A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 8
8
The ultimate insult
Luke 29:9–19
He went on to tell the people this parable: 'A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. 10At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 11He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed. 12He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out.
13'Then the owner of the vineyard said, "What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him."
14'But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. “This is the heir," they said. “Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours." 15So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
'What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? 16He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.’
When the people heard this, they said, “May this never be!”
17Jesus looked directly at them and asked, 'Then what is the meaning of that which is written:
'"The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone"?
18Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.'
19The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people.
G. K. Chesterton once commented that it's always easier to forgive an accidental injury than a deliberate insult. Some people do just seem to have the knack of opening their mouth and putting their foot in it. Everywhere they go they quite unintentionally make offensive and tactless remarks. But usually it's not too difficult to laugh off such clumsy insensitivity, precisely because we know they don't really mean it.
On the other hand, some insults are deliberate, premeditated and calculated to hurt, and they can deliver devastating emotional wounds especially if those who deliver them are people close to us. I remember some years ago being shown a letter written by a daughter to her mother. It was the most concentrated verbal vitriol I have ever read, and it broke that poor mother's heart. If her daughter had publicly spat in her face she could not have felt more profoundly humiliated.
'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' That was the standard playground retort for such oral malice when I was at school. But the bluff is as poor as the rhyme, for names do hurt. Words have a capacity to draw tears and prey upon our minds, to sting our feelings in a way that no physical blow ever could.
Chesterton then is surely right. Perhaps a memory of some such slap in the face haunts you. If so, you'll be able to empathize profoundly with this final parable. In Luke 20 Jesus is telling us the story of what I reckon can justly be called the most shameless, the most cruel insult ever administered in the history of the world. I've called it 'the ultimate insult'. No other insult has demonstrated more brazen impertinence, left such permanent scars or been so totally undeserved. For this insult was delivered not against a human being but against the loving heart of God himself.
And Jesus tells us about it in the last of his parables which Luke records and which I think may well have been tire last parable that Jesus ever told.
Some have argued that 'parable' is a misnomer for this story, for it comes closer to being a true allegory than any of the other stories that we've studied. It's also considerably less cryptic. You don't have to struggle to interpret this one. Perhaps it is because Jesus is now only a matter of days from the end of his life that he feels that he can speak with more transparency than he's done before. So obvious is the meaning of this story that even unsympathetic listeners are in no doubt about what Jesus is getting at. I want us to examine it in three stages.
1. How Jesus understood the human condition
A man planted a vineyard... (Luke 20:9).
Jesus told this parable in the context of another inquisition being conducted against him by the chief priests and the teachers of the law. His journey to Jerusalem, which Luke has been narrating since chapter 9, is at last complete. He has now entered the city amid a triumphant procession of his followers. And no sooner has he arrived than he causes a minor sensation by throwing the merchants out of the temple. Not surprisingly, the Jewish Establishment feel that some kind of official enquiry into this hothead's dubious credentials is required. Hence their loaded question, recorded by Luke earlier in the chapter:
‘Tell us by what authority you are doing these things... Who gave you this authority?’ (Luke 20:2).
Jesus, however, demonstrates once again his consummate skill in parrying this kind of hostile interrogation. He asks a loaded question of his own, refusing to answer theirs directly.
‘Tell me, John's baptism—was it from heaven, or from men?’ (20:4).
While they are fumbling to find a diplomatic answer which will not in some way incriminate or embarrass them, he goes straight on to tell his story.
It's a story which, we are told, his inquisitors were convinced was directed against them personally. I'm sure they weren't victim to any irrational paranoia in entertaining that suspicion. Anyone familiar with the Old Testament knew that the imagery of the vineyard which Jesus uses was not original. He had borrowed it. The prophet Isaiah, 800 years earlier, composed an allegorical song along very similar lines to Jesus' parable here. And the relationship between the two is unmistakable.
My loved one had a vineyard
on a fertile hillside.
He dug it up and cleared it of stones
and planted it with the choicest vines.
He built a watchtower in it
and cut out a winepress as well.
Then he looked for a crop of good grapes,
but it yielded only bad fruit.
