[AI translation] According to the Bible reading guide that our parish gave to everyone as a gift on January 1, this passage we are reading is for tomorrow. The reason why I would like to talk about this very Word is to remind and encourage you to study the Word every day, and to show you how much God has to tell us in a passage of Scripture that is read on a weekday! The message of God that this parable is telling us is, unfortunately, a very sad message, a message of a great judgment that God will not carry out on the last day, but will carry out again and again in history and in time on His unfaithful people.What is this judgment? That the Lord of the vine will give His vine to others, to those who will give in its fruit. This judgment was once literally fulfilled upon the people of Israel. For, according to the first interpretation of the parable, God entrusted His vineyard, His kingdom, to them; they were the vineyard itself. God entrusted them to the vine-growers, the official leaders of the Old Testament people, the chief priests, the scribes, to offer the fruit of their husbandry in sacrifice, in good works, for His glory. But the vineyard workers worked for their own profit and the Master got nothing. One after another the master sent his servants to bring in some of the fruit of the garden: prophets came, they spoke God's message - to no avail, the leaders of the people abused them, beat them, stoned them, silenced them. At the last he sent his only begotten Son, saying: this will be honoured! How can the people of God not honour the Son of God? But the wicked vineyard workers killed the heir and threw his carcass outside the fence. Indeed, there the Son of God died outside the city walls, on Calvary. Everything happened exactly as the Lord Jesus had foretold. The judgment was carried out: the lord of the vineyard lost those workers and gave the grapes to others. In 70 A.D. Jerusalem was destroyed, and for the first time in history this judgment was carried out on the Jews. And the holy inheritance of Israel as God's chosen people, with all its riches, was transferred to spiritual Israel and a new and wonderful flowering was born in the Christian church.
One might think, "But then everything is all right, the prospective judgment has been carried out, we have already gone through all that the Lord Jesus says here pro future, that the wicked vine-growers will kill the only beloved Son of the Gazda, and that the Gazda will give the whole vineyard to others: we have been through all that a long time ago, so let us be happy that the inheritance is ours! But precisely because the inheritance is ours now, the whole parable today applies not to Old Testament Judaism, but to contemporary Christianity in all its details. That vineyard today is the Church of Christ. In such beautiful pictures the parable expresses how God founded His church in this world. He has planted, planted each branch one by one, each soul a work of special care and attention to the Lord, like the planting of a new vine. The church, where it is, is always a plantation of the Lord Himself. The ground by itself grows only thorns and thistles; the vine has to be planted with much labour and expense. It does not grow by itself. The very essence of the church is that it is the object of God's very special care and work: heavenly planting in the earth.
The farmer in the parable surrounded his vineyard with turf. God's church in the world is under His special protection. "I will be a wall of fire around it," God says in one place to His people. His grace in forgiving our sins is indeed like a wall of fire around us: it protects us from temptation, from corruption, from Satan, from death. God's law, by which He regulates the lives of His people, is like a protective fence: until someone breaks through it, they can live safely within it. The obedience that God requires of His people is like a wall of separation that distinguishes the church from the world. Yea, such is the turf with which the Razda has surrounded His vineyard: His grace, the fence of His law, and the strong wall of obedience of His faithful. And all this He has sanctified and sealed even with the divine blood of His only beloved Son! I, as a man from Kecskemét, know very well how much toil, expense and trouble it is to plant and maintain a vineyard! The amount of work and expense that must be put into it before the farmer sees fruit. By the whole parable, the Lord Jesus wants to make us understand that God has an unimaginable amount of the Church, His people, and therefore expects a lot from them! It is God's constant - and legitimate - demand of His Church that she should "receive of the fruit of His vineyard".
What does God expect of the church? Fruit. But what specifically does the fruit that God expects today, in the modern age, as the fruit of His special investment in His church? One of the greatest miseries of humanity today is that it has lost its sense of true community, its disconnection of one man from another. Society has become like a pile of sand, with grains of sand scattered on top of each other, drifting side by side, but without any deeper connection with each other. They have nothing to do with each other. A big mass, a mass without any deeper connection. The world's greatest thinkers are trying to find a way to turn a disjointed, disconnected humanity, and even masses and individuals who are often at odds with each other, into an organic whole, a living community, a mass of disparate people into a society in which one person is truly a partner to another, in which they learn to live together.
You see, this would be one of the Church's most earthly tasks in the world: to present to the world a fraternal community of living together in love. To provide a model of how individuals of the most diverse orders and ranks can live together on earth as one great living organism, a cohesive body. For the benefit of each other, complementing each other. In this disorganised, disconnected world of today, the Church should live everywhere what it means for different people to live together in a vibrant, loving, organic way. The Church of Christ on earth should be the harbinger, the model and the vanguard of a new society! A place where everything that social scientists talk about, and which seems almost utopian because of the many failures, becomes a tangible and visible reality. It is a place where people not only talk about freedom, joy, love, goodness, conversion, purity, but where they actually live freely, joyfully, loving one another, purely!
Then, the other great task of the Church would be to be a pioneer, through its unity in Christ, in bringing together and living peacefully side by side peoples and continents divided by conflicting interests. It is an incredible gift that wherever there is a Church of Christ - in London, Tokyo, Singapore or Moscow, whatever it is called: Catholic or Evangelical, Methodist or Reformed, Greek or Roman Catholic, whatever language it preaches the Word, whatever colour its people, it is all one flock, one large family, one common church of Christ. Whatever the differences between the continents, the Christian churches on them are one, their members are brothers and sisters, children of the same Father! What an opportunity for service now, when the possibility of a peaceful solution would indeed avert a world catastrophe for mankind! But do you know where this begins, this living of the Church, this unity? It is not that you and the Negro Christian in South Africa feel that you are living in spiritual communion with each other; that is very easy, because the Negro Christian is far away from you! It is that you and the Reformed, Hungarian-speaking flatmate are in spiritual communion with each other, that you appreciate and love each other! This is much harder - but more effective!
