Judgment and Love

The parable Jesus told about a landowner who planted a vineyard and then leased it out to tenants (Mt. 21:33-46) appears to be about judgment.  I have begun to question that. 

The landowner planted a fine vineyard.  He put a fence around it, dug a wine press, and built a watchtower.  Then he leased it to tenants.  When the time of the harvest came, he sent his slaves to collect the produce of the vineyard as rent.  But the tenants killed the slaves and did not send the produce.  He sent more slaves.  The same result.  Finally, the landowner sent his son to collect the produce.  He also was killed.  Jesus asked his hearers what would be the natural result of this sort of behavior.  They replied, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give them the produce at the harvest time.”  Sounds like judgment to me. 

There is another story in the Bible about just such a vineyard, and it happens to be one of this week’s options for an Old Testament reading (Isa. 5:1-7).  The parallel is uncanny.  It is about another landowner who planted a vineyard.  He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines.  He built a watchtower in the midst of it.  He hewed out a vine vat in it.  Still, despite all the effort, it yielded inferior grapes.  And then Isaiah goes on to pronounce judgment on the vineyard, the removal of its hedge, the breaking down of its wall, its trampling down, its wasting away.  It would sound like judgment were it not for the way Isaiah begins his story:  “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.” 

It is a song of love and a broken heart more than it is a prophecy of judgment.  It is a song of God’s wooing of the people as if a landowner tending the most beloved and cared for of vineyards even if it ends in disappointment.

Perhaps Jesus’ parable bears looking at again in light of the love song that its original hearers would have had in mind when Jesus told it to begin with.  Immediately after the answer that the tenants will no doubt be put to a miserable death, Jesus quotes Psalm 118 with reference to the son of the landowner who had been killed in the story and no doubt with reference to his own imminent death.  “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”  And then he goes on to refer to that stone again in the very next verse after our reading for this week ends.  It is this.  “The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”  Sounds like judgment, but is it really?

If we take the rejected cornerstone as a metaphor for Jesus, Jesus is not judgment.  Jesus is love.  Jesus came, he said, not to judge the world but that the world might live.  In Jesus, we are not broken by judgment.  We are broken by love.  And over and over, when we fall on the rock solid love of Jesus, what is broken are our own hearts.  What is crushed is not our spirits or our lives but our hardness of heart.  It takes the rock solid cornerstone to break the stone cold hardness of our souls.  If there is judgment in this parable that Jesus told, and in the love song that Isaiah sung, it is the judgment of love, which is perhaps the hardest judgment of all to face, and also the softest.

Peace,