(Isaiah 5:1–5)
Isaiah, however, interprets his allegory:
The vineyard of the Lord Almighty
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are the garden of his delight.
(Isaiah 5:7)
Isaiah's song was far too famous, and the parallels with Jesus' parable far too obvious, for the implication to be lost on these Jewish Bible scholars. The vineyard of which Jesus' parable speaks was the same as Isaiah's. It was Israel, the people of God. The one who planted this vineyard had to be God himself. The servants he had sent as emissaries were dearly the prophets of the Old. Testament. And the wicked tenants to whom Jesus attributes the blame for the vineyard's unproductiveness: who are they? Well, one did not need to use much imagination to realize that they represent Israel's leaders, the very chief priests and teachers of the law who were trying to discredit Jesus at that moment. They were fully justified in thinking it was preached against them.
It wasn't the first time that Jesus had publicly denounced the hierarchy of his nation in this way. Back in Luke 11 there is a pungent attack, including one comment that you could almost regard as a commentary on this parable:
Woe to you [experts in the law], because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your forefathers did; they killed the prophets and you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his wisdom said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute’ (Luke 11:47–49).
It is that strange divine strategy of sending his servants to a rejecting people that Jesus is allegorizing here in his story. The people of God refused to yield the fruit of righteousness which he requires of them. Instead they cruelly reject his servants the prophets whenever he sends them.
The danger for us, of course, is that in recognizing that the immediate reference of this parable was to Israel and to its leaders, we may evade its applications for us. We may say to ourselves perhaps, just as we did with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax man: 'Ah, those hypocritical high priests and scribes! We all know what wicked people they were. Thank God we are not among the wicked tenants he speaks about.' And once again, the shock and the rebuke of the parable is lost on us. We do not feel its stinging force.
That would be a disastrous mistake. For this parable of Jesus is no more limited in its relevance to the Israel of the first century ad than the song of Isaiah, which Jesus is expounding, was limited to the Israel of the eighth century BC. No, this is a story of privilege abused, generosity despised and responsibility shirked. And as such, I suggest, it speaks to the human condition generally. Luke certainly doesn't include it in his gospel to foster anti-Semitic prejudice among his Gentile readers. He included it because it was relevant to them.
I suggest to you that Jesus is not just describing Israel when he speaks of this vineyard. He is describing for us any and every situation on this fallen and rebellious planet where divine blessing is answered by human contempt. As such his words are of relevance to the visible church, a church which possesses the revelation of the Word of God in a way far beyond anything Israel ever knew, but which again and again grieves the heart of God with its apostasy.
These words are relevant to this land of Britain, a land which has experienced the influence of God in a way far beyond the majority of the nations, but which today is almost as secularized and pagan as some which have never heard the gospel.
It's relevant to some of us too as individuals. For we have been blessed personally through the ministry of the Word of God, far beyond many of our neighbours. Yet like that seed which was sown in thorny ground, it has produced so little fruit of obedience in our lives. Indeed, I don't think it's an overstatement to say that Jesus is describing for us here in this parable the tragic condition of the whole world. This is a world which was originally created by God, full of productive potential; it is like a farm prepared with everything needed for prosperity, planted and equipped, needing only to be worked. God put Adam in the garden to till it and keep it for him, we are told in Genesis 2.
So what's gone wrong with our world? Why have things turned sour and all our hopes foundered? Why do those optimistic dreams of a better society prove again and again to be elusive fantasies, like mirages in the desert?
A hundred years ago, at the very end of the nineteenth century, humanist intellectuals spoke with Promethean confidence about the glorious future that awaited the human race in the twentieth century: freedom from illness, war, poverty. The human race, guided by science and technology, they said, was on a route to a new golden age. They were sure of it. Everybody believed it. But instead, of course, these last hundred years have seen military conflict on an unprecedented global scale. They have witnessed famines of unparalleled dimensions. And as for freedom from illness, the medical science which has conquered smallpox and tuberculosis finds itself in the 1990s helpless before the pandemic scourge of the AIDS virus.
