Greedy Tenants

This week's Gospel reading is a hard one. Here, Jesus shares a parable with ominous affect upon a group of greedy tenants. The owner of the vineyard cleans house and installs new leadership. It is violent: the tenants kill the owner's son and they in turn are destroyed; stones crush people. It sounds more like The Godfather than God the Father.

But there is great risk to our faith if we turn away from these challenging stories. If we avoid them, they create ambivalence in our hearts and minds about whether God is as good as we thought.

God is as good as we thought...even better! And whenever and wherever Jesus acts, it is to bring about the Kingdom of God where justice, mercy, and love prevail. Jesus is not offering a contradictory picture of God, nor is he intending to confuse his followers. Rather, he is engaging in an epic struggle on their behalf and describing the cost of liberating them from oppression--a cost that he will bear himself.

Parables like these are especially important and it's good to explore them together. I look forward to being with you on Sunday to do that.

Steve Engstrom+