[Sermon Archive] - [Weekly Devotional Guide]

This Week's Sermon The Fifth Sunday in Lent 25 March 2007 "The Inheritance" Luke 20:9-20 LSB Series C Vicar Hans W. Fiene Soli Deo Gloria!

For those of you who have seen the movie "Gladiator", you may remember a scene early in the movie when the character Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix, murders his father, the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius has just informed his son that he's not going to name him as heir to the throne-that he's effectively not going to give his son the inheritance that Commodus believes he deserves. So, Commodus kills his father as a means of stealing that inheritance, as a way of taking the rights to the empire for himself, to use however he wants.

Now, when Christ tells what is often called the parable of the tenants in today's text, the reaction of those who hear it is a bit strange. You see, the tenants are obviously the guilty party here. They're obviously the Commodus of the parable, who murder the son to try and steal his inheritance and rule over the vineyard as they so desire. And yet, when Christ suggests that the master of the vineyard will come and destroy these wicked, murderous people and give the vineyard to others, those listening to Christ are horrified by this notion. They don't want to believe it. The reason for this is because they understood the general point of the parable and were offended at Christ's implication that God could take back what they believed was their inheritance-their status as God's chosen people. In their minds, that gift was promised to the descendants of Abraham and God could never take it back. But because they became so offended at Christ's suggestion, they missed what they needed to hear the most-that even though they had access to all the fruits of that gift of inheritance, the gift didn't belong to them. It belonged to God.

In a way, the gifts of God are like a river that flows through the heart of His Church. Out of His pure mercy, God invites His people to be strengthened through those waters ever day of their lives. And He will never deny them this right as long as they use those waters properly, as long as they use them as He intended and as long as they recognize that He is the source of those waters, not them. But when God's people begin using those waters for their own gain, when they selfishly cut others off from them or when they come to view themselves as the river's source, don't be surprised when God dams the river and the waters dry up. And this isn't just the case for those in the Gospel text. It's still the case for us today.

One of the gifts that Christ has given His Church is the preached word, and more specifically, pastors to proclaim God's Law and Gospel. But while only one man actually stands in the pulpit, many people are often jockeying for the right to control his lips. Our sinful desire to control this gift for our own selfish benefit can often cause us to put pressure on a pastor to abandon the law and just preach trivial niceties that make us feel warm inside. Or, on the other end, we may try and make the pastor feel that he's doing an inadequate job of using the law if he's not tearing into someone we really want to see torn to pieces. In either case, we're using Christ's gift contrary to its purpose. And, like the tenants of this parable, we're trying to rip the inheritance out of His hands.

Another way that we try to wrestle Christ's inheritance out of His hands is found in our approach to the Lord's Supper. In this sacrament, Christ has promised to provide forgiveness to repentant sinners through His body and blood. And yet, so frequently, we will either approach Christ's altar without an ounce of repentance within us, or we'll feast upon Christ's forgiveness while still withholding forgiveness from someone who has sinned against us. Knowing that Christ doesn't offer us this gift when our hearts are in such a state, when we still eat and drink his body and blood, we are no different from the tenants. We're trying to rip Christ's inheritance out of his hands and tell him that we, and not he, will determine how and when the fruit of His vineyard is to be distributed.

As the famous proverb states, pride goes before destruction. And when we proudly view ourselves as the owners of the inheritance, when we use our status as Christians to abuse and desecrate the gifts of God, don't think for a second that God is incapable of destroying that status. In today's text, Christ says, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces." That's not just a reference to the Jews and the destruction of the Temple after their rejection of Christ. Don't think that because we call our churches Christian, we won't be broken into pieces when we reject Christ by trying to steal his inheritance. Europe has plenty of beautiful churches, but the Gospel won't be found in very many of them today. Because when the European Churches bought into rationalism and used Christ's pulpit to preach against His resurrection and when they began offering Christ's body and blood to those who denied their very presence, God broke them to pieces by taking the Gospel away from them. If we also remain unrepentant after using Christ's gifts against Him, God will strip us of those gifts and leave us to starve without His mercy.

