put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower.” (Mark 12:1). In other words, the man had done everything necessary for the vineyard to succeed. He had put in a lot of work on the property—work from which the tenants would benefit.
The tenants were people who couldn’t buy a vineyard of their own, and so they should have been glad to be able to strike a deal with the man whereby they were able to work a finely prepared vineyard and reap some of the benefits. Yes, they had to give some of the harvest to the landowner, but this was entirely fair since it was finally his land and since he had put in a fair amount of work preparing the vineyard.
But when the time came for the master to collect the harvest, the tenants refused to live up to their end of the deal. Instead, they took the master’s servant—who had come to collect the harvest on behalf of his master—and they “beat him and sent him away empty-handed.”In fact, the Greek here indicates that the beating was probably a bit more than a punch in the gut and a shove out the door. The words used have the meaning of “tearing off the skin” and “wounding severely.”
The master—rather inexplicably—sends a second servant, and the tenants do the same thing to him. The master—even more inexplicably—sends a third servant, and a similar thing happens to him. In fact, Matthew and Mark indicate to us that the master sent quite a number of servants, and that some of them were actually not only beaten severely, but actually killed.
Finally, the master decides that he will send his beloved son to them, assuming that they will respect, that they will not dare to harm his son. The tenants for some reason think that if they kill the son—who is the heir to the vineyard—then the vineyard will be theirs. And I suppose that in some way that’s not surprising. After all, that’s what their actions had been indicating all along—that they weren’t content to be tenants in the vineyard, but that they wanted to own the vineyard, that they wanted everything for themselves.
So that’s exactly what they do—they throw the son out of the vineyard—the vineyard which really belongs to him—and they kill him.
At this point Jesus states the obvious—that the master’s patience will come to an end and that he will bring the worst kind of judgment on those tenants, killing them and giving the vineyard to others—to people who will be satisfied with being tenants and will be grateful to have all the benefits that come from being tenants.
The people listening to the parable say, “May this never be!” and Jesus responds by saying in effect, “Oh, but it will be.” He quotes a passage from the Old Testament, from Psalm 118, warning them that the stone the builders rejected (like the son the tenants rejected) will eventually be the cause of their death.
Was not only the story itself clear, but also its application? You bet it was, for we read that “The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them.”
They knew enough to know of Jesus’ parables to know that the man in the parable was God. They knew from the Old Testament book of Isaiah that the vineyard to which the man had shown such care was God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel, for God had spoken there of a man who had a vineyard and then he said, “The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel” (Isaiah 5:7). (See also Ps 80:8-16; Isaiah 27:1-7; Jeremiah 2:21.) They knew that they, the religious leaders, were the tenants who had been given the privilege of working in God’s vineyard, of tending to the souls of God’s chosen people.
But that hadn’t been good enough for them. They didn’t want to be tenants working for the master. They wanted to be owners, running the show, ruling the vineyard as their own personal property. So when God sent the prophets to them to warn them of their sin, to warn them of God’s coming judgment, and to urge them to repent so that they might avoid such judgment, when God sent prophets to them to collect the harvest, the fruit, what John the Baptist termed “fruits in keeping with repentance”, the religious leaders treated God’s ambassadors every bit as rudely as the men in the parable had treated the servants.
How did the Jews treat the prophets? Tradition says that Jeremiah was stoned by the exiles in Egypt and that Isaiah was sawed in two by King Manasseh. The Bible tells us that Queen Jezebel threatened to kill Elijah (1 Kings 19:2) and that King Joram threatened to kill Elisha (2 Kings 6:31), while they actually succeeded in stoning to death a man named Zechariah (2 Chronicles 24:20,21) simply because he told them that their forsaking of God would lead to God’s forsaking them. This stoning found its New Testament parallel in the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:52). The whole attitude and response of the Jews to God’s servants, who were sent to them one after another, is summed up in Hebrews: “Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two, they were put to death by the sword.” (Hebrews 11:36-37). God himself said sadly in Jeremiah, “Again and again I sent my prophetsBut they did not listen or pay attention; they did not turn from their wickedness or stop burning incense to other gods.” (Jeremiah 44:4-5)
And now God had sent them his own Son. As the man in the parable refers to his son as the one “whom I love”, God had referred to Jesus as the one whom he loved, saying so very specifically at Jesus’ baptism at the beginning of his ministry and at Jesus’ transfiguration just a few days before Jesus told this parable.
