Weekly Greeting - October 9, 2026
We are in the middle of a whole series of difficult words from Jesus.
We started with the story of the man with two sons who told them both to go work in the vineyard. One refused, but later changed his mind and went to work. The other agreed to go but then changed his mind and didn’t go.
Last week, we moved away from the lectionary reading in Matthew in favor of the story in which Jesus feeds five thousand men plus women and children. But if we had used the lectionary scripture we would have read about a man who built a vineyard and leased it to tenants. Twice, the landowner sent his servants to collect produce from the tenants, and two times the tenets murdered the servants. The third time the landowner sent his own son to collect the produce, assuming that the tenants wouldn’t dream of killing his son. But they killed his son, too. The story ends with severe judgement.
When I began studying the scripture for this week, I thought the story followed the same arc as the parable of the Wedding Banquet in Luke 14. It does not. Matthew 22:1-14 is another story of rejection and judgement, and this one ends with weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Context matters, of course, and all of these stories come after the story of Jesus cleansing the Jerusalem temple. You can — and should! — read that story in Matthew 21:12-17. Pay particular attention to verses 14-16 and the reaction of the religious leaders to Jesus’s healing of those who came to him.
These stories are Jesus’s response to the rejection of the religious leaders. He demands that they consider the consequences of rejecting his kingship, his mercy, and his compassion. While we might be tempted to ignore these stories because we are not the religious leaders, we also have to assume that there is a message in them for us, too.
These are hard words, but God has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit to hear them and consider them together as we continue to follow Jesus into the world.
Grateful to be on this journey with you,
Mary Beth