“Sons who Do their Father’s Will”
Matthew 21:23-32
9/28/08
Now, I don’t have any children of my own, but
even I can tell that there’s something wrong with these two sons
mentioned here in this parable. Both of them dishonor their
father in some way or another. The father tells each of them to
go work in his vineyard. The one son says that he’ll go,
but never does. The other one does go, but he begins by telling
his father, “No! I won’t go!”
What’s gone wrong in the relationship between this father and his
two sons that neither of these boys do what their dad tells them to do
from a willing and cheerful heart, purely out of love for their father?
Maybe we should blame the dad for this.
Perhaps he didn’t raise them right. Perhaps he was an
ogre. Maybe he treated them unfairly, didn’t spend enough
time with them, or didn’t show them enough love. The father
figure in the parable represents God the Father. Some people want
to blame Him for their disobedience: “If God had made us
right in the first place, we’d never have turned out the way we
did! It’s His fault we are the way we are!”
It’s sad that no one wants to admit his own guilt anymore.
We always want to put the blame onto someone else. Adam and Eve
did this in the beginning. Even though they are the ones who
disobeyed and ate of the fruit of which God told them not to eat, Eve
blamed the snake and Adam blamed Eve, ultimately pointing the finger
back at God, since it was He who gave Eve to Adam. But the
Scriptures do not allow us to “pass the buck.” They
lay the blame for our sin and rebellion right at our feet, so that we
are never justified in saying that our disobedience is someone
else’s fault, least of all God’s.
So, the relationship between the father and his sons
in this story is strained, not because of any failure on the
father’s part; he loved his sons and did everything for their
good. The fault lies instead with the sons, who for some reason
or another did not have the same love for their father as he had for
them. And the sad fact is that both of these sons represent you
and me at one time or another in our lives. We don’t have
the same love for God that He has for us, even though everything God
has done for us He’s done out of His fatherly divine goodness and
mercy. We either act like the one son, saying we’ll do what
God says, and then not do it, or like the other son we’ll start
off defiant, telling God we won’t do what He says, but then
we’ll change our minds and do it in the end.
Let’s take a look first at the son who says he
will do what his father tells him to do, but then doesn’t do
it. Now, this kind of person in real life might actually look
like he’s being obedient to God. He’ll normally look
like a very religious person, performing what he considers to be many
acts of obedience towards God. If you were to evaluate whether he
loved God or not based simply on his performance, you’d probably
conclude that, yes, he did. This person’s life is generally
characterized by outward obedience to God’s commandments.
It’s a life lived under the Law, a life that looks very moral and
decent. But it’s a life that is, in reality, lived in
disobedience to God, because this person refuses to repent and believe
the Gospel. He rejects Jesus and insists on worshipping and
serving God on his own terms. To give you an example, it might be
like a father telling his son to go mow the lawn, but instead the son
decides to buy his father a card that tells him how much he loves
him. “Dad will be pleased with that,” he
reasons. Well, the card may express a nice sentiment which might
normally be believed, except for the fact that the son disobeyed his
father and did not do what he asked, thereby demonstrating a lack of
love on behalf of the son for his father.
You and I sometimes demonstrate this kind of
“love” towards our heavenly Father. It’s called
a Pharisaical love. It’s a kind of love that thinks it
loves God, because of all these nice things we do for Him. But
even though we might be doing nice things, if our repentance and faith
are false, then those nice things aren’t going to be acceptable
to God. True repentance is a repentance that confesses that
you’re a sinner through and through, worthy of eternal
death. It’s not just repeating words. It’s the
acknowledgment that everything about you and what you do are
contaminated with sin and that you deserve to be damned for it.
True faith, then, clings to God’s promise of forgiveness for
Christ’s sake, who was crucified for you. Faith, too, is
not just a matter of repeating words back to God, but it firmly trusts
that you are cleansed of all your sin with the blood of Jesus and have
eternal life in His Name. Without this kind of repentance and
faith your righteous deeds are as filthy rags in God’s eyes.
