"TWO KINDS OF TENANTS"
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22)
October 8, 2017
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
"I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits."
Matthew 21:43 (ESV)
In order to understand and properly apply any of the parables of our Lord, you first have to know who they are addressed to and intended for. This parable of the tenants that serves as this morning's Gospel is the second of two parables that come right after Jesus' authority was questioned by "the chief priests and the elders of the people" (Matthew 21:23). I don't know about you "elders of the people," but as the "chief priest" of this congregation it makes me very nervous when I read in the Gospels how seriously the Lord takes the responsibilities that He has committed to leaders in His Church. But the application of this parable is wider than that. "The chief priests and the elders of the people" (Matthew 21:23) were merely representatives of the chosen people of God, so even in this age of political correctness I don't think we can escape the conclusion that this parable was originally addressed to the Jews of Jesus' day. They had been called out of the world by God and declared to be His own. To them fell both the blessings and the responsibilities of being the chosen people of God. But they lived in a manner that denied their identity. They rejected God's Law, they murdered the prophets that He sent to warn them about their unfaithfulness, and, even as Jesus was telling this parable, they were rejecting Him and plotting to kill Him--He who was the Fulfillment of everything that they had been promised and for which they had been longing for centuries.
But in all fairness, the application of this parable has to be even wider than that. (Now it's time for all of us to get nervous.) Today this parable speaks to and about us--God's people in Jesus Christ. In sending His one and only Son to redeem us from sin and death and then after His return to glory following that up with the Gift of the Holy Spirit, God was saying some pretty profound things about us. He was saying, first of all, that we are worth something--that we are so valuable in His sight as to be worth His taking on human flesh and suffering the penalty for our sin. Beyond that, He was saying that we are His--that by the power of the Holy Spirit we have been brought into His vineyard to work it so that it bears fruit to His glory. Whether we want to face it or not, this parable challenges us to examine ourselves to see if we truly are who God has said we are. As tenants in the Lord's vineyard--the Church--let's spend these few minutes this morning examining the characteristics of good and bad tenants as we seek the power and aid of the Holy Spirit in living up to the status that the Lord has conferred upon us by the grace of His Son Jesus Christ.
The bad tenants that Jesus is reprimanding in this parable are those who fail to produce the fruit that the Lord has every right to expect from His vineyard. The first and most obvious fruit is faith itself. The Lord who accomplished and proclaimed the salvation of us sinners through His own life, death, and resurrection and called us to be His through His Holy Spirit wants to be able to see that what He has done for us has made a difference in our lives. If we refuse to repent or if we reject His grace and forgiveness and continue to live alienated from our God, we are in fact making God a liar. And if those who speak for God in calling sinners to repentance and faith are met with the same kind of rejection that the ancient prophets and the Son of God Himself encountered, the ones who treat them in this fashion are denying their identity as the people of God and are relinquishing their place in the Lord's vineyard.
But faith is also to bear fruit of its own: the fruit of good works. You know, we Lutherans especially are very familiar with the precious promise of God's Word: "By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8, 9), but we often overlook the verse that follows: "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10). It is true that good works cannot save us. In fact, they have no place at all in the matter of our salvation. But neither are good works an optional thing for the sinner who has been saved solely by God's grace through faith in Christ. Good works are the natural and necessary result of faith. A person who claims a place in the Lord's vineyard appealing to his "faith" while he steadfastly refuses to produce the works that bear witness to faith in Christ is as worthless as a fruit tree that remains forever barren.
The good tenants of the Lord's vineyard are those who know first and foremost that the vineyard is not their own possession but belongs to the Lord and that they are in it only by the Lord's invitation. They love their Master dearly and have no reason to be afraid of Him, but they have a healthy respect for Him--a constant awareness that the blessings that they enjoy are not theirs by right or because they deserve them, but are gifts of a gracious and loving Father. Good tenants of the Lord's vineyard stand in awe of God because they realize that He is holy and they are not. Even though they rest secure in His grace and love, they are mindful of what they really deserve from Him and they constantly thank Him for dealing with them according to His grace rather than dealing with them according to justice.
The lives of these good tenants are a living testimony to the power and love of God. Solely by His grace, revealed in His Son Jesus Christ, God has redeemed us from sin and death and has declared us to be righteous in His sight in the presence of the whole world. That is justification. It has nothing at all to do with anything that we do or fail to do. God has also armed us with the Holy Spirit who gave us the gift of faith (through Baptism in the case of most of us) and the power to speak words and live lives that communicate the saving love of Jesus to everyone who we encounter. That is sanctification. It is a process that begins when the Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts and does not end until He brings it to completion when He makes us perfect at death. Our conversion is a work of the Holy Spirit alone, but everything that follows is a cooperative effort between the Spirit of God and the child of God in whom He resides as that child is nurtured by the Spirit through the means of grace.
Dear friends in the Lord Jesus, you and I have been saved freely by God's grace in Christ, but we have been saved for a purpose. And what is that purpose? Where are the lost supposed to see Jesus in this world of ours? --In you and me, my friends--in the words of grace and forgiveness that we speak to one another and to others and in our actions, which either confirm or contradict the words that we speak. The free gift of life in the Lord's vineyard is intended to produce the fruit of words and actions that glorify God and proclaim His grace in Christ. The Spirit who feeds us with the means of grace continues to bless us with the motivation of the Gospel, with the resources that only He can provide, and with the wisdom to use what He gives us to God's glory, so that through our witness, in word and deed, more of those for whom the Savior shed His blood may hear the Good News and join us in His vineyard.
Amen.
May the Lord bless your hearing of His Word, using it to accomplish in you those things for which He gave it. May you be enriched and strengthened in faith that you may leave here today to go out into our world armed with the whole armor of God, prepared to be able ambassadors of your Savior Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.