Now in the 1990s, just as in the 1890s, there are those who, encouraged by the arrival not just of a new century but of a new millennium, speak once more in utopian terms about the dawn of a 'New Age'. Strange, isn't it, how that row of noughts on the end of the year 2000 is invested with almost mystical significance?
I wonder under what twenty-first century horrors that optimism is going to be buried in our children's lifetimes. It doesn't bear thinking about. The idyllic dream of the Garden of Eden keeps returning to haunt the human race, but it is nothing but a dream, a tantalizing, unrealisable dream of paradise lost. Why is it, Jesus, that we human beings are forever more insecure and violent, the further we advance? What's gone wrong in the vineyard, Jesus?
Is it that these tenant farmers have not yet evolved sufficiently from their animal origins to cooperate harmoniously in tending the vines? Is that the problem? Is it that their science is too primitive; do they need to update their productive efficiency with mechanization and fertilizers? Is it the vicious socio-economic system to which they are victim, with its oppressive absentee landlords and exploited labourers, seething with class antagonism?
No. According to Jesus it's none of these things. The problem is simple, he says. These people were placed in the vineyard as tenants, but they want to be owners.
‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours’ (Luke 20:14).
A tenant, of course, is accountable to somebody. He pays the rent. And Jesus is saying here that the same is true of human beings. We are accountable too. We owe a debt of moral obedience to the God who gave us this beautiful world to live in. That's why the word 'ought' features so prominently in our vocabulary. Originally the word 'ought' was part of the verb 'to owe'. It is the word of moral duty, of moral debt. Intuitively, all human beings recognize its authority over them. We can distinguish quite easily in our decision-making between what we want to do, what's easiest to do or what others are forcing us to do and what we ought to do.
And we instinctively feel that final constraint upon our choices has an unquestionable priority over all others. No matter how painful or inconvenient it may be, no matter how many people are trying to make me do the opposite, if something is what I ought to do then I ought to do it. I'm obliged by an imperative taking precedence over every other consideration. We all understand that word 'ought', for it is the word of our tenancy, the word of our obligation.
The question that has occupied the minds of philosophers for thousands of years, of course, is: where does this extraordinary sense of obligation come from? Increasingly, people want to relate it to social conditioning. 'Morality?' they say. 'Oh, that's just a social convention. We're taught certain things in our infancy, and we internalize them in the form of a conscience as we grow up.' But the trouble is that once you really believe that that's all morality is, it immediately loses its cogency and has no power over you. If right and wrong are just human inventions, then why shouldn't we disregard them if we want to?
Modern sociological analysis of the word 'ought' doesn't so much explain our sense of moral obligation as explain it away. Increasingly in our western world we are experiencing the anarchy and the permissiveness that irresistibly result from that sort of corrosive scepticism. For the distinctive thing about the word 'ought' is that it has to come from outside us, from some higher authority. And the problem with the humanistic philosophy that has dominated our culture for the last two centuries is that it has no access to such a higher authority. Its followers want a moral law but without a moral law-giver. They want personal values without a personal God. And you can't have them.
Responsibility by definition involves two parties. You have to be able to answer the question, 'Responsibility to whom?' Humanism can't answer that. That's why it's been such a disastrous interlude in our intellectual history.
But Jesus can answer the question. He understands where the word 'ought' comes from. It's from the owner of the vineyard, he says. Our moral nature just reflects the fact that we were put on this earth as tenants, not as owners. We owe something to our Creator. There is an inescapable 'ought' in the very nature of our human existence. The fundamental reason the vineyard is in a mess, he says, is that men and women, Jews, Gentiles or whoever they may be, habitually run away from that accountability. 'You can be a god too,' the devil told Eve. And in our arrogance we believe the lie and choose the path of moral defiance rather than moral obedience (see Genesis 3:1–6).
In this respect the Jews' rejection of the prophets is not essentially different from our human rejection of God generally. Paul argues that very point in his letter to the Romans. Deep down, he says, we all know enough of our responsibility to God to submit our lives to his rule. The Jew has the Bible, the Gentile has his conscience. We are all without excuse. We are all sinners. We are all tenants in arrears with the rent (see Romans 1–3). And that's why the owner intervenes in our lives. And when he does, that's why our immediate reaction, like the tenants in the parable, is not one of surprise but of resistance.
