Instead of just reading the Scripture reading this morning, I'm going to invite you to role play it. Or at least to imagine your way into the role of one of the people mentioned in the story. And I encourage you to really enter into these roles. Sometimes the most amazing insights can come out of playing with these stories - we can see things in them that we never saw before.

I'm going to play Jesus, because… well, because!

We need a few people to play the landowner. This is an absentee landowner, who lived some distance away from the property in question, so I'm going to ask the choir to role play the part of the landowner, because you are kind of removed from the rest - This story is told in the Jerusalem temple, to the chief priests and elders, many of whom owned large estates in Galilee and far flung parts of Judea and Samaria. You've acquired some land. It wasn't very profitable growing grain, but there's more money in wine, so you plough up the field and plant vines, build a fence and a watchtower to keep out the riff raff, and dig a wine press. Then you lease it out to peasant farmers and go back home. So as you are hearing this story, try to imagine yourselves as the landowners and notice the thoughts and feelings you have as the story unfolds.

We need tenant farmers - this is a large group, so we'll take the larger side of the congregation. You are share croppers - you lease your land from the landowner in exchange for a share of the crop you produce. You probably are engaged in a constant struggle with the landowner to keep enough crop so that you can eat. Many of you probably had land at one time, or your families had land at one time, and you used it to grow food for your families, but you either got cheated out of it, or had a bad crop for a few years, got into debt and were forced to sell your land. According to Jewish law, your family land should be returned to your family periodically, but the big landowners aren't keen about giving your land back. And it no longer grows food, at least not the food you can afford. Now its growing grapes that are used to produce wine for the city market! So as you hear this story, you might imagine the resentment of a small farmer at the mercy of the wealthy and powerful.

Finally, we need slaves. Slaves made up about half the population in the ancient Roman empire - that's a lot of people - some of you were captured in wars, some of you were sold into slavery to pay off your debts, but most of you were probably born in slavery, and although Jewish law requires slaves to be freed every seven years, Roman law was quite different, so you might or might not ever get freed.

So here is the parable Jesus told to the chief priests and the elders (many of whom were landowners) in the Jerusalem temple:

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.
When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.
But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned a third.
Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, (have them read it) 'They will respect my son.' (oops, we forgot to assign the role of the son - volunteers?)
But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, (read it together) 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.' So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
Jesus: "Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?"

Chief priests and elders: (read it together) "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time."
Jesus: (pointing at the chief priests and elders) "Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will live a kingdom life." (point at the tenants and slaves)

Let's pause there, just notice your feelings and thoughts as that parable drew to a close and share our perspectives so far:
Slaves - what was it like to be a slave? (pretty brutal - your only role was to get beat up or killed - hard to stay alive)
Tenants - you were pretty violent in this story - where do you think that anger comes from? (greed? desperation? sense of being cheated, deprived of your land and livelihood?)
Landowners - now as the chief priests and the landowners, you identified pretty strongly with the landowner in the story. You thought the tenants were miserable wretches who should be put to death for killing your son. You thought that the vineyard should be leased to other tenants who would give you your rightful share! Now this is a parable and usually there is a surprise ending to a parable. What was the surprise here?

The surprise was that you were identifying with the landowner in the story and Jesus turned the table on you and said that the kingdom of God would be taken away from you and given to a people who bear fruits of the kingdom. In effect, he says, you aren't the landowner. You are the tenants. You identified with the landowner, but he is saying that you are the wretched tenants who wouldn't give the landowner his due.

What was your response when you heard him turn on you like that?

What about the tenants and slaves? What did you think when you heard that?

Here we encounter the different ways in which people perceive what is just and fair. Justice has many faces. The landowners are quite wealthy, but they think the tenants are trying to cheat them by not giving them what they are due. They've invested in this vineyard, planted it, built a fence and a watchtower to guard it, and a winepress to process the grapes.

The tenants, I'm assuming, have a different perspective. From their perspective, they are doing all the work, and the landowner is getting a huge share of the produce. Land that may have belonged to them at one time and provided food for their families has now passed into the hands of someone who lives so far away that he has no idea what your lives are like.

