Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ,
The text for this morning’s message is from the Old Testament reading, from book of Isaiah, chapter 5.
Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile 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. What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and briers and thorns shall grow up; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 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!
Thus far the text.
At the outset, the text this morning seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? This is the prophet Isaiah, perhaps one of the best-known, most well-respected prophets with some of the greatest and most beautiful words concerning Christ. Isaiah here begins singing a song of His God, who is our God, the Lord. It is not Isaiah’s song, but a song that God has given Isaiah to sing. This is straight from the mouth of God Himself. And in this song, we see that God has a vineyard. It is on the choicest of hills. Already the soil is fertile and is ready for planting, but God is not yet satisfied.
Instead, God reaches down and gets on His hands and His knees and digs it out. He picks up every rock that he finds that can divert water away from the root, causing bad drainage or erosion. He grades the dirt so that water has a chance of touching every vine but won’t flood it out. He removes every boulder that can interfere with the plow. He picks out every weed that has a chance of choking the vine. And then, finally, when He looks out on the vineyard and is satisfied, He takes joy. It is ready for the planting.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone plant grape vines, but each hole has to be painstakingly dug out. Each hole has to be dug out not too far away from the trellis the vine is supposed to grow up and onto to. Each hole can’t be too deep so it gets too much water, and not too shallow so it doesn’t get any. Each hole has to be lined with small rocks which allow water to flow right over the root. Each hole has to be lined with soft, wet burlap in order for the roots of the vine not to be dried out. Each hole is painfully, lovingly planned out and prepared for the precious vine about to be planted. And this is what Isaiah tells us that God did.
God painstakingly dug out His vineyard and prepared it for the plants He wanted to put there. He had such hope in them. He had prepared only the best vines. The breeding of grape vines is much like the breeding of horses. We know that a champion racehorse is studded and cross-breeded for the best possible horse. That horse, that horse who is the horse of all horses, then gives birth to what is hoped to be the next champion and so on and so on. It is the same way with wine. Each grape vine is cross-breeded with another vine that has the right attributes. Is it fruity enough? Hardy enough to stand the weather, cold or hot? Rich enough? Robust enough? The one who is growing the vine, the one who is preparing for the choicest wine possible knows exactly what He is looking for in His grapes. He has prepared a plan before He even starts to grow the grapes. He knows what He wants, and He has prepared the best vine. He started with a mother-vine, and then takes its roots from it. He takes the roots and shoots of that vine and plants them like a tree until it is able to grow its own roots and have a little stem from which the grape buds will reach out to the trellis it will grow on.
Do you see how painstaking this is? Not only does God have to prepare the vineyard, He also has to prepare the vine, making sure each grape rootling is ready for planting, has the right parentage, has the right height and growth ability. God has prepared for a bountiful harvest. He has chosen each and every vine carefully and specifically.
And Isaiah tells us that God doesn’t stop there. No, instead, God wants to make sure that everything is protected well. He puts up a watchtower in the middle of the vineyard. Now, why would God put a watchtower in the middle of the vineyard? Shouldn’t a watchtower be on the wall? And who builds a watchtower in a vineyard anyway? Aren’t watchtowers for cities?
Isaiah is telling us that God has prepared for the vineyard’s safety. God places a watchtower in the middle of the vineyard to guard against enemies who come from all angles. God doesn’t want anyone encroaching in on the vineyard from the outside and ruining the harvest. He doesn’t want them weeding the ground, which was a very common practice in ancient times. You see, in order to kill the good fruit that a person was trying to grow, a person would come and scatter bramble bush seeds around the field. This was a very subtle, very ingenious way to not only spoil the crop, but financially ruin the field’s owner, whose entire profit was invested in the field.
