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“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.This was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.”May I speak now in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.Amen.Friends, we have wonderful and interesting readings this morning. I am going to begin with Isaiah chapter 5.The Song of the Vineyard“Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard:My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines;he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it;and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.”This great passage from the book of Isaiah is speaking about the relationship between Yahweh, the God of Israel, and his people. You will know, of course, that Yahweh brought his people out of bondage in Egypt, that they wandered in the wilderness, and that they were brought into the promised land and given the land of Israel. God desired a covenant relationship with his people—pictured here as a love song. It was to be a relationship of covenant obedience and faithfulness. Yet his people time and time again broke that covenant with their God.This is, in many ways, the story of the Old Testament: God’s calling to his people to be faithful to him and to his covenant, and their decision time and time again to turn away from him, to sin against him, and to commit idolatry—unfaithfulness with other gods. That is what this parable is about. He looked for it to yield grapes—the grapes of faithfulness, of covenant faithfulness, of obedience—and yet it yielded wild grapes.“And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? … And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.”By this point in their history the nation was divided. There was the northern kingdom (somewhat confusingly called Israel) and the southern kingdom, Judah. The northern kingdom had already been invaded by the Assyrian empire, the superpower of the day. This was considered God’s judgement on the northern kingdom. Here in Isaiah 5 there is a warning to the southern kingdom that the same fate could befall them.A Different Kind of UnfaithfulnessWhat was the situation at the time of the Gospels? How does it differ from the situation implied in Isaiah?We do see a number of differences. Take the religious class, for example—the religious elite, the ruling class we encounter time and time again in the Gospels: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, the elders, the lawyers. Their attitude is very different.In the Old Testament we see covenant unfaithfulness, sin, idolatry, and the breaking of the law again and again. The attitude here is quite different. The religious rulers had become fastidious about keeping the law. They had become so zealous that they invented many other laws to protect the law given by God. Why? Surely, in large part, because they had learned the lesson of the past. They did not want another judgement as there had been before. They wanted to keep their land. They did not want to incur the judgement of God or another national disaster. In a sense they were reformers; in a sense they were arch-conservatives looking to enact a kind of national repentance by returning to the law and being zealous for it. That is, of course, a good thing as far as it goes—to want to be faithful to the God of Israel.But it did not seem to be working in the way it should have been. That is what we see in the Gospels time and time again.The Parable of the TenantsSo when we read Matthew 21, Christ tells a parable that is, in many ways, very shocking, because it is a reiteration of the song of the vineyard from Isaiah 5.Christ says: “Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fe