Luke 20:9-19
Today, Jesus compares His Father to a landlord. And this morning as we study this parable of Jesus, we will look at, “Our Lord the Landlord.” We are going to see that the Lord is the perfectly patient Landlord, and the Lord is the thoroughly just Lordlord. Our dwelling here on earth is temporary, your place is not here on earth but in the heavenly dwelling.
The tension was so thick that you could but it with a knife. We know how things ended up with Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but on Tuesday no one really was sure of how the week was going to turn out. Jesus was answering and defeating all the attacks and traps that his enemies were setting for him. Jesus had the people on his side so strongly that over and over again the Gospels tell about how the chief priests and the elders were afraid of the people. Our text ends with these words, “they were afraid of the people.” The tension was so thick, the outcome still in doubt, that one wrong move and it could have been the chief priests who were the ones being put to death by an angry mob. With that background, this becomes a very easy parable to interpret.
“A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time.”
Jesus first mentions the Lord, his Heavenly Father, who is the owner.
The vineyard is the Old Testament Church, and the farmers that were going to work in that vineyard were the Israelite church leaders, the priests, elders, and teachers of the Law.
With that stage set, Jesus goes on with the story, “at harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard.” Everything is working according to the plan. The landlord expects to be paid by the tenants. The farmers don’t own the land, and so they owe this rent in the form of crops back to the landlord. But…“but the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed.” We’ve got some unruly farmers here, farmers who don’t even own the land they work. And yet they are acting as though the vineyard belongs to them and the landlord is the unfair one, daring to ask them for rent!
Look at the unbelievable patience of our Lord, the Landlord! After his first servant is roughed up: “He sent another servant, but that one they beat and treated shamefully and sent him away empty-handed. He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out.” No way would this ever happen in real life, that an owner show that much tolerance to treacherous tenants. And that’s exactly the point that Jesus is trying to make in this parable. The Lord has an incredible amount of patience for sinners, far more than sinners deserve.
These servants in the parable represent the prophets who were sent to Israel over the centuries. And God’s people, for the most part, ignored them, battled with them, and killed them. You might recall how Moses’s authority was constantly being challenged as he led the Israelites for 40 years through the desert.
It got so bad for another prophet named Elijah that he had to run away from the Land of Israel. Tradition has it that the prophet Isaiah was killed by being sawed in two.
Jeremiah didn’t get treated much better. He was an old man in exile in Egypt when he is rumored to have been stoned to death.
The writer to the Hebrews sums up how God’s prophets, these servants that the landlord sent to the tenants, were treated, “They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated – the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.”
How do you treat the Landlord when he comes looking to collect fruit from you? I am going to be blunt with you. There are one or two of you sitting here today who will walk out of this morning saying, “There he goes again talking about money.” The truth is this text dictates such a conversation about how you spend your time, your talents and your treasures. If you have a problem with that take it up with the Lord do not go gossiping with others, it is between you and God.
The basic sin of the tenants was that they refused to give God his fruits, and we do the same thing. God has a right to expect the best from us. Like the tenants, we don’t really own anything, not our jobs, not our houses, not even our bodies. We don’t even own our time.
All these things God our Landlord rents out to us for one primary purpose: to use to HIS glory, HIS benefit. We, like those self-seeking tenants, oftentimes act as though this is our stuff, we own it, “and Lord, I’ll get you your share when I’m good and ready.” If you ever had a landlord here on earth, you know you couldn’t get away with paying him only a fraction of what you owe him.
So why do we act as though we can skimp on our Lord and expect him to be fine with it?
We cheat God when he asks us for our time, as we tell him we’re too busy right now, we don’t have time to pray, to read the Word, to serve other people.
We cheat our Lord when we tell him that the talents that he’s given us aren’t the ones that really build up the church…that job is best left to others more skilled in that area.
We cheat the Landlord when we bring meager portions of our income to him, and promptly go home after church to read the Sunday paper advertisements and find all the cool things we can spend our money on.
We are renters who have acted like the owners. But what a patient Lord we live under! He sends us servant after servant to tell us of our wrongs, servants like pastors, elders, and other concerned Christians. God sends servants to you because he wishes to lead you to repentance.
And the patience of the Lord seems to know no bounds. “Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my son; presumably they will respect him.” The landlord bends over backwards for his tenants, giving them one last chance. He sends one more messenger, the son, his dearly loved son.
Again, the interpretation is easy for us to understand. Even after Israel mistreated all of God’s prophets, out of his sheer grace he was moved to send them his Son, Jesus. In the parable, this is how the son was treated, “But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.”
There is one major difference between the parable and the real-life event. In the parable, the owner thinks that the son would be treated with respect. In reality, God sent his Son into the world, not just knowing that he would be rejected and killed, but for the very purpose that he be rejected and killed. You can see Jesus saying, “don’t do it! It will hurt you more than me! You are going to lose everything!” But of course, Jesus had to be killed. That’s why we call him Savior and Redeemer. Jesus was more than just a nice guy who had some wise teachings to tell. He was a lamb – a sacrifice.
Many people today want Jesus to be a lamb, but not a sacrificial lamb. They want a lovey-dovey Jesus who goes around and teaches people how to be nicer to each other, a lamb Jesus who talks about giving money to poor people and striving for world peace.
So a peace-lamb? Sure, we’ll take that kind of Jesus.
A sacrificial-lamb? No thanks, that’s just a little too gory and gloomy. I’d much rather make Jesus something fluffier and happier; turn Jesus into something that no one will be turned off by.
Our Lord is a just Landlord. He just isn’t going to ignore non-payment. He expects his fee. And since we don’t have it, here comes the sacrificial lamb, Jesus Christ. Here he comes marching to the cross, because our Landlord needs to be paid. And pay he does! Completely for your sins!
That’s why the cross is literally at the center of Christianity. The main point of this parable is the cross…did you see it in the story? “So they threw [the Son] out of the vineyard and killed him.” In Hebrews, the writer describes how Jesus was thrown out of Jerusalem, and then killed. The biggest object that you see as you enter the sanctuary is the massive cross in the center of our space. The Landlord displays his terrifying justice to those who reject the Son.
God is the Landlord. He owns everything. He doesn’t just own your house, your car, or your job, he owns you. Think about that: God doesn’t just like you or is friendly to you, but he plainly owns you. We don’t simply HAVE to serve him, we WANT to serve the Landlord who has done so much for us his tenants, and has promised that we will never be without the protection loving hand. Amen.