ready, sound in substance and smooth in form. It was a model answer from
a son to his parent: "I go, sir," said the youth, without hesitation or
complaint. I am not sure that the father was overjoyed at the promptness
and politeness of this reply: probably he had received as fair promises
from the same quarter before, and seen them broken. At all events, this
young man's fair word was a whited sepulchre; he did not obey his
father. Whether he fell in with trivial companions on his way to the
vineyard, and was induced to go with them in another direction, or
thought the day too hot and postponed the labour till the morrow, I know
not; but he said, and did not. It was profession without practice. The
tender vine-shoots might trail on the ground for him till their
fruit-buds were blackened; he would not put himself to the trouble of
tying them up to the stakes, although the food of the family should be
imperilled by his neglect.
Now comes the sharp question, "Whether of them twain did the will of his
father?" The answer is all too easy. The light is stronger than is
comfortable for those owl-eyed Pharisees, who were prowling about like
night-birds on the scent of their prey. The sudden glance of this
sunbeam dazzles and confounds them. In utter helplessness, they confess
the truth that condemns themselves; they say unto him "The first."[40]
[40] At an earlier stage of the same interview, when a question
regarding the ministry of the Baptist was addressed to them, fearing
the consequences which an answer might involve, they had sought
shelter under the plea of ignorance. As they gained nothing by their
duplicity on that occasion, they may have been unwilling to try the
same policy again; and, accordingly, they give frankly the obvious
answers to the questions that resulted both from this and the
succeeding parable.
In the first example the Lord represents chief sinners repenting; and in
the second, the form of godliness without its power. The publicans and
harlots, who had forsaken their sins and followed the Saviour, sat for
the first picture; the chief priests and elders, who concealed their
thirst for innocent blood under a mantle of long prayers and broad
phylacteries, sat for the second.
Let us look first to the two distinct and opposite answers, and next to
the two distinct and opposite acts.
_The answers._--That of the first son, "I will not," was evil, and only
evil. It is of first-rate practical importance to make this plain and
prominent. Looking to the son in the story, we see clearly that the
answer was outrageously wicked: it was an evil word flowing from its
native spring in an evil heart. Looking next to the class of persons
whom that son represents, we find they are the openly and daringly
ungodly of every rank in every age. This son, when he rudely refused to
obey his father, meant what he said; he was not willing to obey, and he
plainly said so. This represents those who have neither the profession
nor the practice of true religion; they neither fear God nor pretend to
fear him.
At this point, among certain classes, a subtle temptation insinuates
itself. In certain circumstances, ungodly men take credit for the
distinct avowal of their ungodliness, and count on it as a merit. They
are not, indeed, submissive in heart and life to the will of God; but
they do not tell a lie about the matter; they make no pretension. The
frank confession, that they are not good, seems to serve some men as a
substitute for goodness. By comparing themselves complacently with
fellow-sinners of a different class, they contrive to rivet the fatal
error more firmly on their own hearts. Observing among their neighbours
here and there a rank hypocrite, they compare his sanctimonious
profession with his indifferent sense of honesty, and congratulate
themselves that they are not hypocrites.
Well, brother, suppose it were conceded that you are not a hypocrite;
what then? If you have lived unrepenting, unforgiven, unchanged; if with
your whole heart and habits you have departed from the living God, and
not returned to him through the Mediator,--will all be atoned for and
made up by the single fact that to all your other sins you did not add
the cant of a hypocrite? It is true, a hypocrite is a loathsome
creature; but his badness will not make a profane man good. When he is
cast away for his hypocrisy, it will be no comfort to you as you keep
him company that it is for open ungodliness, and not for lying
pretensions to piety, that you are condemned. Hypocrites are, indeed,
excluded from the kingdom of God; but it is a fatal mistake to assume
that, provided you are not a hypocrite, you will be welcomed into heaven
with all your vices on your back.
I scarcely know a more subtle or more successful wile of the devil than
this. Many strong men are cast down by it. You don't pretend to be good;
well, and will that save you? What comfort will it afford to the lost to
reflect that they went openly to perdition, in broad daylight, before
all men, and did not skulk through by-ways under pretence that they were
going to heaven?
The answer of the other son was evil too, if you look not to its body,
but to its spirit. There is no reason to suppose that it was, even at
the moment, an act of true obedience to his father. "He said, I go, sir;
and went not:" he said one thing, and did another, an opposite; but
there is no ground for believing that he meant to go when he promised,
and afterwards changed his mind. His smooth language was a lie; and his
subsequent conduct showed, not that he had changed his mind when his
father was out of sight, but that he concealed it while his father was
present. It is worthy of notice, that although the first son changed his
mind after he had given his answer, there is no intimation of any change
having passed on the second son, between his answer and his act. By its
silence on this point, the narrative leads us to infer that the purpose
of the disobedient son was the same while he was promising well as when
he acted ill. The course of the life flowing full in the direction of
disobedience, proves that the expression of the lips which ran in the
opposite direction, was a lie; it was like a glittering ripple caused by
a fitful breeze, running upward on the surface of the river, while the
whole volume of its water rolls, notwithstanding, the other way.
