Sermon text: Luke 20:9–19
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
This morning we consider the parable of the wicked tenants. The context in which the parable is told is Tuesday of Holy Week. Jesus is no longer preaching and teaching and traveling around Galilee and Judea, going to smaller synagogues in smaller groups until the multitudes had gathered. He is now in the heart of the beast. He’s in Jerusalem, the holy city, during Holy Week. He’s teaching in the temple on this Tuesday morning, the house of God, in plain view of the most powerful men in Jerusalem.
The temple was — and should have been treated as — a sacred place. It should have been a place where the law and the gospel of Jesus Christ were taught and preached in their purity and all their clarity. It should have been a place where God-pleasing doctrine was taught and God-pleasing sacrifices were offered. It should have been known as a kind and merciful place. But in reality, it had become the epicenter of an oppressive religion of works-righteousness, of excess, and of arrogance.
On Palm Sunday, Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey as the people sang, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” But on Monday, Jesus had to walk into the temple and cleanse it of the money changers. And in the court of the Gentiles, He began teaching openly and in opposition to the accepted orthodoxy of the day. Jesus’s ministry had mostly been conducted in Jewish and Gentile territories outside the city of Jerusalem. But Jesus’s doctrine, His graciousness, His miracles, the forgiving of people’s sins had become a public relations disaster through the religious elite from the very start. But now that Holy Week had arrived, Jesus was continuing His ministry right there in the heart of Jerusalem, namely the temple.
The problem had become, in the minds of the religious establishment of the day, a crisis that needed to be dealt with immediately. Their nation and their thinking was at risk. So by the time we get to Luke 20, we’re involved in the greatest church fight in the history of mankind. Throughout Jesus’s three-and-a-half-year ministry, He had been opposed by a great many of Israel’s religious teachers. It is thought that in Jesus’s day, there were some 6,000 Pharisees alone throughout the Roman Empire. And most of those 6,000 lived in or around Jerusalem itself. The closer Jesus got, both in time and space, to the temple and to Good Friday, the more intense the conflict grew between Jesus and the religious leaders of the day.
The parable of the wicked tenants reflects that increasing tension, conflict, and the intensity thereof. The parable is the most violent of the parables that Jesus tells. The parable itself just shows how evil, irrational, and violent people can be when their own self-righteousness and do-gooderism is challenged by a speaker of the gospel. That’s why so many people get mad at you if you talk to them about Jesus or the gospel. It’s why they tune you out and turn you off.
The parable itself is based on a poem, though, from the book of Isaiah, chapter 5. There’s a shorter version of it: “Let me sing for my beloved a song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting; and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, an outcry!”
The hearers of the parable of the wicked tenants knew immediately the image and the Bible verses that Jesus was invoking from the Old Testament. They knew that the vineyard represented the land of Israel. They knew the landowner was the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, Himself. They knew that the vine growers who rented the vineyard, the ones who were supposed to take care of the vineyard’s fruit and pay the landowner, were the priests and the rabbis and the Levites, the scribes and the Pharisees. They also understood that the servants who were sent to collect what was owed to the landowner, the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, were in fact prophets of the Old Testament. And that the son that was sent would be the Son of God, the promised Messiah. They all understood that, and so did the Pharisees and scribes and Sadducees and religious leaders who heard Jesus tell that parable for the first time. They knew what their forefathers had done to one prophet after another. Some were imprisoned, others tortured, still others hunted, and even some of them killed for speaking God’s word of judgment on the leaders and the nation of Israel and Judah, for calling them to repentance, to return back to the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, and receive from Him the repentance and the forgiveness of sins He had promised.
The closer Jesus got to Jerusalem, the more He began to teach His disciples that He would be rejected, beaten, crucified, die, and rise on the third day. In the telling of this parable, Jesus was making it clear what the religious leaders were going to do and who would be ultimately responsible for His murder. In the parable, Jesus reminds the hearers: the landowner has sent one servant after another, and each time they’re beaten, treated shamefully, and sent back empty-handed to the landowner. Jesus brings the hearers of the parable from recalling that of the Old Testament and drops them straight into the middle of the present reality. That is, He takes them from remembering what was to acknowledging what is the case now: that nothing has changed. They, like their forefathers before them, want nothing more than the prophet and the son’s silence. He brings them from Israel’s rejection and Judah’s rejection of God’s word to their present and greater rejection of God’s only begotten Son, Jesus Christ Himself.
