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February 27, 2005
How to Catch God’s Notice
How to Catch God’s Notice
Psalm 27 / Jonah 2: 1-6
Matthew 21: 28-32
February 27th, 2005
In our Wednesday evening study and fellowship group we are memorizing a couple verses in Isaiah that are very reassuring. “Fear not, I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” “When you pass through the waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy one of Israel.” Your are precious to me.
We are memorizing these verses together because they build in us a view of ourselves essential not only to Old Testament religion, but also to faith in Jesus Christ. He told us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
This last promise comes to us just after urging us, “Be content with what you have.” The promises and commands of God are woven together through Scripture. We often remember the promises of comfort, and this is good. But it is needful to remember the commands as well. Part of the honor that Jesus extended to His followers was that He expected much of them. The God Jesus showed us is not only tender and compassionate, slow to anger and quick to mercy, He also expects a lot of us.
During the week after Palm Sunday Jesus went into the Temple and taught those who gathered around Him. Matthew doesn’t tell us what Jesus was teaching. But the Gospel tells us that the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching. They asked Him by what authority He taught. Jesus replied with some questions of His own. He ended with the question, “What do you think?”
Sometimes you and I ask that question and get the reply, “Think about what?” Well, Jesus anticipated their question, “about what?” with a parable of a man who two sons. It is one of the most thought-provoking parables in the New Testament.
It is a parable that came to my father with some force during his first term as a missionary in India as he observed the way of life of the Hindu pundits who taught him Hindi. They were extraordinary men. They were well-educated, humble, honest, kind, patient, devout, and moral. In fact, he was troubled as he compared their way of life with the way of life he found among a number of missionary colleagues. Dad told me this late in life as he opened more vistas of his early life to me. Dad believed and taught that we are saved by grace through faith, and not by works. But he also remembered that Paul wrote in Ephesians 2: 10 that we are saved “unto good works that God has prepared before hand that we should walk in them.” The Gospel is not only about salvation, rescuing us from a Christless eternity, but also about a way of life now. To be a Christian is to be summoned to an extraordinary way of life.
His Hindu teachers would have politely answered, “no” if he asked them “Have you trusted in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” But Dad found among some colleagues and in himself who had professed faith in Christ an expectation of quality of life far inferior to the way of life these men cultivated. They were justified by faith not works. Attitude of “works not necessary but recommended, as it were.”
And he had come to mind, in that free association that sometimes comes to us, this parable of the man who had to sons. The first son said, “No,” when his father told him to go work in the vineyard. But he then repented and went to work in the vineyard.
The second son replied to the same command, “Go work in my vineyard,” by saying, “Yes, sir, right away.” But he did not go. Jesus asked the chief priests and the elders who gathered around Him, critical of His teaching, “Which of the two sons did the will of his father?” They replied as we would, “The first.”
The concern that began to brew in my father, and which he taught to me, and which I have thought about an awful lot in the course of my years as a pastor is this. In the spread of the Christian faith we have placed a very high premium on saying, “Yes” to Jesus.
But what happens after saying, “Yes” to Jesus? But what about the working in the vineyard afterwards?
Saying “Yes” to Jesus is to open up a vista of life rich with unfolding possibilities. Jesus taught us, “I am the vine, and you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.” Changing the order of Jesus words we read just before this, “Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away.”
Jesus did not intend the Church to be like a vine loaded with fruitless branches. We attach ourselves to Jesus—the vine by saying, “Yes” to Him. But then what? It is here that Jesus’ parable of the man who had two sons presents itself to us as Jesus’ opinion of fruitless Christians. Are we are like the second son who said, “Yes, sir, I go to work in your vineyard,” but then do not go? Or are we like the first son, who said, “no” but then got to work in obedience to his father?
Two sobering questions.
These are two questions that bear reflection during this season of Lent. What a high quality of life you and I have been called to live—we who have said, “Yes” to Jesus. It is useful for us to ask ourselves, am I working in the vineyard?
Let’s back up and look at those to whom Jesus told this parable. It was to the chief priests and elders of the people. The chief priests largely made up the Sanhedrin, the supreme court of the Jewish people in Jerusalem. They were chosen mainly from the Sadducees, the strict constructionists of the Bible’s laws. So the priests not only offered sacrifices, they were the Supreme Court of the Jewish the people.
The “elders” were the scribes and Pharisees. The scribes were important because they copied the Torah scrolls. Painstakingly they would copy the Bible letter by letter, and had to do it perfectly. The Scribes also were authorities on the Bible. They explained what it meant.