God is also placing a watchtower here in order to make sure others don’t come and harvest what is rightfully His. If one could sneak onto a property and steal just enough to live on out of a very large harvest, it probably wouldn't really be missed. But that’s not the point. It’s all God’s harvest, it’s all God’s field, and as such, He doesn’t want anyone stealing what rightfully belongs to Him. It’s also, in the same vein, there to make sure wild animals don’t come in. Boar and deer were common in Isaiah’s time, and when they came in, they would eat the leaves of the grapes, depriving them from much needed moisture- and sun-gathering ability, they would trample the roots, they would eat the grapes. The watchtower was there to sling arrows and kill what would otherwise just wander in. God has protected His very carefully chosen vines.
And of course, of course, God builds a wine vat. God has a purpose for His vines. God has a purpose for those things that He has lovingly tended to and created. He desires them for more than they are. They are more than just little shrubby vines and branches. They will bear the sweetest fruit so they may make the best wine. That wine, that wine that will be pressed down in the vat and fermented over time, it will produce the most complex flavors. It will be that wine that tastes sweet and bold, fruity and earthy. All the lovely things that wine best does, God has lovingly chosen and hoped for.
So God has great expectations from His vines. God has chosen only the best vines. And He plants them. And He waits. God doesn’t operate like some modern farmer. He doesn’t have a system of hoses that He can turn on to water the vines. He doesn’t have the latest fertilizer that is guaranteed to grow them. God uses His own created world to nurture them. He has so far taken care of everything else, providing for them everything they need to grow and do what He has intended them to do. What more could He have done for His vineyard? He created the vines, He tended them, He provided for their security, He put them in a place of prominence and a place that would always take care of them, He gave them a purpose and gave them a goal. What more could He have done?
But, what happens? The vines which He has so lovingly chosen and bred yield sour grapes. Is this God’s fault? No, He has given the vine every opportunity here in His most awesome vineyard. But before I tell you what the result is, I’m going to jump ahead here to verse 7. Follow me if you will. Here is the crux of the whole story. We find, as we have expected, that this is an allegory. It’s a story that stands for something else. Here we are told that God’s vineyard is the house of Israel, the people whom God lovingly chose from among the whole world. Israel is the people from whom the message of God flows, the promise that has been delivered across the ages: “I will be your God and you will be my people.”
And yet, Isaiah sings that God’s people, the men of Judah, they themselves have chosen to bear nothing but sourness. Have you ever had wine that has gone bad? You don’t usually know it until you take that sip. You lift the cup to your lips, drink that first sip of wine that should be so wonderful, and realize that you can’t close your mouth. You can’t even spit it out. Your mouth just stays open and it dribbles out. It’s ruined and it ruins everything it touches. Your tongue, you feel, will never be the same. Your clothes that it dripped out on are permanently stained. The cup has the deepest of nasty dregs sitting in it. That sour wine has ruined everything.
God wanted His people to be righteous, He wanted His people to be full of justice, full of mercy, and what does God get? Instead of mercy, He gets sourness; instead of justice, He gets bloodshed; instead of righteousness, He gets an outcry of pain from those God’s people are killing. And God cannot help but have mercy on the world. HE loves His vineyard, of course. He will always take care of it. But, now He must make sure that those whom His people are killing and hurting are also taken care of.
And here, the story seems to cut off abruptly. What will God do next? The whole of the book of Isaiah is spent on that. I would summarize it, but Jesus does that for you in the Gospel lesson today. In the Gospel lesson, we heard some very familiar words.
33 "Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. 34When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit.“
And here is where Jesus actually begins explaining the song of Isaiah. The grapes don’t become sour because God messed up. The grapes become sour because the people caring for the grapes led them astray. Instead of lovingly placing them on the trellis, the let the grapes grow in the dirt. Instead of making sure they watered appropriately, they got lazy and let streams of water flow unfettered into the vineyard. Instead of protecting the vineyard from thieves and robbers, the tenants let anyone and everything in to take as much as they wanted or do whatever they wanted in the vineyard. Dirty feet mashed the grapes in the vat. Horse and donkey dung ran in rivulets of goop right down into the vintage. Any animal was let in and they had their stomach full. But eventually, even the animals wouldn’t even eat the grapes, for the soil that the grapes grew up in was rancid and imparted its own fecal flavor into the grapevine.
