This passage is another tough one, dealing with wrath and judgment and punishment. And as you know scaring people into the kingdom is not my favorite style, although it may very well be that fear is a better motivator for some people than it is for me. But in our day and age, it’s more likely, I think, that people will respond to hellfire and brimstone sermons by simply deciding not to believe in eternal punishment. Recent surveys show that far more people believe in heaven than in hell, and most of those who do believe are sure they’re headed for heaven, because after all they’re pretty good people, and the God of love we know through Jesus couldn’t possibly be that mean. In fact,"God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. [Jn 3:16-17]
But this same Jesus who came to seek and save the lost is also the one presiding over the great harvest at the end of the age. Hear how John describes him: “Then I looked, and there was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like the Son of Man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand! [v. 14] How do we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory pictures?
If we just look at this chapter of Revelation on its own, it doesn’t seem like the same God at all. Is this the good shepherd who went out searching for the lost sheep? Is this the same loving father who welcomed home the prodigal son without a word of blame or demand for repayment?
Yeah. It is. And the key is in the idea of harvest. There are a lot of passages in Scripture which liken God to a farmer, or a gardener, or to the owner of a vineyard. And there are really two harvests in this one passage. The first is of wheat, and the second is of grapes. And it looks very much as though the harvested grain represents believers, and the harvested grapes represent unbelievers. ”The hour to reap has come,” said the angel, “ because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe." So the one who sat on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped. [v. 2-3]
Now some people are puzzled by this picture because if the one holding the sickle is Jesus, what is he doing taking orders from a mere angel? But if you recall Jesus’ words to his disciples when they asked him when the end would come, he said, "about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. [Mt 24:36] The angel isn’t giving Jesus orders, he’s just a messenger announcing the time.
So Jesus' part in the harvest is to gather in his own - the ones whom he recognizes, the sheep who know his voice, to mix the metaphors again. “The one who rejects me and does not receive my word ... on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge.” [Jn 12:47-48] Note that Jesus isn’t the one who does the rejecting.
The ones who don’t respond, the ones who are left over, those are the ones left for the mopping up operation the angels conduct. “Then another angel came out ...and swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth, and he threw it into the great wine press of the wrath of God.” [v. 19]
But why are grapes showing up as a metaphor for the deaf and the disobedient? I would have expected chaff, or weeds, or dry branches. But grapes? the grapevine is a metaphor for Israel. What happened?
Listen again to the passage from Isaiah, “My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there
to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? [Isaiah 5:1-4]
This is the opening scene in God’s lawsuit against Israel. The vineyard is a metaphor for the bride, and the bride is of course a metaphor for Israel. And the jurors, many of them, are hill-farmers. They live in Jerusalem and they know what it takes to produce a good yield of grapes. I can see them, can’t you, listening intently to the plaintiff‘s case. They are being asked to say if there is anything the owner had left anything at all undone, if in any way the owner is at fault in his care of the vineyard, if there is any reason to hope that if the owner changes his methods or his fertilizer or anything else that the vines will begin to bear good fruit. He challenges them to find anything wrong with his care of the land.
But silence is the only answer. There is nothing the owner has left undone. There is nothing more he can do. There is no point in continuing.
Well, as I said, the vineyard is a metaphor for Israel. And the owner of the vineyard is, of course, YHWH God. And this is only one of dozens of courtroom scenes between YHWH and Israel, as he struggles to get them to see how, time after time, they’ve broken the covenant he made with them, first at Sinai and then again a generation later when they entered the Promised Land. God gave them everything they could have asked for.
He gave them laws to live by. In Deuteronomy 4:8 Moses told the people that the surrounding nations would marvel at the wisdom of the law, saying “What great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law I am setting before you today?”
God gave them land to live on. And as Moses reminded them in Deuteronomy 9:6, “It is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God gave
you the land.”
God gave them leaders to follow. Throughout the book of Judges, whenever the people were overrun by one or another of the surrounding nations, they would weep and wail and repent and promise to behave IF ONLY God would save them. AGAIN. From Deborah to Gideon to Samson, God kept sending them people to pull them out of the hot water they themselves had fallen into. He sent them prophets like Samuel. And at last God gave in to their pleadings and gave them a king.
And all God asked for in return was for them to love him and obey his commandments.
But did they? Of course not. They weren’t atheists, mind you, many of them were quite devout - worshiping Ba’al and Ashteroth on their rooftops and in the sacred groves and of course at the fertility rites - ignoring the far-off, invisible, demanding God who had actually brought them out of Egypt.
And as bad as that was, and as much as God hated their apostasy, what really put the icing on the cake was the way they ran the country. The first chapter of Isaiah lays out as clearly as can be just what they’ve been up to. “Your rulers are rebels,” he says, “companions of thieves; everyone loves a bribe, and chases after rewards. They do not defend the orphan, nor does the widow’s plea come before them.” [Is 1:23]
And so because of that, when they come to worship, God will not listen. “When you spread your hands out in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you, Yes, even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood.” [Is 1:15] Abuse of power, political corruption, influence-peddling, jury tampering, you name it, they did it.
And they had no excuse.
