Sour Grapes: Ezekiel 18: 1-4; 25-28; Matt. 21: 23-32
A master architect began designing the building that would be a career-defining structure. The building was sketched and measured with careful drawings and beautiful designs. It was to be a glorious building to be intricately and beautifully made. And right at the last few pages of design the architect gave up and crumpled every sheet of paper, then threw the design away. It would never work and likely the whole thing was flawed.
The next day the paper was retrieved and smoothed out. The finishing touches were added, and a bit of color made the whole thing come together. The architect looked at it with great pride and joy. About that time the secretary came by and looked at the artistic design. The secretary turned his head slightly, and said, “Looks kinda weird.” The architect, now bitterly upset, took her drawings and threw them away again. But the truth is that the secretary, he was simply filled with sour grapes because of her skill.
Now the important question. How many of you expected the architect to be a man? Now, lest you think I’ve gone down the politically correct pathway in this sermon, fear not. That’s not the whole point here. The true point is that by making the architect a woman and the secretary a man, you got a strong dose of the unexpected. Both our scriptures today give us a similar dose of the unexpected. In the Hebrew lesson, we read of God redirecting a question of blame. And in the Gospel, we hear of the sour grapes of the Pharisees.
The phrase “sour grapes” comes from an old proverb and an Aesop’s Fable. It means, generally, that people will blame something unattainable as being bad anyway. For example, if a guy fails to win an award, he might say, “Well, it’s not that prestigious anyway. Wasn’t worth it.” Now, in our Old Testament, we see a God addressing the idea of curses and punishments being visited on multiple generations. It was typical in Old Testament times that, if the grandparents sinned, it would be held against 3 or 4 generations of the family. The reverse of that was any good and bad fortune of the people could be attributed to God. They could have sour grapes if they didn’t like what God was doing.
Here, God is giving prophecy to Ezekiel that this will be no more. There will come a day, which is our time now, when people will be held accountable as individuals for what they do wrong. But with individual accountability comes individual responsibility. God says here that people can no longer blame God for bad things happening in this world. It’s always a lot easier to blame God for our suffering, than to look in the mirror at what humanity has done.
We ask these questions—why do people hurt each other? Well, they chose meanness instead of peace. Why do we have war and suffering? People chose violence over mutual working together. Why do we have sickness, suffering, and death? The answer is too often we forget God’s promises of life and hope everlasting and to be that hope in the world. If you read Acts 2, you’ll see that the church was set up to reflect God’s kingdom of love, grace, and generosity. It was meant to mirror the same Jesus who fed the multitude, shared his miracles of healing, and called on people to be physically and spiritually made whole—go and sin no more, he told them. In Ezekiel God asks a bold question to the people who said God has not done right. God asks, “Am I the one not doing what’s right, or is it you?” Perhaps that’s a question we can still ask ourselves to this day?
But even in the New Testament, we see these sour grapes continue. Jesus was not the Messiah that Jewish elite and religious leaders wanted. He was poor, challenging, and did not cater to their sense of power and order. They saw the miracles he performed and instead of belief, they had sour grapes.
In the parable for today, they decide to challenge him, and in turn, he hands them back a challenge they cannot win. Then he tells a parable. Now in every parable Jesus talks about work, everybody works in a vineyard. I have no idea why Jesus seems stuck on the vineyard. So, let’s update it a bit for us. A man owns his own mechanic shop and has two hefty repair jobs coming in the same day. He asks his two sons to come and help him. One says, “Sorry I can’t,” but later he changes his mind and the work on that car gets done. The other son says, “Sure, Dad, I’ll help,” but he never shows up. The car owner, furious the work was not done, takes his business elsewhere and gives a bad Google review costing the father business.
Jesus tells the Pharisees that because they were proud, unrepentant, and foolish, they would not see the Kingdom of God. They claimed they would go work for God’s kingdom, but they lied and turned their backs on God’s call. The corrupt tax collectors and prostitutes, the low of the low in Jesus’s day, initially said no, but when they met Jesus, their hardened hearts melted, and they followed Jesus into the work of God’s Kingdom.
In our time, we have too many pharisees, and not enough workers for God’s kingdom. I read an article a few weeks ago from a Southern Baptist leader, Russell Moore, that some of the ministers in his denomination were told by church leaders not to preach on the Sermon on the Mount because it sounds too weak in our time. A friend of mine joked the other day that we can set aside the different translations of the Bible because instead of NIV or King James Version, the newest is the “Cherry-Picked Version.” How sadly true, and how much is missed!
The reason the tax collectors and other undesirables followed Jesus so easily was because they could see the power in his love, his grace, and his call to redemption. Jesus didn’t create a society that made them suffer; instead, he offered them the same hope and redemption that was available to anyone. Those who struggled with sickness, were corrupt, were adulterers, drank too much, had become bitter and hardened, or wrestled with their own demons found a Savior who offered them grace, then said, “Go and sin no more.” The struggle might still exist, but the sin was gone. Do we find that same kind of grace in the church today? Or, do we find a place of sour grapes?
Jesus changed things around in a way that created personal responsibility and accountability for faith. In the religious world Jesus lived in, none of these folks could find grace because it was socially wrong. No matter what they did, they would always be on the margins. But Jesus changed that, and the folks with power had some sour grapes.
The idea of sour grapes comes from Aesop’s Fables. A fox was walking in the woods one afternoon and saw a bunch of grapes hanging over a lofty branch. He believed this would be good to quench his thirst. Yet over and over again he jumped up trying to get them and could not. Finally, he gave up and said, “They’re probably sour anyway,” as he walked away. The moral of the story is this: It’s easy to despise what you cannot have.
A secretary belittles his architect’s work because he couldn’t design something so nice. The people in Ezekiel’s time couldn’t go back to the promised land because of their wrongdoing and blamed God instead of being accountable. The Pharisees tried to humiliate Jesus because they didn’t want him teaching things that undercut their power. Sour grapes…all of them. But if we look to Jesus, we see the example of grace, love, welcome, and most importantly redemption for those who have been told they were unworthy. There are no sour grapes in the Kingdom of God; there is only grace.
Facebook Video: https://www.facebook.com/fccmacon/videos/1281612152824487