Matthew 21

²⁸ “What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ ²⁹ And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. ³⁰ And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. ³¹ Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. ³² For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him. 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. ³⁴ When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. ³⁵ And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. ³⁶ Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. ³⁷ Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ ³⁸ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ ³⁹ And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.⁴⁰ When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” ⁴¹ They 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.” ⁴² Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? ⁴³ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. ⁴⁴ And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.” ⁴⁵ When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. ⁴⁶ And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet.

 I went to a conference at Union University a few months ago. I was delighted when, in the course of one of his presentations, the speaker quoted William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August. It is a powerful novel. I went up to the speaker at the break and asked him if I might share a line from the novel that haunts me. Faulkner writes the line about a pastor, Reverend Hightower, who, in the course of the novel, becomes disillusioned with the church. Here is what Faulkner writes of Hightower’s epiphany concerning the church:

It seems to him that he has seen it all the while: that that which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.[1]

That line hits hard. It is not, Faulkner argues, the world that is corrupting the church. Nor is it even the worldliness of the congregation. Rather, it is “the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.” The indictment there is two-pronged:

• “control”
• “removing the bells from the steeples”

The first speaks of the corruption of power. The second of the corruption of a loss of focus. The first speaks of arrogance. The second speaks of the tragedy of the religious elites robbing the church of its voice and its beauty.

Jesus corroborates this indictment in the remainder of Matthew 21 when he continues His exchange with the religious elites by telling them two stories that illustrate two points.

Jesus shows the religious elites that they are further from the Kingdom than they realize.

The first story is the shorter of the two and it makes a singular point: the self-righteous are further from the Kingdom than the repentant sinner.

²⁸ “What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ ²⁹ And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. ³⁰ And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. ³¹ Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. ³² For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him.

It is a powerful story, and one of Jesus’ simpler stories. By “simple” I do not mean “simplistic.” There are depths to plumb here! But the contrast between the two sons is not overly-enigmatic. The two sons in the story contrast.

• The son who makes a verbal declaration of obedience but then disobeys.
• The son who is initially disobedient but then obeys.

The religious leaders were the former son. Their sins were less obvious to the watching eye, and their vows of obedience were all in place. However, their hearts were hardened. The “tax collectors and prostitutes,” on the other hand, had obvious and visible failings, but, in reality, they ultimately heeded the word of God and came to Him in repentance. The result? The prostitutes and tax collectors enter the kingdom of God before the religious elites.

In other words, the sinful person who is truly contrite is closer to the heart of God than the self-righteous person whose heart is hardened.

Surely this would have been a hard thing for these leaders to here! The lowly, the reject, the despised, the unclean, the dirty: they are closer to the Kingdom than the priests and the Pharisees and the seminary graduates! Why? Because they saw their sinfulness and came to God with broken hearts whereas the religious leaders could not even see their distance from God.

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation,” a Southern woman named Ruby Turpin is presented as a smug, self-righteous, Christian lady. She sees herself and her kind as the gatekeepers of what is proper and right and good in deep-South culture in the mid-twentieth century. Throughout the story, Ruby Turpin comments upon the various types of people within society that she has problems with, her words demeaning and judgmental. She sizes up, vocally and haughtily, the poor and those of difference races from her. Her words drip with self-righteousness and pride and contempt. She sees herself and her husband, Claud, as what good Christian people should be. After a fed-up college student hits her between the eyes with a textbook on Human Development and calls her “a warthog from hell,” Ruby Turpin returns to her farm to nurse her wounds and coddle her offended sensibilities. The story ends with Ruby standing at the pigpen reflecting on how wrong the girl was to behave thus and how right and good and upstanding she herself is. At this point, Ruby Turpin has a revelation, an epiphany. And it is here that O’Connor makes the same point that Jesus is making in Matthew 21:28–32. Listen to how “Revelation” ends.

Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of…trash, clean for the first time in their lives…and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was.

Yes, the “trash” and the “freaks” and the “lunatics” (in Ruby’s eyes, anyway) enter the Kingdom first. This is shocking to Ruby, who is a Pharisee if ever there was one. But even worse, as she sees her own kind, the “proper” kind, the “righteous” kind, entering behind this motley crew, she sees that “even their virtues were being burned away.”

