Grateful and Generous | The Rev. Dr. R. Leigh Spruill

Uh, the paralyzed man, uh, who needs the help of his friends being brought to Jesus.

Blind Bartimaeus who needs Jesus in order to see reality.

I know what that's like.

The impetuous and faltering Peter who nevertheless is commissioned by Jesus to lead the church.

The Pharisee who is prone to think more highly of himself than he should.

Yes.

The woman caught in adultery, her secret sin outed in a public shaming.

What would that be like? One of the many in the crowd on that day who joined all the rest and shouted, "Crucify him." I probably would've been there.

Lord, have mercy on me.

The parable of the wicked tenants, and there I am again inside this story, and I'm not the landowner.

I am a tenant.

It's a simple little story.

Jesus said, "Hear another parable.

There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower and leased it to tenants and went to another country.

When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit, but the tenants refused to give the landowner his due." Now, Jesus here is teaching in public in Jerusalem in the very week that he will be crucified, and there are his disciples around him.

There are crowds around him, but also there are the chief priests and the religious leaders around him, too.

And let's give those folks, the chief priests and the scribes and Pharisees credit because we're told they perceived that he was telling this parable about them, and they are correct, and it's infuriated them.

And they would've heard in this illustration of a vineyard Jesus taking directly, uh, an image, an analogy from Isaiah, chapter five.

A number of Jesus' parables, by the way, have to do with an absentee landlord, and likely this reflects actual social history in the ancient Mediterranean world where there were agrarian Galilean farmers, um, working on lands owned by people who lived in Jerusalem.

And our parable today is a kind of warning about any disposition to regard the landowner as out of sight, out of mind.

Because in fact, the landowner is not out of sight.

His presence and his authority are embodied in the servants that he sends over and over again to his tenants to secure the rightful portion of the fruits of the vineyard.

And so, so weirdly and wickedly, the tenants abuse and kill these servants of the landowner who comes.

Finally, the landowner sends his own son, thinking, "They won't kill him.

They'll respect the fact that he's my own son." But they do not respect his son.