The Song of the Vineyard

Isaiah 5

            The Song of the Vineyard (5:1-7) is a straightforward allegory: Israel is the Lord’s vineyard and, despite all the Lord’s care, she has not yielded the harvest of faithfulness He looked for. The second half of the chapter spells out the injustices Israel perpetuates. The rich accumulate more and more wealth at the expense of the poor. People engage in all kinds of drunken revelry. There is a general confusion of what is good and what is bad.

            It goes on, and in some ways it’s uncomfortably modern. One of the issues in our day is the ever-increasing gap between the rich and everyone else. We seem to be a people who self-medicate—whether it’s alcohol or pot or other drugs—anything to feel something in a soul-deadening world. Certainly there’s a confusion of right and wrong: we live in an age in which if something is natural it must be good. “Be yourself,” is our mantra. Never mind that Christ died to redeem us from our natural state and to make us something new.

            Now we have to remember that Israel is not just any nation. She is a combination of what we would call church and state, and she is absolutely unique among the nations for that reason. If the judgment over Israel sounds like it might be a modern condemnation of the US, it is much more a word of warning for the church, complicit and compromised in the world.

            Anyway, God’s judgment in the 7^th century BC is coming on Israel: famine, invasion, exile.

            The Song of the Vineyard takes on a new life in the hands of Jesus. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the same stories of Holy Week. After His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus takes up residence in the temple. There He teaches and, in turn, His opponents come and challenge Him. In the middle of all of this, Jesus tells the so-called Parable of the Vineyard, in which He co-opts Isaiah’s prophecy and applies it against the religious leaders of His day. Everyone knew exactly what Jesus was saying, and the chief priests began to look for a way to arrest Him. In this way, Jesus applies the words of the prophet to Himself and announces that the true judgment, of which Israel’s exile was just a foretaste, is at hand. More on that when we actually get to the Gospels…