Jesus would surely have us realize that in our twentieth century, exactly the same kind of illegitimate bid for moral autonomy that led to the failure of Israel is leading to the failure of our secular vision for a better world.
Here's the root of those ecological disasters of which ecologists are constantly reminding us. Having thrown off our proper sense of stewardship for this world God has given us, we think we can do what we like with his creation, abusing it in any way with impunity.
Here is the cause of all those failed socialist dreams, of which the collapse of the Communist bloc is the most recent and tragic example. We human beings are just too greedy, too selfish, too lazy, too corrupt to make such utopian dreams of economic cooperation come true. Here is the spark from which the fire of revolutionary violence spreads its cruel terrorism around our world today, the anarchism which is convinced that somehow it's nobler and more dignified to blow up representatives of authority than to submit to them.
Here too is the soil from which the awful spectre of tyranny continues to haunt the human race, armed now with all the weaponry of psychological manipulation and computerized surveillance with which modern science has endowed it. We human beings have a power complex. Like an incompetent actor determined to play Hamlet, so puny man has ambitions to play God. And he is congenitally incapable of realizing that the role is too big for him. So instead of giving power to humble men and women who might lead nations along the path of moderation and peace, again and again we invest power in the megalomaniacs—the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Saddam Husseins—and then winge at the leviathan of control and intimidation with which they encircle us and destroy our freedom.
It all comes down to the same thing. We are not content to be tenants of the vineyard. We insist on being owners. The ingratitude of it is bad enough: that God should bestow such privilege and dignity on the human race, such potential for creative endeavour, and that we should be so little prepared to render anything back to God. But it is the futility of it which is so pathetic. For it's a rebellion doomed to failure. The insane insolence of it, that puny creatures should wave their fists at omnipotence, rejecting anything and everybody that God sends to remind us of the debt that we owe him, and think that we'll get away with it! Surely he won't tolerate it! Will he?
The extraordinary thing about Jesus' story is that he tolerates it for so long.
2. How Jesus understood his own mission
‘What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him’ (Luke 20:13).
I find a pathos in this verse which is intensely moving. Jesus portrays here the patience of God, who has provided rebel human beings with one opportunity after another for repentance, only to find himself slapped in the face every time. Yet still he desires to show his mercy; still he restrains his righteous indignation and turns the other cheek. He will offer one last chance, even if it means gambling with the most precious thing he has: 'My son, whom I love.'
But we must not allow the emotional power of those words to obscure their vital theological significance. I want you to remember again the demand that provoked this parable in the first place. Tell us by what authority are you doing these things. Who gave you this authority?' (Luke 20:2).
It's hard to escape the conclusion that here in the story Jesus is giving a straight answer to that question. 'I will send my son, whom I love.' In a remarkable way Jesus has introduced himself as a character in his own story. If we have any doubts, they are surely dispelled by the addition of that qualifying phrase, 'whom I love', because that's the very same word that came from heaven when Jesus was baptized by John back in Luke 3:21–22. 'You are my Son, whom I love,' said the voice from heaven. The coincidence is just too great, especially when you recall that Jesus had just made a direct reference to the baptism of John shortly before.
There is no missing Jesus' implied assertion, then. The prophets who came before were servants of God. 'But I am different,' he says. 'I am special. I am the beloved Son.' I don't believe that the importance of that self-identification by Jesus can be exaggerated.
This is especially so in our day. Let me tell you why. In the last thirty years or so, liberal theology in this country and indeed around the world has been conducting a relentless public campaign to discredit the doctrine of the deity of Christ. The whole idea of God having a Son who comes to earth in the shape of a man, they argue, is a fantastic fairy tale which no modern person can be expected to entertain any longer. John Robinson launched the first public salvo back in 1963 with the notorious Honest to God. Then came a Baptist, Michael Taylor, with a similar public statement in 1971. In 1977 we had the Anglican symposium entitled The Myth of God Incarnate. In 1984 one of the contributors, Don Cupitt, pushed the matter even more firmly into the public eye with his TV series The Sea of Faith. Most recently, of course, David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, has kept the pot boiling with his newspaper interviews.