Jesus tells the people there exactly how they will treat him in just a few days. They will kill him. And then he issues them a warning. Rejecting God’s prophets is a bad idea. Rejecting God’s Son is a worse idea, because God himself will then bring judgment upon them.
And yet, despite this warning, the response of the leaders is to look for a way to arrest Jesus so that they might kill him.
Can you believe it? It’s almost incomprehensible that the leaders would react in this way. Here God had given their nation everything, bringing them out of Egypt, becoming a wall around them to protect them from their enemies, bringing them into a Promised Land. And then he had placed them specifically in charge of his beloved vineyard, his beloved people.
But it wasn’t good enough for them. Enjoying God’s blessings and living thankful lives for his blessings wasn’t enough for them. They had to be in charge. They had to run the show. They resented anyone who reminded them that everything wasn’t about them, but rather about their good and gracious God. They even resented it when God sent the clearest proof of his goodness and graciousness to them in the form of his Son.
Can you believe it? With the crowd we confess the justice of their punishment, and we say in the strongest possible terms, “May this never be!”
Oh, but it is, and oh, but we are. God has treated us as his special people, not only giving us material wealth that the rest of the world can only dream of, but also giving us his Word in a completeness and detail that the Old Testament believers would have envied. He promises to protect us from our enemies, to save us from sin, death, and hell, and he entrusts us with his Word.
And yet when God sends us that very Word, when he sends us his Word through pastors, teachers, parents, concerned brothers and sisters in Christ, and calls us to live lives which not only give lip service to the concept of repentance, but lives which actually bring forth the fruits of repentance, we are tempted to resent them—especially if they dare to suggest that we ought to consider our spending choices, especially if they dare to suggest that our weekend activities offend God, especially if they dare to tell us that such sins will cause God to kill us forever in hell.
We may even respond violently towards such people—not with physical violence, perhaps—but by violently calling them names, accusing them of being judgmental and nosy, looking for dirt on them so that we have an excuse to disregard their words.
We may even be tempted to respond violently when God sends us his very own Son. When he sends his Son with words of warning concerning lust, we violently tear those words up. When he sends his Son with words of condemnation concerning hatred, we violently cross them out by saying that some people just deserve to be hated. When he says that the standard to which we ought to hold ourselves is holiness, as God the Father is holy, we grab a scissors, cut those words out and replace them with “Be pretty good—or at least better than others.” And when he says that we ought to repent or we will perish in hell, there is a part of us that thinks that someone as good as we doesn’t really need to repent.
Remember in the parable what the tenants said when the son came to them—“This is the heir. Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it—like the sort of thing that no one in their right mind would say. It’s true that no one in their right mind would say it, and yet we say it all the time when we choose to ignore Jesus and his words. We are basically saying, “If I just ignore Jesus and his command, I will be even happier than I can be as a tenant in God’s vineyard. Then I will not merely be a happy tenant, but a blissfully, indescribably happy king.” That’s a lie of the Devil, and it’s one that he is constantly working to get us to believe--because he knows that if he does this, then Jesus’ final warning—the warning about God’s judgment—will occur. Hear this parable, and know that if the Devil tempted the religious leaders of the Jews to do this, he can certainly tempt the “religious people” of the 21st century to do this. So be warned and be watchful!
But is that it? Is that all there is to this text? A warning not to act in the future the way that we’ve already acted in the past? Is there any hope in this parable?
There is—and we see it in at least three places. We see it in areas which made the parable very clearly nothing more than just that—a parable, a story, not a record of actual events.
After all, what master would be so exceedingly patient with such ungrateful tenants? And yet it’s not a fable at all, but rather a picture of God’s patience with sinners like us. Even though we have rejected his Word and his messengers in the past, he has continued to send his Word to us, continued to call us to repentance.
And what master would then send his Son to almost certain death? And yet it’s not a mere story at all, but an actual account of what God did with his Son, his only Son, whom he loved. He sent his only Son to earth to die in order to save us sinners from death.
Finally, what Son would willingly obey his Father and go to such ungrateful tenants, knowing how they will almost certainly treat him? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. But Jesus did because he loved us and because he was willing to take our place, to receive not only punishment from mankind, but also the very punishment that you and I deserved for our treatment of his servants and his Word.
Yes, Jesus issues strong warnings in this parable, and we ought to pay attention to them, lest our sinful nature cause us to respond like the people in the parable and cause us to suffer a terrible fate like the people in the parable. But in the very issuing of those warnings we are reminded of God’s goodness, love, and forgiveness in his Son. Rejoice in those reminders. May that always be! Amen.