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Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost – October 8, 2023
Isaiah 5:1-7, Matthew 21:33-46
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
It has been said that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Every so often you see this become literally true. There’s the popular PBS program “Antiques Roadshow,” where people bring in junky things they find in a box in the basement, sometimes to find that they are extremely valuable. Sometimes you hear stories about people buying things at a garage sale for a couple dollars which turn out to be worth millions. I recently read an article about someone who bought a bowl at a yard sale for $3. It turned out to be an ancient ceramic bowl from the Song Dynasty in China from the year 967AD. There was only one other bowl of this type known to be in existence, and it is at the British Museum in London! This precious bowl which had been cast aside, put out of the house, relegated to the front yard to be sold alongside a bunch of junk, went to auction at Sotheby’s and sold for $2.2 million dollars. The name of the New York family who sold the bowl for $3 was not made public. Can you blame them?
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. A similar principle can be found in Psalm 118, which we hear Jesus quote in our gospel reading for today: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.”
In quoting this psalm, Jesus was talking about himself. Like the prophets before him, Jesus was being rejected by the chief priests and elders. And this stone that the builders rejected would become the cornerstone, the rock of our salvation. What was treated as trash, cast aside, rejected, dragged outside of the city gates and dumped, would become a precious treasure to many.
To illustrate this, Jesus tells yet another vineyard parable. He tells the story of a landowner who keeps sending his slaves to the tenets caring for his vineyard so that they can collect the produce. But again and again the tenets reject the slaves. They beat one, kill another, and stone another. Finally, the landowner sends his son into the vineyard. The tenets seize the son. They reject him. They throw him outside of the vineyard and kill him.
This parable is an allegory. The vineyard represents rebellious Israel. In telling this parable, Jesus is drawing on lots and lots of Old Testament imagery where God’s people are represented as a vineyard. We hear this in our first reading, from Isaiah, where it says, “the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.” We hear this in the psalm for today, where God’s people are described as a vine plucked out of the darkness of Egypt and planted in a new land. The vineyard represents God’s covenant people, Israel, which has a well-documented history of producing sour grapes.
God is the owner of this vineyard. The religious leaders are the tenets, who are charged with tending to the vineyard, cultivating the good fruit. The slaves are the prophets whom God sent again and again to call his people to faithfulness and righteousness, and again and again these prophets were rejected, beaten, and killed. As Jesus would lament, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that stones the prophets and kills those whom God sent you.” The landowner’s son, of course, is Jesus. Even God’s own Son would be rejected.
With this parable, Jesus is holding a mirror up to the chief priests and the Pharisees who are rejecting him. He lays out this parable, which so far is going right over their heads as an allegory, and asks them, “What do you think the landowner will do to those tenets?” And the chief priests and the Pharisees self-righteously answer, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and give the vineyard to other tenets!” Note that this was their suggestion! They don’t even realize it yet, but they have just convicted themselves! They are the tenets in the parable! In their rejection of Jesus, they were repeating the pattern of God’s people rejecting those whom God sent to them. Only now, it was God’s own Son.
They eventually realized he was speaking about them, but this realization didn’t stop them from carrying out their role in the allegory. Everything foreshadowed in the parable came to pass. God’s Son was indeed taken out of the vineyard, outside the city gates, and killed.
But what was treated as trash became a great treasure. For the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone!
The cornerstone was the most important part of any building in the ancient world. Today they are largely ceremonial – on certain buildings you’ll see a little plaque with the date of construction or the names of the builders on it. But in the ancient world, the cornerstone was the most important part of every building. Everything was measured and determined by the cornerstone. It had to be perfectly level. Its lines had to be perfectly straight. If it was crooked or wobbly or off-center, the entire rest of the building would be too. The cornerstone kept everything aligned. It kept everything in right relationship.
In rejecting Jesus, by tossing him out of the vineyard and putting him on the cross, the chief priests and the Pharisees had unwittingly facilitated the means by which we are brought into right relationship with God. The cross is our cornerstone. The cross is the rock of our salvation. Through the cross we have forgiveness, we have a new life with God that begins now and continues forever, and so it is the foundation on which God’s kingdom is built. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone! The rejected Son became the seed of a new vineyard. What was treated as trash would become a great treasure to many.
We live in a time when more and more people are rejecting God’s Son. In our society today, more and more people are seeing the cross as old and junky and worthless, as something to be rid of. We see it in the long, steady decline of mainline Christian churches. We see it in the more recent deconstructing movement in Evangelicalism. We see it in the astonishing growth in the number of people who identify as agnostics or atheists or “nones.” We see it in the number of people who still identify as Christians but who have become apathetic about coming to be in his presence in worship or participating in the life of the church in any meaningful way. God’s Son continues to be seen by many people as not worth very much.
But what is one person’s trash is another’s treasure. What many have cast aside, we see as precious, infinite in worth. Through faith we are given eyes to see Christ and his cross as something valuable beyond all measure. Maybe you have perceived this treasure your whole life or maybe the good Lord is helping you see it anew or even for the first time today, but what Christ Jesus has done for us through his death and resurrection is amazing in our eyes.
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. With the cross as the cornerstone of our lives, we are brought into right relationship with God. With the cross as our cornerstone, we are brought into alignment with God, such that we begin to bear the fruits of faith. With the cross as our cornerstone, we have a rock of forgiveness, life, and salvation on which we can stand firm in joy and in hope and in peace.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church