This morning’s parable presents significant challenges. Jesus is in the Temple, just days before his crucifixion, confronting the chief priests and Pharisees in their failure to produce the harvest The Lord seeks from their stewardship of his vineyard, which is Israel. He is confronting their historic failure to heed the many prophets God has sent to get Israel’s leadership back on track. He’s confronting their brewing plot to kill God’s Son, Jesus himself. He warns them that God is going to find new tenants to produce “the fruits of the Kingdom.”

Our challenge arises from the way this message rolls forward across generations. Who are the tenants today? We are! What is the fruit of the Kingdom? We are! At any point in time, we are in an ongoing process of being the new tenants even as we are also the (hopefully) ripening fruit of the harvest, while raising up more harvest who become tenants and ripening fruit.

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We need to set the scene. Imagine if some street preacher walked in here on the Tuesday morning of Holy Week and started teaching and holding services without my permission. I know exactly what I’d say. “Excuse me, by what authority are you doing these things? And who, pray tell, gave you this authority?”

In order to grasp the weight of today’s Gospel we need to consider where we are time-wise in Matthew’s Gospel. It is what we call Holy Week. Jesus has made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem for the Passover Feast. He has driven out the money changers in the courtyards and he has done some healings in front of big crowds.

And we need to consider where we are physically. Jesus is teaching in the Temple. The Temple itself was the second one, about 550 years old, and was roughly 90 feet long, 30 feet wide and 45 feet high. The Temple would have fit inside this room except it was a bit taller. Herod the Great, the Herod that tried to get the wise men to tell him where the baby Jesus was, had completely restored the Temple and built a huge complex of plazas, colonnades and courtyards all around it that was as big as 29 football fields. The foundation of the Temple Mount was 62 feet high, part of which we know today as the wailing wall. It was one of the great wonders of the ancient world.

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One Saturday morning I woke up around 6 am. I wish I could sleep late, but I can’t usually.  Being in no rush, I was just lying there praying on names as they came to mind.

That’s really a nice thing to do.  It’s quiet, I’m comfortable, I’m rested, and no one else is awake yet.  It’s just me and the Lord, all kind of cozy and snuggly, Meg softly breathing in her sleep rhythm.  And that’s nice too.

So I’m lying there, all nice and peaceful, when Meg says in a fairly loud voice, “You’d better WATCH your attitude!”

I froze, but all I could hear was, again, her breathing in that soft rhythm.  To be perfectly honest, once I realized she wasn’t actually speaking to me, it was all I could do to keep from bursting into laughter.

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