2025-04-06 Lent 5

Scripture Readings

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!

As we draw closer to the end of the season of Lent, conflict intesifies! You’d think that the broken record message of “It’s Lent, Repent!” might have done some good by now but, alas it generally doesn’t. People are a stubborn sinful lot to be sure. Highlighting this is our Lord’s parable of the ‘Wicked Tenants.’ The conflict that I mention is between the chief priests, the scribes, the elders, the Pharisees and, our Lord Jesus. The ‘religious establishment’ we can call them for simplicity.

The Chief Priests were the blue-blooded folks descended from Levi and Aaron. They were responsible for management at the Temple, stewards of the religious rituals and sacrificial system. On the political front, these guys were Roman collaborators of sorts, preserving the influence and overall stability of Jewish nation in the eyes of all powerful Rome. The scribes were the scholars. They had all the book learnin’. Experts in every tittle of the Torah and its interpretation. The priests served the Temple, while the scribes served the Synagogue. These were the two central areas of worship and spirituality for the Jews. And, they form the basis of our Lutheran focus on Word and Sacrament till this very day. Our Divine Service on Sunday morning is divided between these two things. We have the scriptures and the sermon and then we have Holy Communion where the blood of the Lamb fulfills the temple sacrifices. The scribes served as teachers, Scripture scroll copyists and legal consultants. Often the scribes and the Pharisees were on the same page. And lastly we have the elders. These were influential lay leaders. They were wealthy land owners and heads of prominent families. They didn’t have the formal religious roles like the priests or the scribes but they held quite a bit of social and political heft. Together with these other groups, they made up the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of Jewish authority.

So we have all the hot-button topics rolled into one! Politics, Religion and Wealthy Oligarchs! They were the big cheeses against Jesus! What could possibly go wrong!? Logic would seem to say we might not want to tick these people off. Mind your Ps and Qs, regurgitate the official narrative on coffee row. Establishment good, Nazareth man bad. But true to form, that’s not how our Lord operates. Like David vs. Goliath, our Lord loads up the slingshot and hurls the prophet’s stone right between their eyes!

And this figurative stone is none other than His parables. The sharpness of words that dictators absolutely can’t stand and work to cancel, de-platform and outright delete. How dare you say anything different than what the authorized, news media channel tells you to say! But our Lord Jesus dares to do exactly this.

Enter the parable of the Wicked Tenants. This one follows on the heels of last week’s parable of the Gracious Father. At length we talked about the two goofball sons and the mercy and compassion the Father showed them both. What I didn’t mention was that the character of the older son was actually a dig on the “experts” too. The law-dogs, who held themselves in the highest regard. The younger son was a metaphor for the gentiles, the non-Kosher pig herders of the world. The prim and proper and perfect law follower older brother was a metaphor of the Jews. And this is who our Lord Jesus is speaking to with this parable of the Wicked Tenants - the chief priests, the scribes, the elders. Our Lord is calling them out directly with this teaching.

And notice something very key here. He isn’t calling them out with the goal of their repentance. If He was, He would have pulled them aside privately. Like back in school when the teacher pulled you out into the hallway to have a word with you. The rest of the class wasn’t privy to the tongue-lashing you were about to receive! And if it wasn’t you, it was someone you knew! The teacher wasn’t going to call the person out in front of the class for public shame and scorn. It was a private rebuke with the purpose of repentance and behavioural change. But this isn’t that! Notice the key detail St. Luke gives us: “And He began to tell the people this parable” - the crowd, the folks gathered around, the common people. He is preaching this parable publicly - with the goal of ripping the veil off and exposing the aforementioned un-holy trinity of “experts” for the wicked servants they are. It’s a stark word of law from Jesus not to save sinners but rather to burn heretics!

The vineyard is Israel. The astute Jewish “experts” no doubt got this scripture reference, back to Isaiah: “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting;” (5:7). The reference is blatantly obvious. The vineyard is His chosen and redeemed people. He brought them up out of Egypt with a mighty hand. He saved them. Preserved them. Helped them and loved them. He came looking for the fruit of faith: trust and belief and love in response to His grace and compassion for them. But Isaiah tells us what took place: “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?” (5:4). The good fruit is nowhere to be found. Instead there is only thorns. The tenants were doing an abject lousy job tending that vineyard.

He sends servants to check on it. One, two, three are sent. They are met with abject and shameful hostility. These servants are none other than the prophets. God sent them to proclaim repentance to His people time and again. But they likewise were despised and rejected. The vineyard owner is running out of options. If he keeps sending servants, they are just going to come back beaten and bloodied. Perhaps if he sent his son, things would be different. They’d see the authority and change their ways. But rather than respecting him, what do they do? They hatch a plan to murder the heir and steal his inheritance! “And they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him!” (LK 9:15).

“What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them?” Jesus shouts out to the crowd. One of the bold and sassy Jews in the back - most likely an LCMS Lutheran - shouts out “He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others!” (LK 9:16). The “experts” go ballistic! This Jesus is turning the crowds against them! They are aghast at the idea that they would be replaced. And replaced they certainly would be. Our Lord’s disciples, the Apostles, would replace the “experts.” They would feed His lambs and tend the new vineyard, the Church in place of Israel. Version 2.0 is coming and it is bringing with it a reckoning.

And true to form, Jesus doesn’t back down from the opposition. Their rage-monkey routine doesn’t daunt Him. Instead, “He looked directly at them” and cites for them another Scripture reference. This time from Psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (118:22). The “experts” are appalled at this righteous word of law and judgement spoken to them. They thought it was outright impossible that they could act the part of the rebels in the parable. They were pious. They were learned. They were held in high esteem! They were rich and wealthy! They were the elite! But as our Lord quotes for them the psalm, David himself had prophesied that his Messianic descendent would indeed be rejected by none other than the “experts!” They of all people could be and indeed were wrong in their opposition to Jesus. For He was the long promised Messiah in the flesh. This is exactly what the Scripture prophesied. It was coming to fruition, right before their very eyes!

This wasn’t the only Scripture reference about this either. Isaiah had also spoken of a stumbling stone that many would trip over. And in so tripping would be broken (8:14-15). Also the prophet Daniel proclaimed that a stone cut from the mountain would strike the nations and crush them to dust (2:34-35). Building on these references, our Lord Jesus builds His argument against the “experts” by promising Divine judgement to them and any who would reject Him as Messiah. “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him” (LK 20:18).

The “experts” wanted to string Jesus up right then and there! But, they “feared the people” (LK 20:19). Instead they, like their father the devil, would wait “until an opportune time” (LK 4:13). It was coming. Soon even the crowd that welcomed our Lord with such hopes and dreams and palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna!” would turn to shouts of “crucify!” Would the “experts” really win in the end?? No. God had already decided that the stone He would set at the corner of the foundation of the Church would be one deemed worthless by these “experts.” When they would prove Jesus’ parable to be true in only a few days time, the crowd shouldn’t be surprised or dismayed. God the Father would prove the “experts” wrong just three days after that. Glory be to Christ our Cornerstone, now and forever. Amen!