03.10. THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN

THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN Matthew 21:33-45

“Hear another parable,” says our Lord to these ecclesiastical dignitaries who were probably feeling that they had heard quite enough already. Their dignity, they felt, was suffering in the eyes of the mob, who could not fail to see that the tables had been turned against them, and who rarely conceal the rough relish they have in contemplating the discomfiture of pompous ignorance and sanctimonious arrogance. If there flew round the circle none of those jeering remarks or smart personal hits which would inevitably have been elicited from an English crowd, there would not be wanting significant nods and satisfied smiles which would show with equal clearness to the priests and elders that in seeking to expose the pretensions of Jesus they had only exposed themselves. Their falseness in disguising their reluctance to accept Jesus as the Christ under pretense of seeking further evidence, was with a wonderful facility laid bare to all. They stood convicted of refusing to accept the testimony of one whom they dared not deny to be from God. They stood convicted of having incapacituted themselves for recognizing the divine in Jesus. But theirs is not the guilt of the common unbeliever; it was not merely their personal duty and interest to keep themselves awake to the divine by righteousness of life, it was their official duty as well. It was the duty for which their office existed. They must therefore be shown up as men who are hollow shams, who are complacently maintaining their official dignity and the routine and forms of their office, while they are wholly oblivious of its one great object. They are worse than useless. They are as agents whom a man has appointed to manage his business or his property for him, and who use their positions for embezzling the entire proceeds, and enriching themselves at his expense. The parabolic dress under which this warning or judgment is carried home to them is a very thin veil, through which no one could fail to discern the living truth. The liberally cared-for vineyard, furnished with every advantage to facilitate productiveness, was of course Israel, hedged off from the outlying and less cared for fields of heathenism, and furnished with all that goes to fructify human nature. As God had long since declared, nothing that could be done had been left undone. As many men will go to any expense in improving their property, trying new methods, providing the best implements, taking a pride in having every road and fence in good repair, so everything had been done in Israel that could be expected to fertilize human nature. A small section of humanity had been railed off, and the experiment was made that it might be seen to what a pitch of productiveness this m.ost fruitful of God’s plants could be brought. A family or race of men was chosen and set apart for the very purpose of receiving every advantage which could help men to produce the proper fruit of man; to maintain a vigorous, healthy life, and to yield results which might seem to justify the care spent on them. There was to be a nursery of virtue, where any one would only have to look in order to see what proper cultivation could effect. Here it was to be shown that barbarism, degradation, violence, lust, and idolatry were not the proper fruit of human nature. In this garden man was to receive every possible aid and inducement to development and productiveness: nothing was wanting which could win men to holiness, nothing which could enlarge, purify, fertilize human nature. And what was the result? The result was that which every reformatory in the country gives, namely, that human nature in the abstract is one thing; in the concrete, in the individual, another; that as some soils simply absorb all that you can put into them and give no sign, so do most men simply absorb all manner of inducements, counsels, warnings, aids, and bring forth nothing serviceable to God or man. Even persons professing religion are quite contented, nay, even think they are making vast attainment and thriving magnificently, when they are merely receiving, and doing nothing or little. They measure themselves by the care God is spending on them, not by the fruit they are yielding; by the amount of instruction they have received and retain, not by the use they have made of it; by the grace spent upon them, and not by the results. In short, they make the blunder which subverts the whole of religion, of turning means into ends. But in this parable it is not the plants that are censured for barrenness, but the keepers of the vineyard that are condemned for unfaithfulness to the owner. The fruit borne, whether more or less than common, was intercepted by the husbandmen. They used their position solely for their own advantage. That is to say, the priests and elders of the Jews had fallen into the common snare of ecclesiastical leaders, and had used the dignity and advantageous position of their office for their own behoof, and had failed to remember that they had it only as God’s servants. The religious leader is quite as liable as the political or military leader to be led by a desire for glory, applause, notoriety, distinction, power. And the Church is quite as open a field for the exercise and manifestation of such unworthy motives as the State is.* The Church, being a society of men, must be managed by the usual methods, which all societies of men adopt. There must be combination, contrivance, adjustment, discussion, laws and regulations. The Church in its outward system and movements must be wrought by the same machinery as other large associations use. And it is notorious that the mere working of this machinery requires no spiritual faculty in the persons who manage it. It calls into exercise a certain class of gifts and faculties, certain talents and qualities which are eminently serviceable, but which may equally be exercised for the State or for the Church, for the world or for God. The political leader who negotiates with foreign powers, who foresees calamity and has skill to avert it, who can control large bodies of men and keep vast organizations in noiseless motion, may exercise these great gifts either for his country and his God, or merely for the sake of making or maintaining his reputation as the most influential man of his generation. And the ecclesiastic who has very much the same kind of work to do, feeling the pulse of the theological and ecclesiastical world, making out through the distorting haze of public report and opinion what are the facts of a case and what is best to be done in it, and talking over to his view large bodies of men — this man, like the politician, may be serving his God, or he may be serving himself. Success may be the idol of the one as truly as of the other. To have a large religious following and wide influence in the Church may be as thoroughly selfish and worldly a desire as to be at the head of a strong political party. It is not the sphere in which one’s work is done that proves its spirituality or worldliness; neither is it always the nature of the work that is done, but the motive that tests whether it is spiritual or worldly. These priests and elders had not escaped the snare into which their predecessors had fallen, and to which all their successors are exposed. They had used their position to attract applause to themselves, or to make their influence felt in the community, or to win for themselves a name as defenders of the faith.

