When I was a child, I was expected to memorize the Ten Commandments, as you might have been too. It was part of the Lutheran curriculum. We were made to memorize the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, some of Luther’s Catechism, and the Commandments. It was assumed that these were the items we needed to know by heart if we were to participate fully in worship.
Memorization is a chore, I never could see it any other way. Yet, once I knew them, I learned to love the Lord’s Prayer and the Creeds because they were always a part of worship and a joyful experience. Once I knew them, I felt pleasure in being able to add my voice to the congregation as we said the words together.
But the Ten Commandments – it was not easy to shift from that sense of duty to a sense of joy. The commandments are all “do this, don’t do that.” Kids don’t feel excited about rules.
Children need rules, of course, but don’t usually like them. The rules say you have to always remember to say please and thank you at the right times. You have to make your bed, clear your dishes from the table, and take out the garbage even if you have something you would rather be doing. Rules say you can’t hit somebody, even if they made you really mad. To a child, many rules don’t seem to make sense, and in some cases, adults feel the same way.
When I was serving as a campus minister a woman approached me and asked what denomination we were affiliated with. When I asked her the same question about her church, she said, “None at all! We’re independent. We don’t follow anyone else’s rules.” I assume they made up some of their own, but I didn’t ask her.
Generally speaking, I think we regard the rules kind of the way I looked at memorization when I was a child. It’s a chore. A necessity. It’s an impingement on our freedom.
But not a gift.
We don’t usually think of rules, or laws, as a gift, but that is the way the Bible speaks about God’s rules – God’s law.
In the book of Exodus, we find the beginning of the law God gives to the people of Israel. The 10 Commandments are only a small portion of it. There are more than 600 laws written in the scriptures, beginning in Exodus and going through Deuteronomy.
You might wonder how the people felt about it. Aside from the fact that they were utterly terrified by the actual presence of God in their midst, I wonder how they felt about the rules God gave them. All their lives they had been living under the oppressive rule of the Egyptians, their slave masters. They knew something about the pain of rules, they had seen too much of that.
But about some other things, they had seen nothing. In these ways they were like children, cast into a place not of their own choosing, a place they knew nothing about. Here, they were unable to even feed themselves, needing God to provide a daily delivery of bread and make drinking water spring out of rocks for them. They could not say where they were going but needed someone to follow. They did the things that children tend to do: they bickered, they whined, they cried out to be fed. They were afraid. They didn’t know how to behave in this time and place.
But God knew what they needed and gave them the law. What an extraordinary law it is! Some have summarized it like this: Put your trust in God. Take time to rest. Respect and care for everyone in your neighborhood. Don’t be greedy.
So different from the Pharaoh’s rule of brutality. Follow these rules and you shall live. Follow God’s rule and you will bear fruit.
But the one story we find all throughout the scriptures, and actually all throughout human history, is the story of people losing their way, straying from God’s way, forgetting what a gift it was – and is. And then they are no longer bearing fruit.
And so Jesus tells the Parable of the Tenant Farmers. He tells it in the temple in Jerusalem. He tells it to the Chief Priests and Pharisees. He didn’t approach them, but they came to him. They came demanding to know where he thought his authority came from. As far as they were concerned, he had no authority at all. As far as they are concerned, he is not following the rules.
So he tells them a set of three parables and this one is in the middle: There was a landowner with a vineyard. He put up a watchtower and he leased the land to tenant farmers.
The Chief Priests and the Pharisees know right away what he is saying, because these are almost verbatim the words from Isaiah 5. The Chief Priests and Pharisees get the message right away: Jesus is telling them they have failed in their duties. Just as the prophet Isaiah told the kings, Jesus tells the Chief Priests and Pharisees that they have failed God and Israel.
Isaiah’s parable says that the tenant farmers produced a bad harvest. Sour grapes. The prophet says to the rulers, “He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” You are greedy, the prophet charges, and you let people starve. Therefore, it will all be taken from you and given to others, in the hope that these others will produce good fruit.
The Chief Priests and Pharisees know this story, and they get what Jesus is telling them: you are the bad tenants. But there is another layer to this narrative, too. Although Jesus is talking to these religious leaders, it is not a private conversation. Lots of other people are listening, ordinary people. The ones who are sometimes scolded and oppressed by the Pharisees, the ones who suffer the terrorism of the Roman soldiers while the Chief Priests make cozy deals with the Roman governor. The ones whom the Chief Priests and Pharisees have failed – they are listening.
Jesus is speaking on behalf of these people, who are listening. And the Chief Priests and Pharisees are afraid. The leaders are afraid of the people, and there was surely a good reason for that: they knew they were not bearing good fruit.
These tenant farmers have neglected to live in accordance with the rules. Do you remember them? Put your trust in God. Take time for rest. Respect and care for everyone in the neighborhood. Don’t be greedy.
Follow these rules and you shall live. You will bear good fruit. Amen.
The wonderful – and maybe awful – thing about parables is they always invite you, the listener, to find yourself in them. And to hear the message God has for you.
I know that the world we are living in makes it especially hard for us to see the value in God’s rules. The rules we absorb in our daily lives value work over rest. Suspicion over truth. Keeping over letting go. Competition over cooperation. The values in our world make God’s rules look foolish. And if we abide by God’s rules? We look like fools.
But God loves a fool.
God will bless the fools, enrich the fools. And God’s holy fools shall bear fruit.
Photo by Kelsey Todd on Unsplash
