Living in the Spirit

October 8, 2023

Scripture Reading:

Matthew 21:33-46
‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. 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 another. 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, “They will respect my son.” But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “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. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They said to him, ‘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 said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:
“The stone that the builders rejected
   has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
   and it is amazing in our eyes”?
Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.’
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

Following his resurrection, Christ called on us to begin the building of the Kingdom of God on earth and continue to develop it until his return. That Kingdom is defined for us in his teaching carried forth by his disciples and recorded in the gospels now included in the book we call the Bible. It prescribes a way of being as individuals and as nations from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, through the examples described in parables, to Matthew’s description of how he will judge nations in Matthew 25. We are not only challenged to live Christ’s instructions individually, but we are also to build societies based on his way of being. Both tasks are subject to our implementation of them based on our ideals rather than Christ’s. Thus, we are tempted to turn righteousness into self-righteousness, which results in justice becoming unjust in the name of God. Those same gospels record this reality when they describe the actions of some Pharisees and other religious leaders in Jesus’s time on earth. We see this in our world today.

This might be a good time of the year as we move toward celebrating the coming of the Christ Child to review the gospels and consider how much of our faith-based efforts are shaped by Jesus’s teachings and how much is reflective of our worldview today.

Prayer: Lord, open our minds to your teachings and help us incorporate them into our whole beings. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights are reserved.