Thus is even the worship of hypocrites worthless: Not every one that
_saith_ unto me, Lord, Lord; but he that _doeth_ the will of my Father
which is in heaven. The want of the subsequent obedience shows that the
promise was not true.
Thus at first both these sons were in a false and unsafe position. Their
characters were not the same,--were not similar: they differed in
thought and word; but the difference, in as far as their answers were
concerned, indicated only varieties of sin. Legion is the name of the
spirits that possess and pollute the fallen; but all the legion do not
dwell in every man. Different temptations tinge different persons with
different hues of guilt. At the time when the father uttered his
command, the character of the first son was bold, unblushing rebellion;
the character of the second was cowardly, false pretence. The one son
neither promised nor meant to obey; the other son promised obedience,
but intended not to keep his word.
In the first instance, therefore, there is no ground for preferring the
one to the other. While they stood severally in their father's presence,
and before either had repented of his sin, they were both, and both
alike evil. The blasphemer has no right to boast over the hypocrite, and
the hypocrite has no right to boast over the blasphemer. In either case
it is a body of sin, but there is a shade of difference in the colour of
the garments. The one pretends to a goodness which he does not possess;
and the other confesses, or rather boasts, that he is destitute of
goodness. They measure themselves by themselves; and therein they are
not wise. The one thinks his smooth tongue will save him; and the other
counts himself safe because he has not a smooth tongue.
We come now to the ultimate _act_ of either son. The first, after
flinging a blunt refusal in his father's face, repented of his sin. The
turning-point is here. A change came over the spirit of the man, and a
consequent change emerged in his conduct: his heart was first turned,
and then his history. The honesty of his declaration--the absence of
duplicity in giving his answer, would not have justified him before
either God or man. He repented; he turned round. He grieved over his
sin; he was sorry that he had disobeyed his father. Repentance
immediately brought forth fruit after its kind. He went into the
vineyard, and laboured there with a will all day at the kind of work
which he knew would please his father. These two things go always in
company, and together make up the new man--they are the new heart and
the new life.
The grieved father would weep for joy, as he looked up the precipitous
hill-side on which the terraced vineyard hung, and saw there the head
and hands of his son glancing quickly from place to place among the vine
plants. Thus there is joy in heaven--deep in the heart of heaven's
Lord--over one sinner that repenteth. Among the vines that day work was
worship: the resulting act of obedience--fruit of repentance in the
soul, was an offering of a sweet-smelling savour unto God.
The other son promptly promised, but failed to perform. The first was
changed from bad to good, but the second was not changed from good to
bad. No change took place in this case, and none is recorded. It is not
written, that having promised, he afterwards repented and did not go.
His promise was not true; at the moment when it was made, the youth did
not intend to work, and therefore it required no change of mind to
induce him afterwards to spend the day in idleness.
This son represents, in the first instance, those Pharisees who were
then and there compassing the death of Jesus. They ostentatiously
professed that they were doing God service; yet they were spreading a
net for the feet of the innocent, and preparing to shed his blood.
Wearing broad phylacteries, making long prayers, and offering many
sacrifices, they were, notwithstanding, living in malice and envy,
hateful, and hating one another. With their lips they honoured God; but
in works they denied him. These, in as far as they are here represented,
were evil first and last. In the second son we have an example, not of a
man who meant to do good changing his mind and ultimately doing evil,
but of a man who, notwithstanding his fair profession, meant evil at the
beginning and perpetrated it in the end.
Nor are these lessons of the Lord limited to one private interpretation:
the lesson of this parable was not exhausted when the Pharisees died
out. As surely as the thorns, and the tares, and the lilies to which
Jesus on various occasions alluded in his lectures, grow on the ground
at this day, and have grown there through all the intervening
generations--so surely the various classes of human character which he
rebuked, warned, or encouraged in his ministry, have their
representatives going out and in amongst us in the present day. It is
meant that in this glass all the self-righteous to the end of the world
should see themselves; their profession is fair, but their life is for
self, and not for God.
In the stratified rocks many species and genera of plants and animals
are found in a fossil state which are not found in the flora or fauna of
our present earth; but the human characters that were fixed and stamped
as by photograph in the Scriptures are not so far removed from the men
and women who now live on the earth. No species has become extinct; and
even the minuter characteristics of distinct varieties remain legible
still.
