All Under Judgment, and Grace
All Under Judgment, and Grace
There is no getting around the bitterness and judgment in the Word of God given us this Sunday, from the Old Testament to the Christian Gospel to the Pauline letters. There is also grace in the Son whom the Tenants killed outside the vineyard, and the same Son who was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem “for our sake” as we say every Sunday. Only by accepting that “our” includes us do we benefit from that unmerited and undeserved grace.
The moment Jesus said “vineyard,” his fellow Jews would have recognized the echo of Isaiah’s vineyard, symbol of the nation of Israel: divided between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah now shrunken down to its two remaining tribes — Judah and Benjamin — with the other ten tribes having been genocided by Assyria. And yet, the prophet warned, Judah was facing the same danger because of its bloodshed and the outcry of oppression.
But the chief priests and Pharisees who started this argument with Jesus last Sunday apparently thought in the past tense. This was what Isaiah said about those people 700 years ago. It isn’t until Jesus says that the kingdom of God will be taken away from them that they finally realize that they are the murderous tenants in his story. The Good News of God’s love in Christ Jesus was conceived in conflict.
Inherent in the claim of a crucified and risen Messiah was a judgment of those Jewish leaders who had helped bring about his death. But even here, I think that Matthew — the Gospel author most concerned with maintaining continuity between the Covenant with Israel and its expansion through Jesus to the Gentiles — did not give up hope of an Israel reconciled with those Jews and Gentiles who were called Christians, followers of Jesus the Christ. In the Book of Acts, we are told that it was in Antioch in modern-day Syria that the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians. We also know that it was the first Christian community of Jews and Gentiles who found a way to honor the traditions of the Covenant of Israel while still making room for Gentiles and not imposing on them unreasonable conditions such as circumcision. I believe that’s what Matthew meant by the Kingdom of God that Jesus says he will give to an expanded Israel.
And Paul, I believe, wanted the same. Note that Paul could trace his Jewish ancestry back to the one of the two surviving tribes, Benjamin. In spite of his hyperbole, Paul wasn’t comparing his conversion to the worst stuff you take out for the trash collector every week. He was comparing the worth of Christ to the worth of his ancestral legacy, which he would never have given up for anything else in this world except for Jesus. Like Matthew, he also hoped that his Jewish legacy and his Christian discipleship could be reconciled.
Alas, it was not to be. And we know the rest of the story. It took nearly three centuries. But eventually, the Church won over an empire. And it was no longer Christ against Caesar, but Christ and Caesar. Then it became Christ and Charlemagne with a Holy Roman Empire. And when that empire broke into Christian kingdoms, it was still one Christendom, a loose alliance of churches and states that have claimed to be Christian kingdoms, but have often been anything but.
We — mostly children of Europe — have often made the same mistake as the Judahites of Isaiah’s time, and the Jewish leaders of Jesus’s time. We have forgotten that the vineyard, the kingdom, have been given to us, not conquered by us and not our possession. We have too often forgotten what grace is, according to our Outline of Faith commonly called the Catechism: “Grace is God’s favor toward us, unearned and underserved.” We are the heirs of the bargain that the Church made with the Emperor Constantine: Accept imperial power and become the imperial Chaplain.
So, we stand under the same judgment as the Judahites of Isaiah’s time, and the Jewish elders of Jesus’s time. And the grace we receive through Jesus Christ we must extend to those under the same judgment, even if that grace takes us outside the vineyard and the city walls.
October 4th, 2026
18th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22, Year A
The Rev. David P. Kendrick