The reason for this academic conspiracy is not hard to discern. It is the doctrine of the deity of Christ which more than anything else obstructs dialogue between Christianity and other faiths. And such dialogue comes close to becoming an obsession with many of our contemporary theologians and churchmen. Do you want to be rejected as a candidate for the Christian ministry in any of the mainstream denominations today? Tell the candidates' panel that you want to see Muslims in this country converted to Christ. That's all they need to hear.
If only they can rob Christ of his divinity, so that he becomes one among many servants of God rather than the 'only begotten Son' of the church's Creed, then the way is wide open for major rapprochement between Christianity and Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, Christianity and just about anything else. The ecumenical dream of a single world religion can dawn.
They insist that such a reinterpretation of the person of Christ is possible, even desirable. Why? 'Because,' say these scholars, 'Jesus would never have claimed deity. An alien God-incarnate identity has been superimposed upon Jesus of Nazareth by the Christians who came after him. He would be highly embarrassed to hear us calling him Lord and God.' The deity of Christ, they maintain, is an invention of the early church. It was never part of Jesus' own teaching. So, at least, liberal scholarship asserts.
But that, I suggest to you, is most certainly not the implication of this parable. On the contrary, Jesus here displays a clear sense of his own uniqueness. 'I am the Son', he says, quite distinct from the servants, the prophets who came before.
For the Son bears not just the divine Word, but the divine likeness. The Son comes not merely to represent the King, but to be the King. Jesus sees himself as no accident of history. He comes with the most specific purpose of asserting the Father's territorial rights over his rebellious vineyard. He comes, in a word, as the Messiah, to inaugurate the long-heralded kingdom of God of which those prophets had spoken.
There's only one way to avoid the conclusion that Jesus entertained such an understanding of himself. That is, to discard this parable as pure invention. And that, of course, is what the scholars do. They can't bear the thought that Jesus would have incorporated himself into a parable in this way as the Son, so they insist that the story has been worked over by later Christians to such an extent that its original form is now totally lost to us. But, frankly, there are no grounds at all for such a dismissal of Luke's record. Only prejudice of a most gross and blinkered kind could persuade anyone to deny that Jesus is here confessing a most remarkable filial consciousness. 'I am the Son,' he says, 'not merely a rabbi, not even a prophet. I am the Son of God and it is by virtue of that divine sonship that I exercise the authority in the temple of which you complain.'
Notice again the wistfulness of that divine soliloquy as the story continues: 'Perhaps they will respect him.' God surely says the same today, as he looks upon the church and upon the world. I know it is irritating to the modern liberal mindset to say that one religion is better than the other. In our pluralist generation all the pressures are upon us to paint Jesus in non-exclusive colours; a prophet, a philosopher, a gum, anything will do.
But flattering though such titles are, there's nothing unique about them. You can admire such people without following them. You can ignore them, if you wish, without cost. But Jesus will hot allow us to damn him with faint praise in that way. He claims to be God's last resort, his final Word, his beloved Son.
There will be no dissidents in heaven. There will be nobody saying, 'Three cheers for Muhammad.' If Jesus is right, heaven is united by a single unanimous verdict: 'Jesus is Lord.' And if that's so, we've got to listen to him. We've got to respect his authority. We have no choice.
But the awful truth is, we didn't. And the extraordinary truth is, he knew we wouldn't.
But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. 'This is the heir,' they said. 'Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.' So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him (Luke 20: 14–15).
There are so many dimensions to the significance of the cross that we couldn't possibly encapsulate its full meaning in a few words. Perhaps that's why we have to make it into a visual symbol. But in this parable, Jesus is focusing down on one element that perhaps we often miss in our theologizing about its significance. The cross, he says, is the ultimate insult. The cross is the supreme gesture of human contempt for the rule of God. The cross is the final snub that puts the lid on centuries of snubs that God has received from the human race. We could not appreciate or even tolerate anyone who challenges us to admit the debt we owe, who calls us to recognize our accountability to our Maker. So we crucified him.