* * * * *
Here spring two distinct warnings to two distinct classes, with
corresponding encouragements attached, as shadows follow solid bodies
in the sunlight;--to the Publicans and Harlots first, and next to the
Pharisees of the day.
1. There is a class amongst us answering to those publicans and sinners
to whom Jesus was wont to address the message of his mercy. Alas, they
may be counted by thousands and tens of thousands in the land! They are
the drunkards, the licentious, the profane, the false, the cruel,--those
who abandon themselves to a vicious life, and do not take the trouble of
attempting to hide their sin under a cloak of sanctity. They gratify
every lust, and crucify none. They live without God in the world. The
key-note of their being is, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.
To all this class the parable proclaims a warning. A rank, soporific
superstition has crept over these free and easy spirits,--a superstition
as dark and deceitful as any of the inventions of Rome. Men seem
actually to persuade themselves that their very wickedness will supply
them with a passport into heaven. They seem to expect that they will be
made pets in the great day, because they made no pretension to
saintship; and that they will be fondled by the Judge as they have been
by their boon companions, because hypocrisy cannot be reckoned among
their sins. It is a false hope. Free thinking, free living brother, if I
saw you about to put to sea in a ship which I knew to be affected with
dry-rot in the timbers of the bottom, I would warn you with all my
energy, that I might save your life: when I see you preparing to launch
into eternity leaning on a lie, I cry vehemently, Beware, lest you be
lost for ever! Without holiness no man shall see God. The absence of a
hypocritical pretension to holiness will not be accepted instead of
holiness. All who go away to the judgment-seat without holiness will be
shut out of heaven--alike those who thought they had it, and those who
confessed that they had it not. It was all right at last with the
profane son in the parable; but mark, he repented and obeyed. God's
invitation to the wicked is, Turn and live; but the promise contains in
its bosom the counterpart threatening, If you turn not you shall die. It
was not the bold, frank declaration of disobedience that made the first
son all right: it made him all wrong. It was his change,--his passing
out of that state, as if he had passed from death unto life, that saved
him.
But to this class the parable speaks encouragement as well as warning.
So great is God's mercy in Christ that even you are welcome when you
come; the gate stands open; the Redeemer from within is calling chief
sinners in, He has pledged himself to cast no comer out because of his
worthlessness. Nor does the freeness of his grace prove that the
prodigal's sins are small; it proves only that the forgiving love of
Christ is great.
2. There is still a class corresponding to the Pharisees, and to these
the Lord in this parable conveys both warning and encouragement.
The essence of the Pharisaic character, under every variety of form,
consists of these two things,--an exact and laborious observance of
external religious duties, and a heart satisfied with itself while it is
devoted to the world. The species is described for all times and places
in the Apocalyptic Epistle to the Church in Sardis: "Thou hast a name
that thou livest, and art dead" (Rev. iii. 1). There is a profession of
godliness wanting its power; Christ's name comes readily to the lip, but
the god of this world possesses the heart and controls the life.
There is encouragement to the Pharisee as well as to the publican to
turn and live. There is no respect of persons with God; the Pharisee was
as welcome to Christ as the publican, if he would come. A Pharisee and a
publican went up to the temple at the same hour to pray; the publican
returned to his own house pardoned and at peace with God, while the
Pharisee went home still unreconciled and under condemnation: but
wherefore? Not that God was more willing to forgive the publican than to
forgive the Pharisee; but because the Pharisee did not ask forgiveness.
He would have obtained it if he had asked it: his self-righteousness was
his ruin.
Thus in the end of this parable, the Lord intimates to the Pharisees
that the outcasts whom they despised are entering the kingdom of heaven
before them. This does not mean that the way is made more easy, the gate
more wide, to the licentious and profane than to the hypocrite,--it
intimates merely that in point of fact the profane were then and there
hastening in through the gate which stood open alike for all, while the
self-righteous were standing aloof. The intimation, moreover, is made,
not in order to keep these Pharisees back, but to urge them forward. The
Lord desires to provoke them to jealousy by them that were no people.
These despised outcasts are going in before you; arise and press in now,
lest the door be shut. It was not because they were publicans and
harlots that they were saved, but because they believed and repented
under the preaching of John; and it was not because the others were
Pharisees that they were still unsaved, but because even with the
example of fellow-sinners repenting and believing before their eyes,
they, thinking themselves righteous, would not repent and believe.
God delights as much to receive a Pharisee as to receive a publican.
When a self-righteous man discovers himself at last to be a whited
sepulchre, and counting his own righteousness filthy rags, flees to
Christ as his righteousness, he is instantly accepted in the beloved.