But the tenants, oh the tenants, they grew fat and lazy in that vineyard. They enjoyed it. The master continued to provide for their livelihood. They never ever wanted to leave. And here Jesus tells us that the master now sent his servants to collect the fruit. God was going to take what was His own. But the tenants weren’t too happy with that. Not only would God discover that they had let everything go to pot, but then their lives would be demanded of them for ruining the master.
35 And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, ands toned another. 36 Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them.
Those wicked tenants took every servant, every prophet that God sent to His people. You see, if the vineyard is Israel, then we must read the Old Testament in this view. Thus, the vineyard that God intends to harvest is Israel, and the grapes are the people. But they are sour, because the priests that God wanted to lead His people led His people astray. They introduced new gods and new ideas, new wealth and new ingenuities that served to do nothing but leave the land of Israel in ruins, and ruins of its own doing. The people are always responsible for their own actions, even if they are led astray by others. They are the fruit that God planted and chose and they are the ones who let the sourness come upon them. But, God still loved them, so He sent prophets to them, prophets who would clean up the vineyard if only the grapes loved God more than they loved His tenants, the priests. But the tenants killed each and every prophet, each and every messenger of God who came to them. So God had to do something new and different. He loved the fruit of His harvest, so God sent His Son to take care of the vineyard and expel the tenants.
37Finally he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.' 38But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.' 39And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
Here we see ourselves. For we know that we are the ones who are responsible for killing the Son of God. Though we are not Israel or the men of Judah in the literal sense of the terms, we know that we are the ones who have grown fat and lazy. We are the ones who have muddied the waters of the harvest with everything that is foul. We are sinners, tried and true. And we deserve Hell and death for it. And Jesus agrees:
40 When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" 41They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons."
This is where Jesus leaves us in the story. The Son’s death is the last straw. God has judged His people. God is now coming to the vineyard to kill the tenants. He tears down every protection He built there, He tears down the walls, the hedges, the trellises, He allows the vineyard to be overtaken. And again, we see ourselves here. We should be dead. Yet, the good news is that God makes us, we who have grown fat and lazy in the vineyard, God makes us His Church. He redeems His people. He redeems the grapes, the one who chose to be sour and He makes them sweet again. He now grafts them into the true vine, the source of all life, who is Jesus.
43”Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. 44And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him."
Jesus crushes His people to pieces. Does this sound scary? It isn’t. What is a wine vat for? It is there to crush grapes to pieces, to make wine. God is going to use his grapes again for a purpose, He is making them the choicest of wines and He does so under the weight of the Cross. The wine that God makes, which is the fruit of the grapes, which is the good works that we do that proclaim the power and mercy of God IN Jesus Christ, it is the sweetest drink. It is the drink of God’s own wine, the drink of God’s own blood. What else proclaims mercy to those who desire it than the very blood of Jesus Christ?
My friends, the cross is that which crushes us, it crushes us under its weight, and kills us. It tells us that we are the sinner for whom Jesus had to die. But it crushes us under His mercy, because it opens up the gates of heaven, pouring out God’s mercy of Jesus’ blood on us through the cross. It kills every sinner who has dared to take the life of God’s own son, and it raises to new life all those whom God has brought forth to tend the vineyard. It makes sweet wine, it makes it so those grapes fulfill the hope of God, that which proclaims the mercy of His Son.
And that mercy, we hear of this morning. We hear the good news of God’s pleasure with His new tenants, the Church. We hear about the mercy of Christ, that He lived, died, and was resurrected for us and the whole world. That is the sweet wine that comes out of the wild vineyard. God takes the wild vineyard and tames it and makes it even better by the true vine, who is Jesus. Thus is the song of Isaiah finished in the son of the beloved man, our beloved God, our beloved Jesus, and His mercy for us, that we are saved even from making ourselves sour and sinful. He loves His vineyard and will remake it as it should be. It’s a glorious thing that God is doing in His Church, now being tended to by the very Son that once was dead and now is alive. For you. Amen.
Now may the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, tame your wild hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
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