* See the late Canon Mozley’s Sermon on “The Reversal of Human Judgment.”

Another and still more insidious form of the same temptation it may be worthwhile to notice. It is that temptation to which our Lord alluded when He censured this same class of persons for their zeal in proselytizing. But why so? Is not zeal in propagating religion a good thing? If these foremost men in the Jewish Church compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, is this not that very missionary zeal which the Jews are upbraided for wanting, and the modern Church prides itself on possessing? Is evangelistic fervor in the nineteenth century a thing to applaud, while the same fervor in the first is to be condemned? or what was it in these men’s zeal that so roused our Lord’s indignation? It was that same element which so often still taints zeal for the propagation of religious truth — the desire rather to bring men over to my way of thinking and so to strengthen my own position, than to bring them to the truth. My way of thinking may be the truth, or may, at least, be much nearer it than the opinions held by others, and for them it may be a good thing to be brought over to my views; but for myself it is a bad thing and the mere strengthening of a selfish craving, if I seek to propagate my opinions rather because they are mine than because they are the truth. And how wide-spreading and deep-reaching an evil this is, those well know who have observed religious controversy and seen how dangerously near propagandism lies to persecution. The zeal that proceeds from a loving consideration for others does not, when resisted, darken into violence and ferocity. The mother seeking to persuade her son does not become fierce when opposed, but only increasingly tender and pitifully gentle. The zeal for truth that storms at opposition and becomes bitter and fierce when contradicted, you may, therefore, recognize as springing from a desire rather to have one’s own wisdom and one’s own influence acknowledged than from either deep love for others or deep regard for the truth as the truth. But to return — the implied and slightly disguised condemnation of the parable our Lord proceeds to enforce in an explicit form. The truth which had been sheathed in the parable He thrusts home now with naked point. “The kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” And this warning is grounded not on a parable, which they might have affected to despise, but on a passage of the very Scriptures they professed to be the guardians of. There had been the warning before their eyes, read by them, sung by them at their festivals, carefully treasured in their memories; and yet, like us all, they had so little penetrated to its sense, had so little thought out its meaning and possible application, had looked upon it so much as a dead letter and so little as alive for them and for all men, that our Lord has yet to ask them: “Did ye never read in the Scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner? “Is not this stone the same as the heir sent by the lord of the vineyard? Are not ye now in danger of fulfilling the prophecy ye know so well? Are you not about to reject and cast contempt on one whom in your souls you know to be worthy of far other treatment? The careful reader of this conversation will be struck with two points in it — first that Jesus claims to be the heir of God; in other words, He deliberately sets Himself on a wholly different level from the other prophets — high above Isaiah, Elijah, nay, even high above Moses himself. They were all servants; He is in quite a different relation to the proprietor, that is, to God. He is the Son and Heir; in acting for God He acts for Himself. It is because the vinedressers identify Him with the owner that they have a hope of gaining possession of the vineyard by killing the heir. To kill a mere servant would have served no such purpose, another servant can always be appointed; however high his office and title, another can always be raised, and equal authority can be delegated to him; but there is no other son. It is nature and relationship, not mere official dignity, that underlies this title and that is implied in the parable. But the second point is even more worthy of remark. Our Lord implies that this was known by these Jewish leaders. Their condemnation was, that knowing Him to be the Son of God, they slew Him. Peter, indeed, apologetically says that they would not have slain Him had they known He was the Lord of glory. It may have been so in some instances; and, no doubt, had they allowed the fact to stand clear before their minds, had they given free course to it and weight to it, they could not have done what they did. Still, as the parable shows, it was just because they knew this was the heir that they were so eager to remove Him. Their state of mind is perfectly intelligible and very common. There lay latent in them a deep consciousness which they would not allow to become distinct and influential. They had a conviction that Jesus was the Christ, but they would not let their mind