The Pharisees were the thoughtful interpreters of implications of the law. They did for all the laws what Jesus did when he said that “Do not commit adultery” means as well, “Don’t look lustfully on a woman,” and “Do not kill,” means, “Don’t hate someone and don’t destroy their character with what you say about them.”
So Jesus was talking to the religious cream of the crop, at least in some formal sense. If anybody knew the score, they did. The reason Jesus asked them the question with which the story ends, “Which of the two did the will of the father?” was that the chief priests and elders believed they had said, “Yes” to God.
What Jesus said next must have bewildered them as much as it does us. “Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” Certainly Jesus was not endorsing their way of life. Tax collectors robbed the people and harlots seduced them. Both were like sons who said “No” to God. But then they repented. Jesus stood in line with tax collectors and harlots to be baptized by John. Their lives changed. John told them what Jesus would later say to a woman caught in the act of adultery, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
And these who were forgiven much were overwhelmed with gratitude. They lavished on God their gratitude. Zacchaeus, the short tax-collector who climbed a Sycamore tree to see Jesus and then invited Him to dinner restored to those he had robbed more than he took from them, four times more. He had lived a life saying “No” to God, but then he repented and did the works that please God lavishly—giving to the poor, restoring what he defrauded fourfold.
We can imagine what the harlots did whom Jesus forgave. Perhaps they blossomed in works of love and mercy to the wretched of the earth. We don’t know. The Gospels show us one picture of a woman whose life Jesus rescued. Her gratitude is so lavish it is almost unseemly. Jesus said they entered the Kingdom of God before the people well known for saying, “Yes” to God.
Jesus’ disciples were more than eavesdroppers as Jesus told this parable to the chief priests and elders. Jesus intended them to listen because they would become apostles. As apostles, their task would be to urge people to say, “Yes” to Jesus.
Part of our dilemma in reflecting on such a sobering parable is that the Apostle Paul taught us that in Christ we are free from the Law. And as Americans who treasure our freedom we put two and two together and think that Christianity is a way of life without demands on us. It is all optional. No one, not even Jesus Christ, will tell me what to do. And in a way this is true. Because the whole basis of our obedience to Jesus is not the coercion of a society we belong to, but friendship with Jesus. It’s an attitude thing. If I love Jesus, it matters what He said. Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
This puts a little different wrinkle on our freedom, doesn’t it? You are my friends if you are like the son who said, “No” at first, but then went to work in the vineyard. It does matter what we do.
Some sects of Christianity have created demanding systems to ensure their members disciplined their lives to obedience to Christ. In Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, the Roman Catholic order known as the Opus Dei is described as a heavy-handed dictatorial system demanding explicit obedience of its members. It includes an assassination conspiracy at the orders of the top brass of the order. A recent article in Commonweal by a former member lets us know that this is a caricature. Opus Dei is a much better organization than Brown’s novel suggests. It is one of many societies that have developed as Christians saw how laxity set in, making of Christianity a ”Yes sir” kind of faith, where the child of God is not expected to work in the vineyard.
Jesus calls us to follow Him from the heart, not because of some humanly devised system of coercion. Perhaps the Lord would be pleased if you were to ask, in this season of reflection, “Am I at work in the vineyard of the Lord?” How many vistas open up to us when we ask that question.
There is so much to do. If you just look around you, in the station of life you find yourself, whether old or young, you find plenty to do. There are people to love. There are deeds of mercy to do. There is financial need to respond to. There are people who doubt who need to hear you say simply and humbly, “I trust in Jesus.” There are lonely people who hope you may invite them with you to church on the Lord’s Day. There is work in this church waiting to be done by those eager to do the Father’s work in the vineyard.
The boundaries of your vineyard are yours to discover. And if you will find them and get to work in that vineyard, you’ll never be at a loss for a sense of worth, a sense of being a part of the society of Jesus. It much more pleases Jesus, and it much more pleases you and me, when we have done this from a loving and grateful heart rather than under the coercion of some system that Jesus did not ordain.
My people in this church let us be like the first son. You and I may have said, “No” to God in the past. But we can change. Let us get to work in the vineyard. Let me not be like the second son.
Let us pray: O Lord Jesus, help us to escape the bondage of indifference, and to find the door to your vineyard where we may prove to be your friends. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN
Posted by faithpres at February 27, 2005 09:30 AM