But whenever God dries up the river of His grace, whenever He takes the inheritance from our hands, He doesn't do this because it pleases Him. He doesn't do this to get back at us. He does this so that, having been starved by the absence of his mercy, we might cry out for that mercy in repentance. And Christ will never hesitate to return to repentant sinners with his inheritance, the same full inheritance that we tried to claim as our own. This inheritance that we're speaking about-it's the favor of God, it's the right to be called a son of God-and when God humbles us to see that we can't preserve even an ounce of that inheritance apart from Christ, it's in that moment that God actually reveals how precious and eternally comforting that inheritance is.

Getting back to the movie "Gladiator" for a moment, Marcus Aurelius denied his son the inheritance because he believed his son was unfit in his nature to receive it. And so even though he sits on the throne, Commodus never really finds comfort in it because he knows that he doesn't really deserve the throne. He can't find any peace because there's nothing in his nature that makes the inheritance permanent and assures him that it's his to keep.

In a way, this is how we stand before God. Because of who we are, because we are sinful in nature, we are unfit to receive the favor of God. But unlike Commodus and unlike us, Christ does have a legitimate claim to the inheritance of His Father. Because Christ is of the same substance of His Father, because Christ is, in fact, God himself, everything that belongs to God-all of God's love, all of His authority and all of God's right to judge-also belong to Christ. The inheritance belongs to Christ because of His nature. So, while Commodus lost his inheritance the moment that he died, death failed to take Christ's inheritance because death couldn't change Christ's perfect nature. And not only did death fail to take Christ's inheritance away. Christ's death on the Cross is actually what gives the right to live in His eternal inheritance.

Now, the chief priests and teachers of the law are so upset at Christ's teaching that God is going to give their status as his chosen people to others that they plot to kill Jesus. And in killing Christ, they actually accomplish the very thing that they killed him for preaching. Because it's through the spilling of His blood that Christ's inheritance comes to encompass those who were not the blood descendants of Abraham. And the great comfort in this irrevocable nature of Christ's inheritance is that, if the chief priests and teachers of the law were utterly incapable of stopping Christ's inheritance from pouring out over us, nobody else can't stop it either-and that includes ourselves.

You see, if it were up to us to make sure that those gifts remained holy and pure, our sinful nature would corrupt them the moment that we got our hands on them. But because the purity of those gifts depends on Christ alone, those gifts aren't dependant upon us to keep them alive. Just as a vineyard doesn't lose its ability to produce fruit after we have spit out the grapes, so God's gifts don't lose their ability to forgive when we have misused them. And when Christ creates repentance in our hearts and invites us to return to the very same gifts we have tried to rip from his hands, we'll find that the forgiveness within is still just as powerful. Even when we have tried to use Christ's gifts against Him, because the inheritance can't be taken out of His hands, Christ still has every ability and right to forgive you. And Christ does forgive you.

Now, we Lutherans are always taking about remembering our baptism. And the reason for this is because it's in that moment Christ claims us as his own and ties us to His inheritance. And because Christ can't be separated from God's favor, then those who live in Christ also can't be separated from God's favor. Our baptismal liturgy says that, in the water and the word, we receive the robe of Christ's righteousness. And because Christ's inheritance is stitched into every fiber of that robe, it doesn't matter how imperfect and unholy the flesh underneath is when Christ's robe covers it. Because the robe is from Christ, nothing can take the inheritance out of that holy, perfect garment.

So when we consider the day in which we will stand before God in judgment, rest assured that we won't receive from our Father in Heaven the same judgment that Commodus received from his father on Earth. Though we are, in our sinful nature, completely unfit to receive the Father's inheritance, Christ is not. And because Christ has covered us in the robe of His inheritance, God will welcome us into His presence, to live within His holy vineyard for all time.