The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost Marvelous in Our Eyes Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Amen. Today’s Gospel is that disturbing parable of our Lord, where the owner of the vineyard was made a fool by his tenants. Dear Christian friends: No one chooses to be a laughingstock. You might deliberately act foolish and try to get a chuckle out of people, but that is only fun and games. No one wishes to be derided or mocked. No one wants to be the fool. No one, that is, except for your God. The Scriptures do more than proclaim that God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and His ways higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). The Scriptures also depict the Lord our God as having no self-respect and no sense. The Scriptures portray God the fool. For example, • Jesus once compared the heavenly Father to a man who had two sons (Luke 15:11-24). When the younger son demanded his inheritance—essentially wishing his father was dead—the father foolishly agreed. (Who would ever do that?) Later, when the son desperately crawled back home, having lost it all, the father abandoned every semblance of dignity in his rush to reconcile with his son (Luke 15:20). That father is the heavenly Father. The younger son is everyone who has ever needed to be forgiven. Honor, decency, pride and self-respect have nothing to do with fatherly love. • Another example of God’s foolishness: Jesus compared himself to a farmer who scattered seed in every direction, throwing seed even in places where it. The farmer did not seem to notice or care that most of the seed was wasted by drought and thorns and hungry birds (Matthew 13:1-13). The seed is the Word of God. The foolish farmer is Jesus. Without consideration of the cost, Jesus continually throws the living, forgiving, cleansing Word of God into His creation, cascading and abundant and never-ending, even only a few shall receive it. • God’s foolishness shines also today’s Gospel: There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants. … When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” Outside of this Gospel, where would you ever find such a fool as the owner of this vineyard? People like to quote Albert Einstein as having said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” If that is true, then the owner of this vineyard is insane. He sent servant after servant, doing the same thing over and over again, hoping the result would be different. Anyone else would have dealt with those wicked tenants after the first two servants limped home, carrying the dead body of their fellow servant. The second wave of servants only makes the situation outrageous. (You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to predict the result.) Then the owner of the vineyard sets himself up for the deepest tragedy of all. “I will send them my son. They will respect my son.” The owner of this vineyard is God the heavenly Father. Jesus is His Son. “The Word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to use who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Is the Lord our God truly a fool? Of course not. The Scriptures remain immovable and true: • “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). • “Brace yourself like a man,” says the Lord. “I will question you, and you shall answer Me: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell Me, if you understand. Have you ever given orders to the morning? Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you comprehended the vast expanse of the earth? Tell Me, if you know all this” (Job 38:3-4, 12, 16, 17, 18). • Wisdom and might are with God. He has counsel and understanding. With Him are strength and sound wisdom. He leads counselors away stripped and He makes judges into fools (Job 12:13, 16-17). • And what do the angels sing? “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen!” (Revelation 7:12). If the Lord our God possesses such infinite wisdom, then why does He play the fool? Why send another wave of servants when those wicked tenants treated the first servants so shamefully? Even more, why risk your own dear son to such men? God plays the fool because love demands it. We all have very specific limits to which we are willing to go for our neighbor. Those limitations are defined by self-love: Jimmy Jinglechange will give, but only so much. Billy Butler will help out now and again, but do not lock him into a long-term obligation. Betty Broadshoulder will patiently carry your burden for a while, but only if you can find no one else. Father, mother, sister, brother, wife, workers and occasional angels: your dignity stands in the way of your love. Self-respect comes at the cost of love. The Lord our God knows no such limitations. God abandons all—even the semblance of wisdom—for the sake of His love. Jesus is the stone the builders rejected because He looks like a fool; because “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23), humiliated, derided, the Scorn of the Nations. Dignity is not the issue in His rush forward to receive you back and welcome you and clothe you again. Cost is not the consideration has His hand dips again and again into the bag, fling the Word of His forgiveness and life far and wide and onto your soil. Wisdom did not deter Him from walking into the vineyard of the men who sought His life. Jesus takes the role of the fool for you without regret because love demands it. God is nothing, if not love (1 John 4:9-10), “I will send them My Son,” He said. “They will respect My Son.” _______________________________________________ Sermons mailing list [email protected] http://cat41.org/mailman/listinfo/sermons