Yes, such is the fruit the Lord of the vine wants to receive from those to whom He gave His precious vineyard two thousand years ago! That means He is looking for fruit in you personally! You are a vine in the garden of the Lord, which has the right to exist because it bears fruit. That's why you have it! For the fruit! Let's not forget that the whole point of our Christian life is to be fruitful lives, to offer to the world the fruits of love, goodness, peace, humanity, full of the good taste and vitamins of heaven! That is why we are! And that is why the Lord planted the whole vineyard! That's why he spent on it. The Lord Jesus was not born to have a nice, cosy, candlelit Christmas Eve for a part of humanity, but to bring a whole new way of life, its reality and its possibility, from heaven into this world! And Jesus Christ did not die on the cross so that tears might fall from our eyes in the emotion of religious piety on Good Friday, but so that His blood might cleanse us from concrete sins! And Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead so that we could sit through a red-egg, cologne-soaked Easter full of merry spring fun, but so that we might rise to real new life and bear fruit through the death-busting power of His resurrection! Fruit that we could not bear on our own! The kind of life that the Sermon on the Mount speaks of! The Lord does not expect and seek great, glorious, glittering deeds, heroic deeds, but very little obedience. Like what I heard the other day, for example, that one of us here went to his old neighbour and confessed to him in all honesty what he had stolen from him years ago and now he has returned it. Not a heroic pose, not a glorious deed: yet an obedience that reminds us of Jesus Christ, that shines through with the goodness and the spirit of the Lord Jesus! Yes, the Lord of the vineyard wants to receive fruits like these and more from you! Will he receive it?
Because that is the most important question of this Word right now! Brethren, shall I say that he shall not receive? Shall I say that the labourers and keepers of the vineyard today are no different than the workers of old who were judged?! I hope we all know and feel it! For we have so often spoken of the bankruptcy into which the churches have fallen! Who needs to be proved today that we Christians have long since ceased to be salt and leaven in this world, neither the light of the world, nor a city built on a hill, nor a credible witness to the faith we profess with our mouths? Our life is something quite different from what is called following Jesus Christ and bearing His reproach. God once took His vineyard from the workers who had beaten His servants the prophets and killed His only loving Son, Jesus Christ, and gave the vineyard to others. But the present workers of the vineyard, those in charge, do not take the word of the prophets seriously either, and if they bind that Jesus Christ, Who wants to love with their hearts, kill that Jesus Christ, Who wants to speak with their tongues, do good with their hands, then the judgment will be repeated: the Lord of the vine will again give the vineyard to others! The unbelief and stubbornness of the present Christian churches will not make the kingdom of God powerless: If someone does not want to give the fruit in any case, someone else will come along and want it! The grapes will be taken and given to others.
This verse stuck in my heart when I thought about it. I feel the church of Jesus Christ is now coming under more and more of this judgment! Judgment on the church is that a stranger is doing the ministry that she has failed to do. As in the parable of the Good Samaritan: the service of charity that the priest has not done, that the Levite - that is, the Church - has not done, God will do it to the Samaritan, to the non-priest, to the non-Church, to the non-Christian! Thus God is slowly taking away from the Church more and more the ministry of the diaconate. This is how God is taking away the ministry of schooling, of teaching. This is also how the church has lost the ministry of healing by faith, how the ministry of caring for souls has been shifted from church workers to psychiatrists... For God takes away the ministry of which the fruit is not given to Him.
Nowadays it is often the case that people who keep themselves far away from any kind of church life find a pure life, a Christian way of life, a way of life that puts many church people to shame. The sons of the world sometimes carry out their vocation with a truer humanity, a greater understanding, a more heroic stand than the believers. Sometimes it almost seems as if more Christian principles are put into practice outside the Church than inside it! Churches are increasingly losing their credibility in the world. But who is losing it? Jesus Christ? No! Christian faith and morals? No! The Kingdom of God? No! Who then? Only the current workers and agents of the vineyard!
I have read that the Japanese have a negative attitude towards Christian churches because they smell the politics of the West. But they are very interested in Jesus Christ and have an open heart for him. Millions worship Jesus Christ, millions read the Bible, hundreds of thousands learn the Sermon on the Mount by heart. There is a great revival movement in Japan, but it is called the Non-Church-Movement, not the church (revival) movement. In the far-flung areas of mission, a third main type of Christianity is now beginning to emerge alongside the familiar, old historic types of church: non-Roman Catholic, non-Protestant Christianity, a new Christianity, the so-called Young Church Christianity. Do you feel the weight of judgement? The heavenly host is giving the grapes to others!
It has not yet taken it from us, if it has already given it to others! According to our guide, read this Word again tomorrow. Remember that the time of grace is still on. But how much longer? We do not know! Jesus Christ says: "The stone which..." He himself is that stone. He is either the foundation stone or the stone of stumbling. Either we build a whole new life on it, or our whole life will be crushed and crushed on it. For those who have met Jesus Christ, their whole destiny, their present and their future rests on this stone. Come then, let us pray to Him:
He who opened for me,
Hide me, O eternal stone!
That is the water and the precious blood,
That thou hast shed for sin,
Be a cure for my soul,
Save me from sin and blame.
(Canto 458, verse 1)
Amen
Date: 19 January 1958.
Lesson
Mk 12,1-12