dwell upon it. There are few of us who have not such buried convictions, few of us who do not leave out of sight thoughts which, if allowed influence, would urge us to unwelcome action. There are thousands who have a haunting suspicion that Jesus deserves a very different kind of recognition from that which they give Him. Is there not lying in the mind of some of you half-formed thoughts about Jesus, possible if not actual convictions, which if you carefully thought them out would lead you to take up a different and much more satisfactory attitude towards Him? And if there are those who feel that things should be plainer, that the majesty of Christ should be so borne in upon the soul that all would yield to Him, this is natural; but it is to overlook the fundamental fact that room must be left for freedom of choice and the exercise of judgment. The fact is, that the rejection of Christ by so many is one of the proofs that He is Divine. It is worldly worth that is acknowledged by all, and worldly blessings that are universally accepted. The higher the blessing, the fewer accept it. All wish plenty to eat, a minority value good education, a few seek the kingdom of God. And so our Lord here points out that it had long been foreseen that when He came He would be rejected. In reply to those questioners who ask how He can allow the Hosanna Psalm to be applied to Him by the people, He takes this very psalm, and out of it proves to the authorities that their very resistance and rejection of Him is the proof that He is what the crowd were affirming Him to be — the Messiah, the Son and Heir of God, the Stone despised of the builders, but chosen of God. Rejection by the builders was one of the marks by which the foundation chosen by God was to be identified. Truth is often more convincingly exhibited by the opposition of a certain class of men. It is not discredited by their opposition; but a prima facie point in its favor is that they do not receive it. And, certainly, had the claims of Jesus been accepted by these dried-up formal traditionalists we should have had some cause for doubt.

Abandoning the figure used in the parable, our Lord makes use of a new figure to complete the warning. He speaks of two possible contingencies — “Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken”— this had been declared by Isaiah — “but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder,” this figure had been familiarized by Daniel’s use of it. The stone which lies ready hewn and suitable for the best part of a building may inflict severe injury on the builder, either by his carelessly stumbling upon it, falling from a height upon it, and so getting himself bruised and broken; or it may fall from a height upon him, in which case it is certain death. The first case is that in which Christ is a stone of stumbling to those to whom He is presented. God lays this stone everywhere in our way that we may build upon it or set it high in the place of honor, and we cannot simply walk on as if God had done no such thing. Whatever else Christ is, He is substantial, a reality as solid as the stone against which your foot is jarred. To make as if He were not, and to pass on untouched and unchanged, is impossible. If we attempt to do so, ignoring that the stone is there, we stumble and fall and injure ourselves. The foundation stone becomes a stone of offense. Every one who hears the gospel, every one in whose path Christ is laid, is either the better or the worse for it. The gospel once heard is “henceforward a perpetual element in the whole condition, character, and destiny of the hearer.” No man who has heard can be as if he had not. Though he may wish to pass on as if he had not seen Christ at all, he is not the same man as he was before, his spiritual condition is altered, possibilities have dawned upon his mind, openings into regions which are new and otherwise inaccessible, he is haunted by unsettled perplexities, doubts, anxieties, thoughts. This attitude of mind must have been very common in Christ’s own time, many persons must have shrunk from the responsibility of determining for themselves what they ought to think of Him. Many now do the same. They wish to overlook Him and pass on into life as if He were not in their path. But how foolish if He be the one foundation on whom a life can safely be built. Men do not think of sin as a permanent foundation — they only think of it as a temporary expedient — practises get into a man’s life which he does not like to think of as permanent, but only as serving present turns. They do not deliberately choose anything as permanently satisfactory, cannot bring their minds to the idea of being built and settled finally, even though they have some consciousness that it were wise to be so. Those who thus overlook Christ and try to pass on into life as if He were not, damage their own character, because they know He is there, and until they make up their minds about Him, life is a mere make-believe. It is thus they are bruised on this stone of stumbling. They are practising upon themselves, and