At that point, it's all too easy for you and me once again to shelter behind the fact that Jesus was directly addressing first-century Jews in this parable. 'Oh yes,' we can say. 'It was their fault. The Jews, the Romans, we all know how barbaric they were. The crucifixion was an appalling judicial murder; of course it was. Why, when I watched Ben Hur last Christmas, my eyes were wet with tears at the injustice of it all.'
But no, we cannot isolate ourselves from blame in that way. To do so is not to engage with this parable as Jesus wants us to engage with it, but to run away from it. The whole point of what Jesus is saying is that we are tenants too. We were there when they crucified the Lord.
Some of us were with those Roman bureaucrats, some with those violent soldiers. Some of us were among the Pharisees, smug in our biblical orthodoxy. But where were most of us? Statistics dictate that we were in that mindless crowd shouting, 'Crucify him! Crucify him!'
Our hands were not the actual hands that drove the nails through Jesus' hands. But our hearts are wicked, rebellious and irresponsible enough to have done it. I suppose we can plead ignorance. Indeed, Jesus pleaded it for us. 'Father, forgive them,' he said, 'for they do not know what they are doing' (Luke 23:34).
But this parable surely exposes the generosity of that prayer, and the shallowness of such an excuse. For if we crucified him in ignorance, it was nevertheless culpable ignorance. Jesus insists that these tenants knew only too well who it was they were murdering. That's why they were doing it. This is the heir,' they said. 'Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.'
So Jesus would have us realize that deep down at the most profound levels of our personal honesty, we too know who he is and we too know why we don't want him in our lives. It is that obsessive desire for independence, that lunatic ambition to play god. 'I don't want any patronizing deity interfering in my life. I want to do my own thing, thank you very much. I want to be my own master. This is the heir; let's kill him and the inheritance will be ours.' We've all said it. And every time we say it we add our personal nail to those that held Christ to his cross.
3. How Jesus understood the future
What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? (Luke 20:15).
Once again, in its initial reference, this verse predicts the way in which the Jews, by their rejection of the. Messiah, forfeited their spiritual privileges to the Gentiles. Matthew puts it clearly in his vision of this parable. 'The kingdom of God will be taken away from you', he says, 'and given to a people who will produce its fruit' (Matthew 21:43). It's understandable that the Jewish audience were offended, for such a prospect tore the stuffing out of all those messianic dreams of theirs. As patriots, they were looking forward to the kingdom of God. It would be a day of triumph for the Jewish nation. 'No,' says Jesus, 'not at all. The kingdom of God spells a day of national catastrophe for the Jewish nation.'
But just as it would be foolish of us to think that the only wicked tenants in this world are Jews, so it would be an even greater folly to assume that they are the only people God is angry with in this world. No, it is with the solemn prospect of judgment to come that Jesus confronts all of us at the end of his story.
He confronts the visible church with that prospect, for if the leaders of Jerusalem forfeited the spiritual privilege of Israel to the Gentiles because they failed to honour and respect God's Son as they should, what will God do to those so-called theologians and clerics who in their zeal for interfaith dialogue deny the uniqueness of Christ? Is it any surprise that the mainstream denominations of our nation are declining in membership and influence today? Is it any surprise that new Christian groups who are not embarrassed to own a divine Christ as their Lord are capturing the initiative in our land today?
The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, is right when he talks of the next few years as critical for the Church of England. There are clear signs that God is giving the vineyard to others under the very noses of the bishops. I'm just hoping that George Carey is courageous enough and honest enough to admit that it is the defection from the apostolic faith of the New Testament on the part of some of those bishops which is largely responsible. The glory is departing from some of our mainstream denominations, because of undisciplined error in the most fundamental matter of the lordship of Christ.
Jesus confronts the nation of Britain, too, with this prospect of final judgment. For if Israel had known blessing from God's help over the centuries, so has this land of ours. For a thousand years Christianity has been the official faith of this land. We were delivered from paganism in the distant past, from Islam in the Middle Ages, from apostate Catholicism in the sixteenth century, and from Fascist and Marxist dictatorship in this twentieth century. God has spared this country politically in most remarkable ways, time and time again.