The king and nobles of Judah were not ignorant of what God required, they were not helpless actors in a corrupt system, they were not taking desperate measures in the face of a national emergency. They were simply, willfully, pursuing their own power and gain at the expense of God’s justice and the lives and well-being of the people who looked to them for leadership and protection. And so it was no wonder the people weren’t impressed by the God they claimed to worship. The kings and the priests who were supposed to model God’s righteousness for their people to follow weren’t any better than their neighbors.
The Israelites had been given absolutely everything they needed to produce a just and decent society, one that would have been a showcase for God’s righteousness, and they had blown it. No - “blown it” is too mild. They had thrown it away and trampled it in the mud.
The fruit God looked to receive from the covenant people was “justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.” [Is 5:7]
We, too, have been given absolutely everything we need. Hasn’t God taken care of us, protected us, provided for us - just as he did ancient Israel? Hasn’t God given even more to us than he did ancient Israel, in Jesus Christ, who died so that you and I might be reconciled to God and given new hearts so that we would be able finally to respond in love to God’s incredible generosity? What have we done?
Now you dwellers in Clayton and people of America, judge between God and the vineyard. What more could have been done for this people than God have done for us? When God looks for good grapes, why does it yield so much bad?
In the Old Testament, the covenant community was built from the top down, around the law and the land. And so the courtroom scenes and the day of judgment deal with the whole people, with the nation as a whole being swept away into exile or slavery or extinction. In the New Testament it’s different. The relationship with God is developed individual by individual, with one heart at a time turning back toward God, and growing into a people that transcends politics or culture or national boundaries. And in Revelation the judgment is also comes one by one, as each one chooses whether or not to come when they are called. But although the details are different, the underlying problem is the same.
The courtroom scene in Isaiah is a divorce court, not a criminal court. And the problem, again, is not that God is rejecting the people who don’t live up to his impossible standards, it’s that some people - for whatever reason - have decided that they don’t want to have anything to do with God, no matter what he does for them.
So let us take another look at God, and think of the rejected lover, the bride left at the altar, the abandoned wife, the betrayed husband. Unrequited love is something that everyone over the age of about 13 has probably had some experience with. Maybe for you the closest you ever came was a crush on a high school hero, or a TV star. Maybe you’ve nursed a friend through the aftermath of a disastrous affair. I hope none of you has been fool enough - or emotionally needy enough - to build a whole romantic fantasy out of a couple of conversations and a smile, as I was in my youth. But there are some of you who have been rejected, abandoned, in acutely painful ways, by the breaking of a relationship that
should have worked, in the breaking apart of two lives bound together by shared experiences, dreams, confidences, love. That loss, that betrayal, is one of the most painful experiences imaginable.
We can, most of us, empathize with God in this situation, can’t we.
It’s harder to get into the skin of the faithless one. It’s less common to be on the receiving end of an obsession. I’ve some experience of what it feels like, and let me tell you it’s quite uncomfortable. Being adored may sound nice in theory, but the reality of receiving unwanted gifts, phone calls, and extravagant compliments gets to be a very heavy burden. You find yourself resenting their demands on you. You wind up avoiding the person - even if it’s someone you would otherwise like to spend time with. And in a way that’s natural - because responding to someone else’s love means giving up some of your autonomy, entrusting part of identity to their care. And it’s especially risky if they’re the jealous type.
God is a jealous God. And he loves us with an unswerving longing that rivals any human desire. And for us to turn, to open ourselves to that passion goes against all our instincts of self-preservation. There’s a poem by W. H. Auden that has always haunted me.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it if stars were to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Think about it:
How should we like it if stars were to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
God burns for us with a passion we cannot possibly return - unless we surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit. And even if we love God with all our hearts the more loving one will still never, ever be me. Or you. We will always be the debtor. And until we let go of our egos, and acknowledge the debt, and our helplessness to repay even part of it, it is indeed more comfortable to go without that love altogether. We’ve seen it happen on a grand scale in our own culture.
First, the 18th century deists who reduced God to a distant being who does not give a damn. And now in this century we have banished God altogether, and called it progress.
It also takes place on a personal level. Some reduce God to a manageable size and call their response to that shrunken deity worship. Others go without altogether, and call themselves enlightened, or independent. Far too many think of God as a stalker rather than a suitor, and screen their calls. Others see God as a kind of cosmic killjoy, out to keep them from having a good life. I can hear them now, muttering under the grape-leaves as the farmer’s steps draw near, “Here he comes again, pulling out all our nice weeds, doesn’t he want us to have any friends? And where does he get off, cutting off leaves and branches just because they’ve got a little brown? They’re MY branches, after all, aren’t they?
And I won’t eat my fertilizer!”
And finally, awful lot of people simply don’t have any clue how much God loves them. Perhaps they’ve had a bad experience with church, perhaps the Jesus they’ve been told about is someone his own mother wouldn’t recognize, and more people than we realize have never even heard the gospel. There are as many reasons as there are people.
"Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. 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.
Finally 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?" [Mt 21: 33-40]
Jesus told this parable to show Israel why it was that God was replacing the Old covenant based on the law with the new covenant based on Jesus’ death and resurrection. But the parable still has meaning for us, because the owner of the vineyard has put us - the church of Jesus Christ - in charge. When the owner comes, will he find that we have taken good care of the field? Or have we let the grapes turn to vinegar on the vine? Jesus said the field is ripe for harvest - and he’s sent us out into it.