This is an important point in O’Connor’s story and, more importantly, in Jesus’ story: you can hide a lot of sin behind virtue. Behind the preening there is oftentimes a sewer. And it, along with the more obvious sins, needs to be burned away.

This is the first of Jesus’ two rebuking stories.

Jesus shows the religious elites that they are more blind to the Kingdom than they realize.

The next story is longer. It, too, would have stung its hearers. It reads essentially as an allegory. Let us listen:

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. ³⁴ When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. ³⁵ And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. ³⁶ Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. ³⁷ Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ ³⁸ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ ³⁹ And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.⁴⁰ When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” ⁴¹ They 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.” ⁴² Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? ⁴³ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. ⁴⁴ And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.” ⁴⁵ When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. ⁴⁶ And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet.

The chief priests and Pharisees “perceived that he was speaking about them.” We are told this at the conclusion of the story. And well they might perceive it! Consider the details:

• The master of the house: God
• The vineyard: Israel (perhaps the temple / in a wider sense, the world itself)
• The tenants: the leaders of Israel (the priests, the Pharisees, the religious elites)
• Fruit: obedience / holiness (here the story is tied in explicitly with the cursing of the fig tree in Matthew 21:18–19).
• The servants: the prophets
• The Son: Jesus

I suspect that this story stung even more than the first. In the first, sinners are shown to be closer to the Kingdom than the so-called righteous. But in this story, the sinfulness of the righteous is laid out in shocking detail! They are shown, in fact, to be more unclean than the prostitutes and more greedy than the tax collectors.

How so? The story shows the priests and the Pharisees to be greedy in their usurpation of God’s vineyard. They are shown to be arrogant in their refusal to acknowledge that they are merely tenants, stewards, and not owners. They are shown to be at odds with the God in whose name they presume to serve as they persecute the prophets sent to them. And they are shown to be blind devils in their killing of the Master’s only Son!

Add to this the following: through this story, Jesus is clearly calling Himself the Son, the Messiah, the Anointed of God. And He is also pronouncing judgment upon these religious elites: they will be “crushed” by the rejected stone, Jesus (v.44)! They themselves are led into pronouncing their own judgment!

⁴⁰ When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” ⁴¹ They 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.”

It is fascinating to observe that what Jesus is doing here is what Nathan did with David in 2 Samuel 12. Remember?

¹ And the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. ² The rich man had very many flocks and herds, ³ but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him. ⁴ Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” ⁵ Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die, ⁶ and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” ^7a-b Nathan said to David, “You are the man!

In doing this, Jesus is showing Himself once again to be a prophet, indeed the greatest of prophets. Like Nathan, Jesus draws the guilty listeners into the story, has them pronounce their own judgement, then opens their eyes to the fact that they are the guilty party in the story!

It is a powerful moment, and one that makes points we dare not miss. These include:

• The fact that we can be so close to something that we stop seeing it.
• The fact that, in failing to see it any longer, we can actually put ourselves at odds against it.
• The fact that righteousness is more than verbosity and assumption: it must exist in reality in the human heart.
• The fact that sometimes those who know the most about the Kingdom actually know the least about it.
• The fact that our religiosity deceives and ultimately mocks us if we are not in an actual relationship with the Lord.

Again there are depths in these two stories. But there is also a twist we dare not miss: is it possible that we ourselves could hear these two stories and not see the rebuke that might be here for us? Are we the religious posers? Is our righteousness just a veneer, behind which lurks wickedness? Are we the Pharisees, the priests in the story?

It is easy to read all of this and say “Get ‘em, Jesus!” But what if we are ‘em?! After all, the Word of God is abiding and speaks to us, no?

Heed the Word of the Lord. Hear the stories that Jesus tells here. But really hear them. Are you in an actual relationship with Jesus? Have you grown haughty in your own assumed righteousness? May these stories drive us to our knees and to repentance before King Jesus!

 

[1] William Faulkner. Light in August. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p.487.