More than that, he has blessed this nation with preachers of extraordinary power and influence: godly men who have called us as a nation to place ourselves under the authority of God; martyrs who have died to bring us the Bible; evangelists who have spent their lives promoting revival. There are churches and chapels in every town and village testifying to God's signal goodness to this land.
What then will God do to us if, in the face of all that blessing, this land today turns its back on its Christian heritage and embraces a secularism as godless in its immorality and pagan in its superstition as many nations that have enjoyed not a fraction of its privileges?
Is it any wonder that economic prosperity is drying up, that the crime rate soars, that our international influence declines? Our world is littered with wrecks of great empires and nations of the past. There is nothing immortal about Great Britain.
But perhaps supremely we have to face the fact that Jesus confronts each of us as individuals with the prospect of final judgment, in these sobering and solemn words at the end of his story.
To us, Jesus' comments after the story, in verses 17–18, may seem difficult. But to Luke's readers they made eminent sense. For Jesus is fusing together here three verses with which they were very familiar. The New Testament quotes them often. Perhaps they come to Jesus' mind here because they are all about stones. And in the Aramaic language that he spoke, the word for 'stone' and the word for 'son' sound almost identical.
The first quotation is from Psalm 118, and speaks metaphorically of the construction of a house. The masons building the house discover an oddly shaped stone that won't fit in the wall. At first they discard it, but then when they get to the very top of the building they realize that this is just the piece of rock they need to complete the supporting arch, the brick without which the whole edifice would otherwise collapse—the chief cornerstone.
In its original setting this psalm applied the metaphor to the king of Israel on his return to Jerusalem after a successful military campaign. The pagan nations had treated the king of Israel with contempt, and they discarded him like a worthless pebble. But now God has vindicated his anointed one and exalted him over his enemies. So the stone the builders had rejected has become the capstone. 'It's the Lord's doing and it's marvellous in our eyes,' they sang.
But to the Jews of Jesus' day this entire psalm was interpreted messianically. Indeed, we encounter a chorus of it on the lips of the crowd as they welcome Jesus triumphantly into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: 'Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord' (Luke 19:38).
So Jesus is pointing out the full implications of Psalm 118 to these so-called Bible students who were challenging him. 'If, as you believe, this is a messianic prophecy, then don't you see what it implies? It implies that the powerful men of this world will repudiate the Messiah just as those pagan nations repudiated the king of Israel of old. But then God will lift him to his rightful place of exaltation. My story of the rejected son is confirmed in that scripture you know so well, the scripture of the rejected stone.'
And before they can recover from this startling expository insight, with a stroke of genius Jesus welds on two more verses from Isaiah 8 and Daniel 2 which also speak about stones. The Isaiah text cautions that if Israel does not trust the Lord, then the Lord himself will become like a stone over which they stumble. The quotation from Daniel speaks of a stone or a rock symbolizing the kingdom of God, which will be used at the end of the age as a hammer in God's hands to destroy all the opposing kingdoms of the earth and smash them to smithereens.
And by fusing all these scriptures together, Jesus is issuing a solemn warning. The stone the builders discarded, he says, now lies on the ground. You are plotting to murder God's Son. Careless people stumble over him to their destruction, as Isaiah said they would. But one day soon he will be raised up to the top of the arch. And for people who are foolish enough still to reject him then, it will no longer be they who fall over him, but rather he who falls on them, as Daniel predicted. 'It is a dangerous thing', he says, 'to reject me. You are playing with fire. Put yourself in the owner's place in my story and you will realize why. Do you really think God is going to tolerate the preposterous insolence of the human race for ever? Do you think he will stand idly by and grant his beloved Son no vindication in the face of his enemies?'
No, a day of accounting is coming. 'What you do with me,' he says, 'the Son, the Stone, will determine your final destiny on that day. You must choose either to be broken voluntarily by me, your rebellious pride humbled and chastened by recognition of who I am; or you must choose to be finally crushed by me, judged, condemned for your complicity in this rebel world.' This is a solemn message. But I fear it's one that, as churches and preachers, we are growing reluctant to be frank about.
