DAILY BYTEWe could sum up the message of this parable in the following way: If you act like you own the vineyard, if you impose your rules about who shares in it and try to control how it all should be, and if you become greedy and selfish, then your whole world will shrink down into a little patch of land that will almost certainly become blood-stained.
Blood-stained because death will occur – death in relationships, death in community, and death in certain parts of you as well.
So let me ask you a personal question. How are you living right now?
For example, how are you responding to some of the crises that the world and our country are presently facing? Power struggles, corruption charges, economic turmoil, stock market plunges, and the seemingly never-ending spiral of crime and pain and fear.
If you are anything like me then your temptation is to hunch down into your particular patch of vineyard, into the parts of life you feel you can still control. To put up walls and to refuse to reach out in any way. It’s hard enough to keep yourself going most of the time, never mind worrying about others.
But the unrelenting challenge of this parable, repeated in 3 different gospels, is that to do this is actually the worst response we could possibly have. That kind of response only shrivels us up, leaving us angry and desperate, impoverished by our selfishness and fear.
No, keep remembering that all is God’s. As hard as it is to do sometimes, we need to keep trusting that reaching out in Jesus-like love is needed NOW more than ever.
Keep reminding yourself that the vineyard is God’s, and that the greatest way we can express that truth is in radically sharing God’s love with everyone – not just some, and not just those like us who we find easy to love, but even our enemies and those we fear or dislike. If we do that then we will know the fruit of the Kingdom because we will be sharing the fruit of the Kingdom.
And if we do this, then our little corners, our hearts, lives and being, will expand and it will be as if the whole world is our vineyard. Of course it will be shared with many others, but it will be wide and free and full.
Almost always, the message of this parable leaves us feeling angry and challenged. Certainly it caused me to sulk more than a little, and it may well affect you in the same way. With Jesus’ original audience it seemed to have caused enough anger for people to begin plotting his violent death.
But here’s hoping that for all of us who hears its message today, that it becomes for us a source of life.
PRAY AS YOU GO
Loving God, we ask that you would expand our hearts and our lives. Even in these troubled and difficult times, help us to continue reaching out with the very same love you have reached us with. Amen.
FOCUS READING
Matthew 21. 42 NRSV
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 amazing in our eyes”?
