Sunday Worship
Welcome to Sunday Worship in Leesfield Parish on the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. Our Church Services this morning are at the usual times of 9.15 at St Agnes' and 11.15 at St Thomas'.
If you are unable to be with us in person, you will find resources below to worship at home.
Our first hymn this morning is "Christ Triumphant, Ever Reigning"
Today's Gospel
Matthew 21:33-end The Parable of the Wicked Tenants
“Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went away. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first, and they treated them in the same way. Then he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:
“Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
Reflection
To understand the parable that forms the Gospel reading today, we really have to look at the Old Testament reading that precedes it from ‘The Book of Isaiah 5.1-7’. This is written in the form of a love song from God to his people. It is often called ‘The Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard’. In this, the prophet sings of a vineyard (Israel), planted on a fertile hill and tended with great care (by the people of Judah) cleared of stones, planted with choice vines, equipped with a watchtower and wine vat.
Despite this care, the vineyard produces wild or rotten grapes instead of good fruit.
God gives the people every opportunity to flourish and to thrive, but instead, time and again they produce only sour fruit – violence, bloodshed and exploitation. Therefore, God declares He will remove its hedge, break down its wall, and let it become a wasteland, unpruned, overgrown, and deprived of rain. God expected justice and righteousness but instead found horror and cries of distress.
Jesus is speaking this parable to his disciples and the crowds gathered. We must understand that he knew exactly who he was speaking to, and not least, who he was speaking about - the religious leaders, the pharisees and the scribes, and the people would have no doubt that he was drawing examples from the book of Isaiah, and relating to them in a round-about way that the leaders of this day, who were every bit as bad as those vineyards that Isaiah sang about! Jesus is warning them that the power and the privilege they enjoy as God’s chosen people is in dangerous waters – it can be removed easily if God wanted to do so. We might wonder why he is being so provocative, why so outspoken? Maybe he could have landed the parable more subtly, without the stark comparisons being made? But here, Jesus is still in grave dispute with ‘those in charge’ over the loss of his cousin and his friend, John the Baptist, and whether they accepted he was a prophet. He has launched at them the parable of the Two Sons, and then goes straight into this parable, just in case they have not quite grasped the concept in the first place.
In the parable, the prophets are sent (as the servants of the tenants) and are repeatedly killed by the tenants, (the Old Testament tells us that God’s prophets - including John the Baptist, are killed time and again by the people God has sent them to), until God sends his own Son, and then sure enough, they plot and plan to kill him too, (which of course they go on and succeed with also).
On first reading this parable, it can feel a little bleak – where is the hope as the story builds? But then, of course, comes the crux of the matter, as Jesus quotes Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Even though the tenants kill the Son, the parable points beyond death to resurrection: The rejected stone becomes the cornerstone and the Son’s death leads to the kingdom being opened to new people who will bear fruit.
The hope is that God’s love, patience, justice, and kingdom cannot be stopped — not by corrupt leaders, not by violence, not even by the killing of His Son.
In times gone by, people sometimes mistakenly thought that when Jesus says the vineyard will be given to “others who will produce fruit,” this was a rejection of his chosen ‘people’ Israel, and at this point, promotes Christianity to the theological ‘number one’. However, this is a dangerous path to tread. At no point does God reject his chosen people – they were chosen, they remain chosen. He is not talking about replacing Jews with Christians. He means that the covenant is open to all nations, that those who respond to Jesus will be welcomed and become a faithful community of fruit bearers. Christianity does not replace Judaism; it teaches that God entrusts His kingdom to all who respond faithfully — an invitation open to Jews, Gentiles, and anyone who bears fruit. In Romans, Paul explains this beautifully – he explains that God does not plant a new tree. He says there is one tree, the covenant people of God, rooted in the patriarchs. Christians are not a new tree, we are wild branches grafted in. The simple truth is the original tree remains beloved, chosen, and alive. But the new branches keep it thriving.
What was rejected becomes the foundation, what was wild is now welcome, what was broken is now healed. What hope can be found here, what love is demonstrated and what inclusion we receive.
As we journey through this next week or so, let us check that we have our hearts and minds on being the good and robust fruit bearers Jesus called us to be. As the parable states, ‘this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’ Rev Kirsten x