are not true to their own convictions. They do not walk steadily and uprightly as those whose path is ascertained and assured, but they stumble as those who are still tripped up and held back by something they have not taken account of. Just as a person who feels he has forgotten something, cannot give his mind fully to what is before him, but is held back by the unconscious effort to remember, so here the spirit that has yet to take account of Christ and decide regarding Him is held back and distracted. Besides, this unwillingness to face facts fairly, this desire to do for a time without Christ, and as if He were not in our path, is apt to produce a habitual falseness in the spirit. You may be unconscious of any such process, but many processes go on in us quite as effectually without as with our intention. Those which are fatal to the body do so. Each refusal to determine regarding Christ makes your conscience blunter, your heart less open to righteous and reasonable influence. It may be by a very little, yet it does. The frost of a minute, or of thirty minutes, may be imperceptible in its result, or it may only draw a few pretty lines upon the water, but it is frost all the same, and is gradually forming a strength of surface which no hammer can break, nor any fire melt. By trying, then, to get past Christ and make a life for yourself without Him, by trying to build on some other foundation, you are both trying to do what everything is arranged to defeat, and you arc injuring your own character, not yielding to the influences that you feel to be good, nor listening to convictions which you shrewdly suspect to be reasonable. This bruised condition, however, is remediable. The second action of the stone on the builder is described as final. The stone, which is of sufficient massiveness to uphold a world, falls upon the unhappy opposer, and the living, hopeful man lies an undistinguishable mass. At once slain and buried, those who determinedly opposed Christ lie oppressed by that which might have been their joy. Their dwelling and refuge becomes their tomb. Every excellence of Christ they have leagued against themselves. It is their everlasting shame that they were ashamed of Him. The faithfulness, truth, and love of Christ, that is to say, the qualities whose existence is all that any saved man ever had to depend upon, the qualities in the knowledge and faith of which the weakest and most heartless sinner sets out boldly and hopefully to eternity, these all now torment with crushing remorse those who have despised them. Do not suppose this is an extravagant figure used by our Lord to awe His enemies, and that no man will ever suffer a doom which can be fairly represented in these terms. It is a statement of fact. Things are to move on eternally in fulfilment of the will of Christ. He is identified with all that is righteous, all that is wise, all that is ultimately successful. To oppose His course, to endeavor to defeat His object, to attempt to work out an eternal success apart from Him is as idle as to seek to stop the earth in its course, or to stand in the path of a stone avalanche in order to stem it. His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom — He has become the Head of our race, that in Him we may together be led on to everlasting prosperity and righteousness. The whole forward movement of individuals and of the race must be made on the lines laid down by Christ, and the time is coming when this shall be so plainly manifested that all who have not His spirit shall feel that all power has left them, and shall see the whole stream of life and progress flow past them, leaving them stranded and wrecked and useless. For a long time it may be doubtful in a country and in national affairs whether progress and prosperity are bound up with one party or another, with one spirit in trade and in government or with another, and men take their sides and adopt their several causes according to their tastes and judgment; but a day comes when the one party is put to confusion, and when it is entirely left behind by the current of events. So is it here, but in a far more momentous sense. It is not only national affairs that are governed and guided by certain deep laws that the craftiest statesman has no power whatever to alter; but the affairs of the individual, of each one of us, and of all men together, similarly move onwards according to certain immutable moral laws. These are revealed to us in Christ, that we may know and appropriate them. For, just in proportion as we do so, and attach ourselves to Him, and feel the power and beauty of His way and of His spirit, shall we ourselves stand with Him when all opposition has slunk away ashamed, and enter with Him on the great future which will open to those who are capable of taking a part in it. What, then, you feel it in you to do by God’s grace in the way of bending your will to what is right, of subduing the evil in you which you see can but lead to death and disturbance, these things do, hoping in Him who has promised to return and reign eternally.