And the slaves, have a different perspective still. They are caught in the middle; the best they can hope for is to survive.

So far, we've read this story as one that makes sense in the tension of the social conflict that was first Palestine. Perhaps something like this actually happened in Jesus' lifetime. But in turning it into a parable, Jesus drew on an Old Testament image of Israel as God's vineyard. So you priests aren't the landowner at all. The true landowner is God and this is God's vineyard, and you've treated it like your own. Instead of being good shepherds of the people, you've taken the land that grew their food and turned it into into vineyards so that you can drink luxury wine. And when they protested that they didn't have enough to eat, you wanted to put them to a miserable death. Just like you are about to condemn Jesus to a miserable death. That is not God's way, not the fruits of God's kingdom, not a kingdom life. Let's keep reading to get a clue to God's way.

Jesus continued: "You can read it for yourselves in your Bibles: 'The stone the masons threw out is now the cornerstone. This is God's work; we rub our eyes in amazement, we can hardly believe it! Whoever stumbles on this Stone gets shattered; whoever the Stone falls on gets smashed.'
When the religious leaders heard this story, they knew it was aimed at them. They wanted to arrest Jesus, but, intimidated by public opinion, they held back. Most people held him to be a prophet of God.

This passage reflects a situation of social conflict, a conflict in which the leaders and the general population don't see things at all the same way. They have different perspectives of justice.

Today, where do you see this kind of conflict?

Labour relations in which unions and management view each other as antagonists.

agriculture where small farmers and big agri-business don't see things at all the same way.

wherever people see the world as divided into us and them, as a struggle over scarce resources, where they see others as enemies to be defeated or garbage to be disposed of.

In each of these conflicts, people have different perspectives of what is right and fair. But that doesn't mean that there is no way to decide between them. The key to biblical justice is its focus on the way a decision impacts the widow, the orphan, and the poor - the most vulnerable in society.

But alongside that, there is gospel. There is a landowner-God who will not give up on his tenants. When the owner's slaves arrive to collect his share of the produce, the tenants attack them, even beating one and killing another. You'd think the vineyard owner would send in the police at that point, but no! This odd landowner simply sends another delegation of slaves to collect the rent.

Those slaves were treated even worse than the first. Surely by now the owner will respond to violence with violence! But no, he makes himself even more vulnerable, sending his son and heir. Where does the bright idea come from to send his son, his heir, alone, to negotiate with these violent tenants? It's nuts. "Who would do such a thing? No one...except maybe a crazy landlord so desperate to be in relationship with these tenants that he will do anything, risk anything, to reach out to them. This landowner doesn't act like a businessman. He acts more like a desperate parent, willing to do or say or try anything to reach out to a beloved and wayward child. It's crazy, the kind of crazy that comes from being in love."

"What will the landlord do when he comes?" Jesus asks, and all they can do, all we can do, is imagine more violence: "He will put those wretches to a miserable death." That's our response to violence. We cheer when Osama bin Laden and other Al Queda operatives get killed and breath a quiet hallelujah when serial murderer Clifford Olsen dies a slow death of cancer. It seems like justice.

But the key question this parable invites us to consider is not what will that land owner do, but what did that land owner do. "And to that question we have Jesus' own answer: the landowner-God sent his son, Jesus, to all of us who have hoarded God's blessings for ourselves and not given God God's own due. And when we killed him, God raised him from the dead, and sent him back to us yet one more time, still bearing the message of God's desperate, crazy love."

That is yet another face of justice, the justice which isn't fair at all, but amazing generosity, radical vulnerability, and grace beyond imagining. That is the justice which is at the heart of the universe, the kind of justice which is the stone against which we all stumble, and the kind of justice which smashes all lesser forms of justice into tiny, insignificant bits. That's the kind of justice on which real community is built, the kind of justice which leads us beyond conflict into concord, beyond violence into serenity, the kind of justice which is, if we really search, is deep in our hearts!