The Vineyard

Sermon The Eighteenth Sunday After Trinity, 4 October 2026

Readings: Isaiah 5.1-7; Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-end.

Theme: The Vineyard

I will never forget what a winegrower once told me. He said, “the more difficult the soil the better the wine.” In other words, the conditions for growth are often not the ones that you would at first expect. A challenging soil produces the best wine. 

It was in the soil of Israel that the Lord had chosen to grow his kingdom. At first, Israel thought that this meant the nation of Israel. However, as the first reading from Isaiah reveals this was not God’s intention. These vines that the Lord had planted only produced sour grapes. The soil of Israel was far too rich to produce the best fruit. As with any good soil the roots grow too shallowly and the foliage chokes off the rays of the sun. And so it was with the house of Israel. 

However, because of God’s faithfulness to the covenant made with Israel the portion of the soil that had been rejected, the difficult soil, was used by God to produce the best fruit of all. It was “the stone rejected by the builders that has become the cornerstone.”

The Gospel employs the same metaphor as Isaiah in speaking about the growth of God’s kingdom. The vineyard image is one taken from Isaiah by Matthew to speak directly to the Jewish communities of the time. Some of these had recognized that the Messiah had come in Jesus and though this was not the kind of Messiah many had expected it was not without precedent in Israel’s history as the difficult soil of the ‘suffering servant’ passages of Isaiah indicate.

Paul recognizes that this prophecy of the ‘suffering servant’ was the soil of the kingdom in the reading from Philippians. This is why; he has “suffered the loss of all things for Christ.” And if anyone knew the Jewish tradition at the time of Jesus well, it was Paul. As he says, his zeal for the house of Israel had made him into a persecutor of the church. He had also previously thought that the kingdom of God was to be identified with the house of Israel. 

However, after encountering the Lord on the road to Damascus, and in journeying with this same resurrected Lord throughout his travels around the Mediterranean, he came to realize that the kingdom planted in the soil of Israel was not to be confined to the nation of Israel. It was also for the Gentiles.

It was in this ‘poor soil,’ as the Israelites had viewed it, that the message of the Gospel would take root. In this soil, the grapes would produce the best wine of all. 

As tenants of this vineyard we should, therefore, recognize the extraordinary privilege that we have been given to tend this crop. It is to the church that the responsibility of producing the fruits of the kingdom has been given.

However, it is important for us to be aware that readings such as these in the Bible can be abused for antisemitic purposes. It can be easy to set up a false opposition between the church and the Jewish community based on such readings and we need to be conscious that how we speak can influence others and we should never use our words to incite any form of antisemitism.

In fact, the readings we have for this weekend represent a conversation within Judaism between those who accepted the ‘suffering servant’ Messiah at the time of the Old Testament, and in the New Testament era acknowledge this Messiah to have come in Jesus.

So, we should not see the church and the Jewish community as in opposition to one another. Rather the church is a growth within the Jewish community. This is particularly clear in the gospel of Matthew because Matthew is speaking to the Jews and the Jewish-Christians who are engaged in challenging conversations with one another about the heritage of the Jewish tradition. 

Matthew is proclaiming to this community that the Jewish Messiah has come and it is incumbent upon the community to acknowledge this. In other words, there is no intention of Jesus, or indeed Saint Paul, to set up a new religion. This is not the purpose of these readings from the scriptures. Rather the point is that the heritage of the Jewish tradition has now arrived at an inflection point in which it needs to make a choice of whether this Messiah has come in Jesus and who this message is for.

It will take several centuries for the Jewish-Christians and the Jews to split apart into what today we would call the two separate religions of Judaism and Christianity, but this was not the intention of the communities from the start. Allowing the Gentiles to join in the message of salvation had caused an internal tension in these communities and it would be this stress fault which would eventually lead to their separation.

Yet, despite the separation of Christians and Jews today, it is important that all recognize that the Jews continue to be the people with whom God has initiated the covenant and this covenant has never been revoked. We see this covenant from Noah to Abraham and through to Moses been refashioned but never rejected by God. Jesus is the one who fulfills these covenantal promises and completes the work of God’s covenant that began with the promises made to the patriarchs.

Perhaps one thing that Christians can still learn from Judaism is the need to wait. For the Jews, they are awaiting the coming of the Messiah, but for Christians, we are awaiting the Messiah to return at the Second Coming of Jesus. This is something we Christians can forget. It is also possible for Christians to learn the ability to live as a minority and to guard one’s identity from the Jews. Jews have mastered this art and it is one which we Christians have a great deal to learn from in our secular world of today.

So, let us dedicate ourselves, Christians and Jews, to waiting, perhaps as minority communities, in peace and harmony with one another for the Messiah to consummate the work that has been begun in the advent of Jesus. Maranatha: come Lord Jesus.