20 Pentecost, Year A

“CALLOUS REMOVAL”
Proper 21 -- Ezekiel 18: 1 – 4, 25 – 32; Psalm 25: 3 – 9; Philippians 2: 1 – 13; Matthew 21: 28 – 32
A sermon by The Rev. Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, IL, on Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Callous removal…….

My dad was a guy who worked with his hands all his life. A highly talented man who had little in the way of formal education (he finished eighth grade, then had to go to work to help support the family during the Great Depression), he was gifted by God with an innate ability to do all things mechanical. When I was very young, he operated a small town blacksmith shop, and when I was about six or seven, he took up the craft of drilling water wells (some of them 600 – 800 feet deep!).

During most of the time I either watched him work, or helped him during the summers drilling wells, I rarely ever saw him wear gloves.

As a consequence, his hands were the hands of a working man, that is to say, they were heavily calloused.

Occasionally, in the evening as he was sitting in the living room in front of the television set, he’d pull out an old fashioned single edge razor blade and begin cutting the calluses off of his hands.

To this day, it’s a scene in my minds’ eye that still sends shivers up my spine! Even back then, I couldn’t stand to watch him do it for very long.

But, as long I as could stand to watch him, I never saw him cut himself or draw blood….He was obviously well practiced at getting rid of those calluses.

Well, my reaction, those shivers up my spine, might well describe the chief priests and the elders’ reaction to Jesus comments, heard in our Gospel today.

For, you see, the chief priest and the elders, the ruling elite of Jesus’ day, are the target of Jesus’ question, “What do you think?” Jesus is engaging in one last attempt at callous removal with these power brokers of the Temple in Jerusalem. For these chief priests and elders had become calloused, impervious to the inner and outer holiness that God demands if His people. For the matching of our insides and our outsides is at the root of the Parable of the Two Sons that Jesus tells today.

Hold that question in your mind for a moment, “What do you think?” as we turn our attention to the setting of today’s encounter. For we must understand the setting for the interchange we read today, as well as the next two Sunday’s readings, in order to understand the greater picture that emerges from our Gospel passage for today.

Jesus has made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the last week of His earthly life. And now, in the Temple precincts, He has cleared away the money changers in the courtyard of that Temple.

Now, today, we witness the exchange of questions between the chief priests and the elders, as they ask Him (Matthew 21: 23 – 27) “By what authority” He is doing the things He does.

Instead of answering them, Jesus asks them a question, “The baptism of John, where did it come from? From heaven, or from men?”

The chief priests and the elders commiserate a little, and then answer, saying, “We do not know.”

(You see, their answer, Matthew tells us, was predicated not on the truth of the matter, but on expediency….they said they did not know because to have acknowledged John’s ministry as valid would have meant that they should have believed John the Baptist and his call to repentance. On the other hand, to have said that John’s ministry was of human origin would have incurred the wrath of the crowds, who held John in high esteem.)

Now, we are ready to look at this parable, the Parable of the Two Sons, which is the first of three parables Jesus will tell directly to these members of the ruling class of 2,000 years ago. (We will read and study all three today and in the next two Sundays.)

And, just in case the chief priests and elders thought they could duck the meaning of this parable, Matthew records Jesus’ “zinger” at the end of the parable, when we read, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you….” (Zingers like this are a feature of Matthew’s writing style…there can be no mistaking the applicability and the meaning of Jesus’ parables!)

So, Jesus says, “What do you think? A man had two sons; and he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he repented and went. And he went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go sir,’ but did not go.”

As we unpack the meaning of this parable, we ought to remember that the biblical meaning of a vineyard is that it often refers to the nation of Israel. It is an image that Isaiah and others (The Psalms, for example) use quite frequently…..Isaiah 5: 1 – 7 probably forms the background of today’s teaching. In Isaiah 5: 7 we read that “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are its pleasant planting.”

For Jesus’ audience, the ruling elite of 2,000 years ago who knew the Scriptures well, the image of the vineyard and its correlation to Israel could not have been missed. They knew precisely that Jesus was referring to them!

And, just as Isaiah paints a picture of God’s judgment on Israel, Jesus proclaims judgment on the leadership of Israel in His own day: Isaiah proclaimed God’s judgment because of the injustice and lack of righteousness that God’s people practiced. Jesus proclaims judgment because of the calloused attitudes that characterized the leadership of His day, attitudes that showed a basic disconnect between outward profession of faith in God, but actions that demonstrated just the opposite. The callousness of the chief priests and elders would be seen most clearly in the wickedness of their determination to get rid of Jesus.

In both cases, Isaiah and Jesus, calloused hearts are at the root of the problem each was addressing.

Jesus’ words are calculated to cut away the hardened layers, much as that razor blade cut into the calluses on my father’s hands.

Calluses occur when routine actions that we do every day, whether they are the actions of fine, liturgical worship, or just the routine of day-by-day living, result in a gradual hardening of our sensitivity to God and the radical holiness that He demands.

That seems to be the case with the chief priests and the elders….As keepers of the Temple, the new (and not-yet-completed) Temple was a magnificent structure. And they, the priests and the elders, were the keepers of the Temple, and of all the religion that it signified.

Maybe they were “building worshippers”, you know, people who just like fancy buildings, nice furnishings, and who like to be in places of honor in such magnificent surroundings.

Perhaps they thought that excellent liturgical worship (we should remember that Israel’s worship, like the vast majority of Christianity from which it sprang, was liturgical worship) was a good substitute for inner holiness. Maybe they liked good religious displays, and thought that would please God.

The Gospels do not paint a very pleasant picture of the chief priests, the elders, or the Pharisees, those groups who were “in charge” in Israel 2,000 years ago.

But the disease that plagued all of these groups, can also plague us….

So, Jesus’ question comes to us today, as well, “What do you think?”

What do we think of our outer actions and words?

What do we think of our inner disposition, that is, the disposition of our hearts?

Do the two match one another? Does our “inside” match our “outside”?

One final comment: Jesus tells His audience today, “The tax collectors and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” Why did He say that? I think the answer is that those who were “unclean” in the estimation of the chief priests, the elders and the Pharisees had little to lose. As a consequence, they probably recognized their callousness in terms of their hearts’ inner disposition. Since they had less to lose, they were much more willing to admit the disconnect between inner attitudes and outer actions.

The Lord calls us to admit our own callousness, and to allow Him to remove these barriers which insulate us from God’s radical call to inner and outer holiness.

AMEN.