It's a great mistake to confuse divine patience with divine indifference. According to this story, God is being patient with us human beings, sending one servant after another and finally sending his own Son. The danger is, we could be deceived into thinking that his patience is infinite. But Jesus says it is not. The heart of God is unbearably provoked. You must not mistake his patience for indifference.
It's popular to speak of God as a kindly old fellow, all love, who would never harm a fly. But where have we got the idea from? It certainly wasn't from Jesus. It is God's moral indignation against evil that prevents his love from degenerating into mere sentimentality. We don't really admire people who are never angry. There are times when righteousness demands anger—at cruelty, at prejudice, for example. We can't respect a person who remains in some kind of insulated benignity when confronted by real wickedness.
If there are times when people ought to be angry, how much more, then, will there be a time when God will be angry! Do not mistake patience for indifference. He's patient with us men and women, but not indifferent towards our sins. We are accountable; and ultimately we shall give account of that missing rent, account for those injured servants, account for that murdered Son.
How does Jesus see the future? He sees it as a day of accounting, a day of judgment. Samuel Johnson remarked, 'I remember that my Maker has said that he will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. That is a solemn truth which this frivolous age needs to hear.' The frivolous age he was talking about was the eighteenth century, but there's plenty of frivolity still around.
It disturbs me most profoundly that so few people today take hell seriously. Many of those theologians I mentioned earlier are universalists, insisting that hell is a sub-Christian superstition. 'Who can possibly imagine a loving God tolerating such an obscenity?'
More popularly, people joke about it. 'Well, if I go to hell there'll be plenty of people who'll go with me'—as if hell were going to be some jolly party for the society of the free spirits. I do not deny that the language of judgment the Bible sometimes uses is difficult. I sympathize with some who find the doctrine of hell confusing and unpalatable. I would agree that Jesus uses symbolical language when he speaks of 'hell fire'. But I cannot believe he would use such language unless he wanted to warn us of something real and dreadful. And I cannot believe that the Son of God would have hung on the cross amid such agony if he did not want to spare us something even worse. Of course judgment is real. It's because judgment is real that we need rescue. The very word 'salvation' would be meaningless if there was nothing to be saved from.
Here is a God, I say, who sees us as individuals walking into misery, determined to be what by very nature we cannot be; independent of him. He puts up signposts in our path to warn us; he sends messengers to try and persuade us; but we despise and ignore them. He even sends his own Son, and he watches as we murder him. Yet still he persists in urging us to come to our senses. Still he persists in urging us to discover our true human destiny in fellowship with him as tenants of his world, not as usurpers of it.
But if we insist upon our autonomy, he will give it to us. In that sense he doesn't have to send any of us to hell. Our tragedy is that we are already walking there. The one principle of hell is, 'I am on my own.' If we tell God to leave us alone, Jesus says, then at the end of the day that's just what he will do: leave us alone permanently. The Bible says it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, but I'll tell you something that scares me even more. And that's falling out of his hands.
‘What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.’
When the people heard this, they said, ‘May this never be!’ (Luke 20:15–16).
Should not those words generate a great concern for holiness in us? Should they not generate a great passion for evangelism in us? Should they not generate in us a great seriousness about this Christian faith? If we are backsliding from a faith in Christ we once professed, or if we are uncommitted to Christ altogether, should those Words not generate in us a great concern for our eternal destiny? What will he do with you?
Do you notice that phrase with which Luke introduces the finale to Jesus' story? 'Jesus looked directly at them,' it says. There's a strange intensity about that, isn't there? He fixed his eyes upon these people. What was in that look as he issued this solemn final warning to them? Urgency, pity, appeal, love? Yes, love surely more than anything. For these were the eyes which, just a few hours before, had been weeping for Jerusalem.
Can we not then sense that Christ looks directly at us? He looks at us with that same intensity, that same urgency. All the love of God for us stupid, sinful, wayward men and women is concentrated in that gaze. For we were there, with all the other rebellious tenants; we were there when they crucified the Lord.
We have insulted God. We have presumed upon his patience too long. We have despised his generosity too long. We have treated his Son as a second-class feature in our lives too long. He waits now, patiently, but not indifferently, for our apology, and for the payment of that long-overdue debt of moral obedience we owe him. He is not going to wait for ever.