18th Sunday after Trinity
READING: Matthew 21.33–46
Whose Vineyard Is It Anyway?
I wonder, when we look at the food on our plate, how often we think about all the people, places and processes that brought it there?
It is an exercise we often do with youngsters when preparing to celebrate Harvest.
You see, Harvest can easily become a rather comfortable, colourful celebration: decorating our churches with fruit and vegetables, flowers and sheaves of corn; singing familiar hymns; and giving thanks for farmers, growers and all those who provide our food.
And this is good.
But the Gospel reading chosen by the Church for today – Jesus’ parable of the vineyard – shines a rather different light on Harvest and asks some less comfortable questions.
Because although the vineyard in this story is fruitful and productive, the real question is: who does the vineyard belong to, and what are those entrusted with it doing with its fruit?
Jesus describes a landowner who plants a vineyard, puts a fence around it, digs a winepress and builds a watchtower. Then he entrusts it to tenants.
Notice that the tenants do not create the vineyard.
They receive it.
Someone else planted it. Someone else prepared the soil. Someone else built the infrastructure that makes the harvest possible.
And perhaps that is a good place to begin our thinking at Harvest.
We live in a world we did not create.
We did not make the soil beneath our feet, the rain that falls, the rivers and oceans, the seeds that grow, or the astonishing ecosystems upon which our lives depend.
And much else besides has been entrusted to us.
We inherit communities, churches, buildings, institutions, traditions, skills and stories. We inherit the work of generations before us.
We are recipients before we are owners.
The trouble begins in the Gospel reading when the tenants forget this.
Gradually, stewardship becomes possession.
They begin behaving as though the vineyard exists entirely for them.
And when messengers arrive asking for the fruits of the vineyard, the tenants refuse to listen. They beat one, kill another and stone another. Finally, when the owner’s son comes, they kill him too.
It is a disturbing story.
St Matthew was writing his Gospel in the shadow of catastrophe. Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. The early Christians were trying to make sense of devastation, just as generations before them had tried to understand the experience of exile.
So this parable reflects some of those painful questions about responsibility, judgement and what happens when societies and institutions lose their way.
But we should be careful about pointing fingers.
This passage has sometimes been misused by Christians to claim that God rejected the Jewish people and replaced them with the Church. That reading has contributed to centuries of antisemitism and should be firmly rejected. Jesus, his disciples and the people with whom he was arguing were themselves Jewish.
So perhaps the question isn’t:
Who were the wicked tenants?
Perhaps it is:
Where are we behaving like them?
Because Harvest confronts us with an uncomfortable truth.
We can easily confuse stewardship with ownership.
We can do it with the earth.
We can do it with money.
We can do it with churches.
We can do it with power.
A business can forget that it exists within a community.
A church can forget that its building is part of the life of a neighbourhood.
Those who own land can forget that the land will outlive them.
Institutions can become more concerned with protecting themselves than serving the people for whom they exist.
And whole societies can enjoy the harvest while forgetting those whose labour produced it.
So Harvest asks some wonderfully earthy questions.
Who produces our food – the food that you and I will eat today?
Who receives a fair share of its value?
Who has secure work?
Who has enough to eat?
Who carries the environmental cost of what we consume?
Who gets invited to the table – and who remains outside?
These are profoundly Christian questions because Jesus says something extraordinary at the end of the parable:
“The kingdom of God… will be given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”
Notice the emphasis.
Fruit.
Not status.
Not respectability.
Not simply saying the right things.
Fruit.
And perhaps that gives us a very HeartEdge way of thinking about Harvest.
The harvest God seeks is not simply grapes from a vineyard.
It is the flourishing of the common life.
Does our life together produce compassion?
Does it produce justice?
Does it produce hospitality?
Does it produce beauty?
Does it produce meaningful work?
Does it produce friendship across difference?
Does it create places where lonely people find companionship and people pushed to the margins discover that they belong?
Does our economic activity strengthen communities, or simply extract from them?
And does the presence of the Church make the neighbourhood around it more alive?
There is one more wonderful reversal in Jesus’ story:
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
The people considered expendable can become central to what God is doing.
The voice nobody wanted to hear may be the voice we most need.
The person on the margins may see something those at the centre have missed.
That sounds rather like the kingdom of God.
And perhaps keeping Harvest is ultimately about learning again how to receive.
To receive rather than possess.
To steward rather than control.
To listen rather than defend.
To share rather than accumulate.
To cultivate rather than exploit.
Because the vineyard was never ours in the first place.
We are simply tenants for a while.
So, among all our Harvest thanksgiving, perhaps there is one question worth carrying with us:
What has God entrusted to us –
and what kind of harvest are we producing from it?
Because Harvest is not only about looking gratefully at what has been gathered in.
It is also about looking at the world, the community, the Church and the lives entrusted to our care – and asking what we are giving back.
The fruit on our Harvest table tells us that the earth can be wonderfully generous.
The parable asks whether we can be generous too.
And perhaps that is the Harvest God is waiting for.
Image: Roberta Sant-Anna, Unsplash.com
