Proper 22 (A) The Self-Importance/Humble Servant Interface

October 4, 1981

By Rev. Ernest F. Campbell

God, in His wisdom, chose the Israelites to be His ambassadors to the world. It was God’s hope that 
through the Jews He would be able to convey His purpose and love toward human beings. His divine commission to the Israelites was….

• To be a holy nation.
• To be a kingdom of priests (Exodus 19)
• To be God’s witnesses (Isaiah 43)
• To be a blessing to all mankind (Genesis 12)
• To be a channel of God’s revelation (Romans 3)
• To be the channel of God’s manifestation in the flesh (Romans 9)
• To be the instrument of the kingdom’s proclamation (Isaiah 12)

This holy awesome responsibility…carried with it the highest trust imaginable. In short – the Jews were chosen to be the stewards of God’s vineyard…. the conveyers of His redeeming love and truth….to…. the…. world.

God surely must have realized the risk. The Jews were not robots…they struggled with doubts about their calling just like we struggle with doubts about our own calling. No question…. there must have been times when their own personal security, or the security of their family was threatened, when they felt that God had forsaken them. There must have been times when it looked like those who resisted their mission had life better in every way!

Psalm 102:

“Hear my prayer, O Lord… do not hide your face from me when I am in distress… my bones burn like glowing embers. I lie awake, I have become like a lonely sparrow on a housetop.”

Whenever our security is threatened…whenever we begin to feel like that lonely sparrow….we are sorely tempted to make personal importance and personal security our cause, while letting any higher purpose slip from our grasp.

In the vernacular we call it “covering our rear end.” – Justifying our existence by making ourselves look good.

Does that sound familiar…. would any honest person refuse to admit that when it seems like God has forsaken us, we feel compelled by any means, to come to our own rescue?

The Pharisees had gotten good at tooting their own horn; special clothing…public prayer…or a prideful nature.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, His purpose was to show again that God’s chosen people…. God’s community…. God’s church was called to be a blessing for all mankind. And that in and through that blessing, God would be glorified.

Jesus had observed that this purpose had been abandoned by the religious leaders of His day (namely the Pharisees) who now kept God’s blessings to themselves in order to build up their own image of self-importance, and their own self-glorification. Instead of a blessing, they had become a stumbling block. Jesus, through his telling of some powerful parables, allowed himself to be the interface (the connection) between God’s call for humble servants, and the Pharisees’ disastrous pursuit of self-glorification.

His story of the wicked landowner was both a warning and an urgent call to repentance.

From Matthew 21: Jesus said, “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 watchtower. 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.”

The tenants in the story were merely managers or stewards. Their purpose and responsibility was to produce good fruit that would profit the owner. Instead, they seized the opportunity to keep the profit for themselves by violently rejecting any measure of co-operation with the owner’s will.

Jesus invites them to pronounce God’s sentence on themselves when he asks them to suggest what the owner will do when he comes in person. They said, “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 was holding up God’s purpose against the way they practiced their religion. He was saying to them, all you Pharisees want to do is give orders and criticize. Life is a loan from God. Only a fool does not take God’s purpose into account. We are under God’s judgement now! We are either a child of God, or by our desire for self-glorification, a child of destruction. No one can be immunized against us.

A few minutes ago, I used the word interface. “Interface” is that space where action takes place under pressure.

• In Geology – Faults
• In Computers – Input meets programming
• In Medicine – Transplants
• In Sociology – Where Humanity meets other humanity

In a society where everyone is bound to promote his own self-importance, the interface will be destructive.

But, how do we change?!

Listen to Philippians 3:4-11:
Anything I try to perfect (even for good ends) will be riddled with ambiguities.

Lord, make our lives be the fulfillment of the purpose for which you made us. Let us die to self in Christ, and so be new creatures. May we never be afraid to allow Jesus Christ to be the interface between that which is destructive in our desire for self-importance and God’s purpose for our lives. Help us Lord, to be a blessing to all mankind.

Amen.

Resources for further study: 

The Lectionary Page:

Track 1	or	Track 2
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 Psalm 19 Philippians 3:4b-14 Matthew 21:33-46		Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80:7-14 Philippians 3:4b-14 Matthew 21:33-46