Jesus does not revel in the destruction of the wicked tenants. He turns their fate back on His listeners, but not to threaten them or us. Oh certainly it is possible to get people to “produce the fruit” if you use the right threat against them, but that’s not faith. And anything that is not done from faith—be it ever so good—is sin. No one is ever threatened into faith and faithfulness. No one!
Rather, what Jesus does in the painful darkness of the vineyard tragedy, is to set the love—this boundless, reckless, illogical love of God—He sets God’s love so very clearly as a self-immolating love that will suffer itself to be crushed in the winepress of crucifixion, so that the vintage of God’s wrath borne by Jesus may become for us the cup of salvation, that we may drink and not die. Us…who could never fare any better than those wretches back then.
Sermons
It was the father of psycho-analysis, Sigmund Freud, who famously wrote in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”
Bill Cosby, not a doctor but who played one on TV a couple decades ago, had perhaps the best response: “Sigmund Freud once said, ‘What do women want?’ The only thing I have learned in fifty-two years is that women want men to stop asking dumb questions like that.”
So if women are from Venus and men are from Mars…what planets can a person possibly use to illustrate the fathomless mystery of the question, “What does God want?”
Perhaps here as well, Mr. Cosby’s response is the beginning of wisdom: stop asking foolish questions. In this he sounds like Martin Luther, who once was asked by a student what God was doing before He created the world. Luther, clearly not in the best of moods, replied, “Creating hell for people who ask dumb questions.”
But that question, “What does God want?”, drives so much of the religious engine, that it seems impossible to ignore it. If you take a look at most of the world’s religions it does seem as though what God wants is obedience, compliance, submission.
What an education John gives us by these visions. He shows us how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Neither a despairing lament of helplessness nor a tune of blustering, bullying bravado. This song in the Book of Revelation murmurs with the serenity to accept the things we cannot change about this strange world. The melody pulses with the warm-blooded courage to change the things we can change about this strange world. But this song always embodies in Christ that counterpoint of wisdom that knows the difference between what we can change about the world and what we cannot change. A song worthy to learn and sing!
This moment in Revelation is echoed in the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien at the end of his trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. In that saga, there have been so many battles, won and lost. But at the end the heroes stand at the gates of hell itself, Mordor. The great final battle of Morannon is at hand.
In the movie that battle is not as great as it is in the book. In the book, Tolkien pours into his writing all the darkness of his experiences with the horror of World War I. All his horrific memory of the trenches, the fighting, the dying, the wounds worse than death…it crowds into his words with dark imagination. And yet… despite the War…or perhaps because of it…Tolkien, like St. John, knew something greater than the darkest horrors of this world.
Tolkien once wrote, “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God…. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.” St. John could have written the same thing. And, in effect, he does in this passage today! So it begins.
You see, you cannot read the Book of Revelation and make any sense of it without the cross of Jesus Christ. Without the cross you get nothing but the wildly ridiculous scenarios painted by every Tom, Dick and Harry Endtimes Preacher. And they are legion!
God’s righteous vengeance on all the godless has already come over us. The blood of the godless has already flowed. God’s death sentence on the wicked has already been pronounced. God’s justice is fulfilled. It all took place on the Cross of Jesus Christ.