Preached at Christ Church, Worton; Holy Cross, Seend; and Christ Church, Bulkington
Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46
“…the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”
Did you know developing countries don’t always make all the money they should from their natural resources, because so many of their products are processed and finished elsewhere, and that’s where the real money is to be made. So copper is sent from Zambia to China to be turned into wires, and cocoa is sent from Ghana to Switzerland to be turned into… Toblerones.
So, the tenants in today’s Gospel reading are really fortunate to have a landlord who hasn’t just let some land to them, but has also provided a winepress – a significant capital investment for their benefit. Rather than just selling grapes, they can sell wine, which is where the real profits are. Are they grateful to him for that? Not at all – they beat up and even kill his servants when they come to collect the rent, which is due in the form of produce of the land, specifically its fruit.
The landlord’s patience with these ungrateful tenants is incredible. Long after most would have hired some hard men to enforce payment, he persists in asking them nicely. In the end, he sends his own son – and they kill him too, hoping to steal his inheritance. Talk about ingratitude!
Maybe the money they’re making has led them to believe they’re landowners rather than just tenants, that they’ve made this profitable wine entirely on their own and haven’t needed help from the landlord.
The landlord is God; his son is Jesus Christ; the tenants are the Jewish leaders, who have not paid God back for what He has done for them. When Jesus told the chief priests and elders this story, they replied that the ungrateful tenants deserved to be put to a miserable death and their land given to a more co-operative tenant. Then they realised He was talking about them – and started looking for a way to arrest Him.
Something we want to remember in this exchange between Jesus and the chief priests, is that there was a long history of the self-proclaimed holy men of Jerusalem killing prophets, and this story is set on the Tuesday of Holy Week. Within three days the chief priests will be instrumental in the beating and killing of Jesus. They didn’t recognise a prophet right in front of them. They have already said what sort of response their own behaviour would rightly deserve. They had forgotten they were merely tenants of God’s kingdom, who showed little gratitude for the favourable terms they had received.
It’s easy for us to say, “What terrible people those Pharisees must have been”, but the adoring fans who crowded round to hear Jesus teaching in the Temple also turned on Him and jeered Him as He was put to death. Even His closest followers nearly all went into hiding, denying they ever had anything to do with Him.
We like to think we’d be one of the chosen handful who stayed with Jesus right to the end, but that’s unlikely given we put such little effort into following Him in a free society where it costs us nothing. How much effort do we put into money and material comfort compared with prayer and Bible study? I know how little it is for most people, because I know how little it is for me. I’d batter my granny out of the way for a hundred quid article commission but I’m not always the most regular at saying my daily office. The things of the world bewitch us, and we live at a time when entertainment and consumption have never been so alluring. Our society’s rich Christian inheritance of literature, music, and art is neglected, even by Christians.
Like the ungrateful tenants who forgot that their landlord provided them with a winepress, we think that our prosperity and freedom are entirely a result of our own cleverness and skill. We have forgotten that it is all leased to us by God. Perhaps that’s why we’re making such a mess of looking after our environment. What inheritance will we leave the generations after us?
4 October is St Francis’ Day, and because Francis had such a special love for animals and the natural world, the Church takes a particular interest today in caring for creation. Francis’ father was a cloth merchant, who made his money from finished goods produced from what others had supplied. Young Francis had plenty of money and partied hard, then tried soldiering, but nothing satisfied him.
One day, praying in the crumbling church of San Damiano outside Assisi, he heard the crucifix speak, “Francis, go and repair my house.” He took it literally, sold a bale of his father’s cloth and gave the money for the repairs. His furious father dragged him to court. Francis handed back the money, took off his clothes, laid them at his father’s feet, and said that from now on he would call no one father but his Father in heaven.
The life Francis lived after giving up material things changed the world of his own time and still has an impact on our world today: there are about forty thousand friars and nuns, and a quarter of a million laypeople in the world who dedicate themselves to living and praying like Francis did.
St Paul was cut from a similar cloth to Francis. The inheritance he didn’t accept was a spiritual one. He reminds us in today’s first reading, from the Letter to the Philippians, that back in the day he was a Pharisee himself, and a successful religious entrepreneur, a preacher influential enough to summon a mob when he needed one.
But Paul lost all that when he decided to follow Jesus. Paul is much poorer materially as a result of following Christ, and much less respectable in the eyes of society, and has often been beaten up and imprisoned because of his preaching. But because he has kept his eyes on the real prize, he is content. He trusts that God will reward him with eternal life, so he knows that what seems to be loss in the eyes of the world is pure profit in the only currency that really matters.
But we aren’t all cut out to be like Paul. Instead, we should trust that God will provide all we need – in fact, all that our hearts truly desire. What does God want from us? Well, it is symbolically significant that in the parable of the ungrateful tenants, the rent is fruit, and a winepress has been provided. God wants us to bear fruit in the world He has loaned to us, to pay the rent on our spell in creation through rich, full lives, lived in both enjoying His bounty and in loving service to our neighbours.
It is when we forget that each of us is only a tenant on this Earth for a short time – and forget who our landlord is – that things go wrong. As well as enjoying the fruits of God’s bounty, and being faithful in praising God and loving Him, an important part of your job as a Christian is trying to create a world where everyone shares in those fruits; one where everyone, even the people who harvest the cocoa, gets to share the Toblerone.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.