Verse 13 and following: “Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’ But when the tenants saw him, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Let us kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours.’ And they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.” And Jesus then asked the scribes, the hearers of the story: “What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” And they responded, “Surely not!”
Remember what Simeon told Mary and Joseph about their son, baby Jesus, in Luke 2:34. Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed — and a sword will pierce through your own soul also — so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.” In the parable of the wicked tenants, Jesus was revealing in parable form their thoughts and intents. Jesus also warned them that the Father would not allow the evil to go unpunished. The vineyard will be taken away from them and given to another, namely to Gentile Christians, and they themselves will be destroyed.
There was no question in anybody’s mind what the parable meant. Jesus walked right into the den of thieves and murderers and told them what they were going to do to the very Son of God. Jesus wasn’t just telling a moral parable. Jesus was prophesying about what was about to happen. And the priests and the scribes who heard were offended at this prophecy pretending to be a parable and how it was revealing to the world their thoughts and intents. Their intention and most inner thoughts were being revealed, and they were outraged that people could see what kind of scoundrels they really were. “The scribes and the chief priests sought to lay hands on him at that hour, for they perceived that he had told this parable against them, but they feared the people.”
The gospel of John adds another little detail: “So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, ‘What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.’” There’s the motive. They want religious power over the people. They want their own seats. Even if their nation is a puppet nation of the Roman government, they want their religious beliefs and their works-righteousness to be the law of the land, and they want to be in charge of enforcing it.
But their reasoning as vine growers is rather idiotic. They say to each other, “This is the heir. Let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” They just didn’t let workers go around killing people and taking their inheritance. It didn’t work that way. But if you ever try to deal with unbelievers, they’re quite unreasonable and irrational from time to time. Deep down, they believe that their bloodlines and their good works have earned them the right to a coup d’état. You might recall how Paul talked about his former self when he was actually Saul, the unconverted zealot of the Jewish religion: “If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”
Three days after Jesus told this parable, the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the chief priests forced Pilate into a political corner and ultimately got him to crucify the Lord Jesus Christ. They thought that by killing the Son, their positions of power in the nation would be secure. But they were wrong. But so it is always with the church in all times, in all places, in all generations. C.F.W. Walther, the first president of the Missouri Synod, wrote this about the church’s life in the world: “As soon as God’s Word is proclaimed, people split up into two camps. Some will receive it with joy. Others will be offended by it and will begin to hate and persecute those who receive it. The church is not a kingdom that can be built up in peace. It is located within the domain of the devil, the prince of this world. And accordingly, the church has no choice but to be at war at all times in all places. It is the church militant, and will remain such until the very blessed end of time.”
Jerusalem and Holy Week were the place and the time where the greatest church fight in all of history was fought and won: won by God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father desired only that which belonged to Him rightfully: faith, devotion, and the love of His adopted children. In order to receive what rightly belonged to Him, God had to send His only begotten Son as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world.
The parable of the wicked tenants is a parable about Holy Week. And it’s really about everyday life and the battle that a Christian must face between right and wrong, sin and virtue, good and evil. Jesus ended the parable of the wicked tenants with a quote from Psalm 118:22. And then He adds a little commentary Himself: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” And just in case they didn’t get it — those scribes and Pharisees and priests, which they did — Jesus drives the point even deeper into their hearts and minds and warns them: “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.” He’s telling them they can’t win. They can’t prevail, even though they think they can. He’s the cornerstone of which Psalm 118 spoke. Just as the builders rejected the stone in the psalm, so the Jewish leaders were rejecting Jesus the Christ. They tried Him, sentenced Him, handed Him over to Pilate so that the execution could be carried out.
This parable teaches that the Father sent the Son, and that the Son willingly came into the world to suffer at the hands of sinners: to save us, to deliver us into the hands of our heavenly Father, and there receive our promised inheritance of a heavenly mansion and eternal life. We will not be crushed by the stone which the builders of this world have rejected. We have been placed upon the rock of our salvation. He is our foundation. By God’s grace and patience, our heavenly Father has sent His beloved Son and given His word to us in the waters of Holy Baptism. And soon the beloved Son will come to us in, with, and under the sacrament of the altar of bread and wine. And we will not be moved, but will be secure. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.