Isaiah 5:1–7
Psalm 80:7–15
Philippians 3:4b–14
Matthew 21:33–46
“I can’t make you love me if you don’t. I can’t make your heart feel something it won’t…” This is the opening line of Bonnie Raitt’s song I Can’t Make You Love Me, one of the best songs about unrequited love I know. It is so easy to connect with this pain over loving someone so intensely and then, loving till you just could not love anymore, you find your dearest beloved not returning your affections, but trampling on them. This song brings up sensory memories for me—the aching pain in the belly, the stinging of tears in my eyes, the lump in my throat. They are not pleasant feelings, but those very feelings can actually help us access the mind and heart of God today.
Because another one of the best songs about unrequited love is today’s OT reading from Isaiah. Isaiah sings not of an almighty God, but of a heartbroken God, a vulnerable and dejected God. A God who knows what it is like to love, desperately and deeply, and to be rejected. Isaiah sings of the people that God had created and tended and nourished who now turn their back on God. “What more could I do for my vineyard than what I have done?” God wails in a voice like Bonnie Raitt’s. God knows how it feels to have been kicked to the curb.
So I understand why Isaiah’s love song concludes with God vowing not to water the vineyard anymore, nor to cut back the brambles and briars anymore, but to just allow it destroy itself with the help of external threats—threats that God will no longer fend off. What else could that vineyard expect? What else could a God of justice do? If the vineyard doesn’t yield after all the effort that God has put into it, who could blame God for wanting to give up and try again with a different vineyard?
This lament from Isaiah was a familiar one to the people of Jesus’ time. They had heard this song many times, and they knew the parallel between God’s beloved vineyard failing to yield sweet grapes, and the people of God failing yield justice and mercy. They would have recognized the echo of this song about God’s broken heart: “He looked for justice, but behold: bloodshed! For righteousness, but behold: an outcry!” It was a common household song, just as vineyards were a common, everyday parts of their lives. Maybe even as they stood there listening to Jesus they were surrounded by vineyards. Depending on the time of year, they may have been looking at vines overflowing with juicy grapes and lush foliage, or cut back stubs after the harvest.
It’s likely some of the crowd listening to Jesus had worked as tenant farmers on land owned by absentee landlords, and knew the struggle of working land that was not theirs. And they would have been familiar with what caused sour grapes—vines that were too shallow to reach the groundwater for sustenance. The new twist Jesus gives to the old story, however, is that in his parable, the vineyard is not destroyed. As Jesus tells the story, a landowner leaves his precious vineyard, fully operational, in the hands of tenants. The tenants are called upon to steward the vineyard and to cause it to be fruitful.
In Jesus’ story the fault lies not with the vineyard, but with those left in charge of it. It would seem that if the tenants did not care for the grapes and did not yield the produce to the landlord, that he could fire them and get some other, more responsible workers. Why then does the owner in Jesus’ parable keep trying to reason with uncooperative hired help? Maybe it’s the reason we put up with people in our own lives who keep disappointing us. Maybe he loved them. Maybe he wanted to give them another chance to show that they were worthy of his esteem.
But did they? No. Though the landowner sends messenger after messenger, pleading with them to live up to their callings, they kill the messengers without a thought. Finally the landowner can think of no other way to communicate his affection to his workers than to send them his beloved, beautiful son. “Surely this will show them how much I honor them, and long for them to reciprocate!” But they did not see the honor being done them in having the most precious treasure of their landowner sent to address them. They only thought of ways that they could hang onto what they had come to think of as theirs. It wasn’t of course. Even after they killed the landowner’s son, it was still his land. And they were still tenants. Only now they were also murderers. And heart-breakers.
We could blame people oh-so-long-ago and far away for killing God’s son and breaking God’s heart. We could swear we would never be so callous. But let’s consider what has become of God’s vineyard. Who has been asked to care for God’s land now? You and me. As the church, how are we doing with caring for the earth? Has our loving attention to God’s vineyard resulted in new life and growth? Or have we abused or neglected creation? Ask a polar bear. Or the ozone layer. In our time, the environment is being destroyed, polluted, privatized, and generally misused at an unprecedented rate.
At the same time, we must ask ourselves if we are completely innocent of the crime of wreaking violence on the people God loves. There are wars all around us. There is constant chaos in our nation, bringing into the open nasty secrets about racism and poverty that we’d rather not have exposed. There is corruption in our corporations and our government. There is distress in our school systems and communities. In our own homes, there is pain. In our own hearts there is chaos. God’s vineyard isn’t really flourishing under us, is it?
It’s gut-wrenching for us, and we can only imagine it is worse for God. We may not wish to break God’s heart. But we do. Every act of injustice, every act of justice left undone, breaks the vineyard owner’s heart. Should we expect the absentee landlord to return at any moment and throw us out? What hope is there for us?
This is the hope. In the story Jesus told, the tenants killed the landowner’s son and left him out of the vineyard. Can you see him there, his body thrown up against the wall, a jumble of arms and legs, lifeblood seeping into the ground? Seeping, perhaps, under the wall that surrounds the vineyard? Seeping through the irrigation system and down the rows of vines where it touches their deep, deep roots? Can you see the blood mingling with the soil, making it richer and more fertile with the Son’s own lifeblood? Long after the landowner’s dead son is buried, his blood remains a love offering that sustains and nurtures the vines that grow in that soil. Year after year, century after century, the grapes from that vineyard continue to be gathered and collected at harvest, put into great vats where they are crushed and made into wine. One wine, shipped all over the world.
I know we picture God as the Absentee Landlord in this parable, but the truth is that God is not absent. Even when we’d rather pretend God is far, far away, it isn’t true. God is right here, present within and around us. God did not destroy the Vineyard or the tenants, but lives on that very land among those very tenants. God’s love permeates every part of creation. God’s love is in the soil under our feet. It is in the living things that spring out of that soil. It is in the hands that tend to the living things that spring from that soil. It is present in the wine which will be offered shortly to you with this promise from Jesus: “This is my blood, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sins.”
Let us turn to our heartbroken God and offer our own broken hearts. All the ways that we’ve been less than dedicated tenants AND all the ways we have been very good workers, but seen no results. All the ways we’ve found meaning in our jobs in the vineyard AND all the ways that we have not. All the ways we’ve hoarded the joy of this land as if it were our own AND all the surprising moments of generosity in ourselves and others. Let’s bring it all to God. Let’s bind up one another’s breaking hearts and rededicate ourselves to caring for creation. Such love is exactly what the master of the vineyard most longs for. Amen.
~Pastor Susan Schneider
Trinity Lutheran Church 