If I could be admitted, in the body or out of the body, to a vision of
the saints in rest, I would like to creep near the spot where two saved
sinners chance to meet,--the man who wrote this narrative of Christ's
ministry, and the man who preached Christ to the Gentiles. I would fain
listen for an hour to the conversation of Matthew the publican and Saul
the Pharisee when they meet in the mansions of the Father's house. Their
loving argument, I could imagine, would sometimes run high. Matthew will
contend that the grace of their common Lord has been most conspicuously
glorified in his own redemption, "for," he pleads, "I was all evil and
had nothing good, I had neither inside purity nor outside whitening. I
had neither the seemly profession without nor the holy heart within. I
was altogether vile; and in me therefore is the grace of God glorified
most." Paul, on the other side, will contend, with his keen intellect
perfect at last, that he was the chief sinner, and that consequently in
his redemption a more decisive testimony is given to the abundance of
the Saviour's grace. After describing his own hardness and blindness and
unbelief, he will add, as the crowning sin of man, the crowning glory of
God,--While I was thus the chief of sinners, I gave myself out as one of
the greatest of saints.
It may be hard to tell whether of the two mountains is the more
elevated; but one thing is clear,--both are covered by the flood. The
blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth us,--the profane and the
self-righteous alike,--cleanseth us from all sin.
XI.
THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN.
"Hear another parable: There was a certain householder, which planted a
vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it,
and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far
country: and when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his
servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of
it. And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed
another, and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than
the first: and they did unto them likewise. But last of all he sent
unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. But when the
husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the
heir: come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.
And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him.
When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto
those husbandmen? They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those
wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen,
which shall render him the fruits in their seasons. Jesus saith unto
them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the
builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this
is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? Therefore say
I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to
a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall
on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it
will grind him to powder. And when the chief priests and Pharisees
had heard his parables, they perceived that he spake of them. But
when they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the multitude,
because they took him for a prophet."--MATT. xxi. 33-46.
When a proprietor has determined to appropriate as a vineyard a portion
of ground which had previously lain waste, or been employed for some
other purpose, his first care is to plant the vines. As some time must
necessarily elapse before the young plants begin to bear fruit, he may
prosecute the other departments of his undertaking at leisure. In due
time, accordingly, he constructs a fence around the field to keep out
depredators, whether men or beasts; digs a vat for receiving the juice,
and prepares an apparatus above it for squeezing the clusters quickly
in the hurry of the vintage; builds a tower as at once a shelter for the
keeper and an elevated stand-point for the watcher by night or day.
In the case which this parable represents, the owner did not continue to
reside on the spot and cultivate his own vineyard; "he let it out to
husbandmen, and went into a far country." This lease, granted by a
non-resident proprietor, throws an interesting light on the habits of
the place and the time. In regard both to the tenants and the terms, the
information, though very brief, is very definite. The vineyard was let
not to one capitalist, who might employ labourers to do the necessary
work, but to a kind of joint-stock company of labourers who proposed to
cultivate the property with their own hands for the common benefit. It
was stipulated, moreover, that the rent should be paid not in money but
in kind. It is the system known in India at this day as ryot-rent; the
cultivator undertakes to give the owner a certain fixed quantity yearly
from the produce of the farm, and all that is over belongs to himself.
The structure of the parable in its later stages presupposes a country
in which the central government is paralyzed, and the will of the
strongest has usurped the place of law. With us it requires an exercise
of imagination to conjure up a scene in which these events could
possibly occur; but in those regions such anarchy was not uncommon
then,--is not uncommon now. It is probable that the annals of our own
empire in India could supply some parallel conflicts between the
privileged superiors and the actual cultivators of the soil.
The proprietor, being personally absent from the country, employed
agents to demand his stipulated share of the produce at the proper
season from the tenants in possession. The tenants, presuming on the
distance of the superior, and the difficulty which he must necessarily
encounter in any attempt to enforce his rights, not only refused to
fulfil the conditions of their lease, but also assaulted the messengers
who made the demand; they beat one, and killed another, and stoned a
third. Obviously, they determined from the first to retain the whole
produce of the vineyard for themselves. They do not seem to have laid
their plans with much care: there is more of passion than of policy in
their conduct. It is the ordinary practice of those who break the laws
of God or of man, to grasp madly a present pleasure, and refuse to think
of coming vengeance. Having heard of the treatment which his agents had
received, the proprietor despatched another party more numerous, with
the view probably of overawing the refractory peasants by a display of
strength; but the second mission was as cruelly and contemptuously
rejected as the first. The proprietor, still unwilling to bring matters
to an extremity, adopted next an expedient which he hoped would subdue
the rebellion, without imposing on him the necessity of punishing the
rebels. Keeping out of sight for the moment his rights and his power, he
appealed confidingly to their hereditary reverence for the family of
their chief; he sent his son, and sent him unarmed, unattended.