Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, Sunday, October 4th, 2026, the Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost (YrA). Readings: Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Psalm 19; Philippians 3:4B-14; Matthew 21:33-46
Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom (Mt 21.43)
Last Sunday we talked about Jesus’ authority. Today’s gospel, assuming that we accept Jesus’ authority over our lives, asks us to think about how we show the results of following Jesus in our lives. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
First, let’s take a moment to think about last summer and the kind of holidays we like to take. We all have our favourite places to visit, but I suspect that a lot of us like to visit a winery. Joy and I love a winery visit, especially if it’s a sunny day, there’s a nice view, a delicious flight of wine and a tasty charcuterie plate. But wineries are more than fancy restaurants and bottle stores.
When I visit a winery, I like to notice things like a shovel leaning against a shed, an ATV scooting around, or someone tending the vines. These details remind me that a winery is a workplace, a factory designed to make good and abundant grapes to become delicious wine. That’s the point of the winery, to produce good fruits.
The parable in today’s gospel can be confusing. We struggled with it in this week’s bible study. There’s a political battle going on, between Jesus and his adversaries, the chief priests and religious leaders of Jerusalem. That battle is a continuation of the argument over Jesus’ authority, which we talked about last week. It’s a battle that Jesus seems to lose when he is executed but the resurrection is his victory and vindication as the Son of God.
So let’s note that while focusing on the vineyard in the parable. What does it represent? Well, Jesus is drawing on a Jewish tradition of portraying Israel as a vine planted by God. In fact, the parable is basically riffing on a passage from the prophet Isaiah:
The vineyard of the Lord Almighty
is the nation of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are the vines he delighted in. (Is 5.7)
As in Isaiah, the owner of the vineyard in the parable takes care to protect and nurture the vines so that they are fruitful and protective. So in the parable, the owner is God, the tenants are the chief priests, the slaves are the prophets who were often poorly received, and the owner’s son is Jesus. The parable is thus a prediction of Jesus’ death (the sequence “they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him” mirrors Jesus’ arrest, expulsion from jerusalem to Golgotha, and his death there) but also an assertion of his authority. When Jesus says he is the “the stone”, he’s quoting again, saying that he is the “stone” rejected by the “builders” (chief priests) and is now the “cornerstone”, the chosen one of God.
OK, all well and good, but how do we relate to the parable? Where do we find or see ourselves in it? Well, I’d say it’s clear that we are the grapes. We are the ones that God has planted and lavished care on. In Isaiah, God wants his vineyard Israel to grow good grapes that can make wine but all he gets are “wild grapes” (Isa 5.4). The good grapes are the results of God’s people living by the covenant, the long agreement that God’s people would live well and respect God’s law.
Law in scripture is God’s way of shaping God’s people. In our first reading from Exodus, the law given to Moses is a kind of blueprint for what God wants his people to be once they finally arrive at the promised land. The law iis good because it comes from a God that is a liberating God, the God that brought them out of slavery. The law is designed to orient the people towards God but also to orient the people to one another. The law is designed to create a people that respects one another, that learns wisdom from its elders, that carves out time for rest, and which allows neighbours to live together in peace. The spirit of the law is, if you will, the design for the garden or vineyard that God will plant when God’s people reach their destination, so they can grow and flourish as a people.
How does all this relate to us? In several ways, I think, beginning with the idea of accountability. The covenant idea of Israel as God’s vineyard does not apply to us directly, but I think it is helpful in understanding God’s expectations of u as beings that he has created. All that we are and all that we have is a reflection of what God has given us. Our individual lives as disciples and our collective lives as church are vineyards that God has given us to tend. The season of Thanksgiving, which we celebrate next Sunday, reminds us that our relationship to God is always grounded in gratitude. As the Prayer Book reminds us, quoting the Hebrew scriptures (1 Chron 29), “All things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee”.
There are lots of passages in the gospels where Jesus speaks of his expectations if what he wants of us as disciples – the parable of the talents (Mt 25.14-30) being one example of the general idea that Jesus expects us to be his disciples in deeds as well as in name. As disciples, we are expected to help Jesus show the kingdom of heaven to the world.
If we want to think of our own lives are vineyards that God has given us to tend, then God expects that we will be spiritually fruitful. St. Paul uses this imagery most famously in Galatians, when he describes the Christian virtues as fruits of the spirit: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal 5.22-23).
Our accountability to God can seem daunting if we think of it as a series of good deeds that we must produce, or laws and commandments that we must keep (I told you about my speeding ticket last week). We can dispel this fear when we realize how badly God wants us to succeed and flourish. In Isaiah 5, God sings a “love-song” to his vineyard, and asks “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?” Creating the vineyard is God’s dearest project, and in Jesus’ parable, the landowner pours everything he can into saving the project, including sending his Son.
The parable shouldn’t make us anxious when we realize that the son comes to us as the gardener, someone who wants us to thrive and bear good fruit. We only bear good fruit because of Jesus. We couldn’t do it without him. In John’s gospel, Jesus says “I am the vine; ayou are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15.5).
Today’s parable teaches us that the goal of the Christian life is to be fruitful. Traditionally the church saw fruitfulness as being expressed in acts of charity and piety. A fruitful life was expressed in acts of love and kindness to the poor and in acts of devotion and worship to God.
These definitions remain valid and worthy but today we might add to them – we can also see fruitfulness as the absence of racism and hatred, as healthy community, and as a care for the environment and the earth as part of God’s creation. Fruitfulness can be expressed in a hundred small and practical ways, and like a good perennial plant it should be deeply rooted in our lives and sustained by our relationship with Jesus. Jesus deeply wants us to be fruitful, to show something of the kingdom of God to those around us. Being fruitful is to live our best life, to flourish as God intended.
My prayer for is is that we can be a fruitful vineyard, or if you will, that we can be a wonderful flight of wine, as varied as our personalities and talents. Some of us are crisp chardonays, others are rich merlots, with here and there an ice wine or perhaps even a dandelion wine! The point is that we all flourish and bear fruit if we are deeply rooted in Jesus, all of us a good vintage that will be pleasing to God and to others.