You and I know all this in our minds, but sometimes
our repentance and faith are feigned; they’re just a show that we
put on, a bone that we throw to God, thinking He’ll be happy with
our pious behavior. But this is not doing the will of the Father,
even though it might look like it is. It’s like the boy
buying a nice card for his father instead of doing what the father
asked him to do. John the Baptist proclaimed repentance and faith
to both the Pharisees and the tax collectors and prostitutes - to those
who thought they were righteous and to those who knew they were
sinners. But even though they lived an outwardly holy life and
looked like they did the will of the Father, the Pharisees refused to
confess their sins and trust in Jesus. They refused to confess
that they had rebelled against God and were just as in need of His
forgiveness as the tax collectors and prostitutes. Only when you
admit that you are a sinner and that in your heart you hate God and
rebel against His commandments, can you then hear the Father’s
love and forgiveness spoken to you through Jesus Christ. Only
then can you trust in Him and produce the fruit of obedience that God
accepts.
The one son, then, says he’ll do his
father’s will but doesn’t. The other son, however,
outright refuses to do the will of his father, but then later changes
his mind and does what his father tells him to do. The one son
generally looks like he obeys his father, when he really doesn’t;
the other son actually appears to be disobeying his father, when in
fact he does obey him. This son represents the tax collectors and
prostitutes in the parable. The outwardly pious Pharisees
considered these kinds of people to be the most sinful, because they
grossly and openly disobeyed God’s commandments. And yet,
Jesus says that it’s these sinners that would get into the
kingdom of God. Why? At first they refused to repent and
believe in Jesus. They were just as rebellious and sinful as
their self-righteous brothers. But later they changed their
minds. They repented of their sins at the preaching of John and
believed the Gospel. They did do the Father’s will.
And now, even though they’re still sinners, even though they
still manifest disobedience and rebellion against their Father’s
commandments, they live in repentance, confessing their sins, and
hearing God’s forgiveness spoken to them for Christ’s
sake. The sin that’s still attached to their works is
forgiven, and their love and obedience, weak as they may still be, are
seen as good fruit in God’s eyes and are acceptable to Him,
because they’ve been cleansed by the blood of Jesus.
The will of our heavenly Father is that we repent,
believe the Gospel, and then bear fruit in keeping with
repentance. After hearing this parable, we want to be like the
son who, even though he was rebellious at first, changed his mind and
did his father’s will. But in order for us to do this, the
broken relationship between ourselves and our heavenly Father needs to
be mended. And for this we need the obedience of a third
Son. He’s not mentioned in this parable, but He’s the
one telling the story. It’s Jesus, the Son of God.
Without Jesus, it’s impossible for us to repent, believe the
Gospel, and bear good fruit, because it’s by His work alone that
we estranged sons are brought near and reconciled to the Father.
Now we can confess our sins, believe the Gospel, and produce good fruit
from a cheerful and willing heart.
But none of us can do God’s will
perfectly. We are still sometimes like the one son who said he
would do his father’s will but didn’t, and sometimes
we’re like the other son, who, though he did his father’s
will in the end, started off outright refusing. Jesus is the only
Son who not only told His Father that He would do His will, but also
did it, and did it perfectly out of pure love for His Father. You
and I fail and have failed at being faithful and loving sons of our
heavenly Father. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are even now
contaminated by our sin. We do nothing purely from a heart of
love towards God. We do not deserve to enter into His
kingdom. But Jesus, our Brother, did what we could not do, doing
God’s will perfectly on our behalf. And yet, He suffered on
the cross under the Father’s wrath, as if He had not done
God’s will. He did all this for you and me, so that we
might be accepted as God’s beloved sons and given the inheritance
of the kingdom of heaven. And it’s this that moves us to
repent of our sins and believe the Gospel. It’s what Jesus
has done for us that causes us to change our minds. It changes
our minds about what kind of Father we have in God. I don’t
know what the relationship of these two sons with their father was
based on, but it wasn’t based on love. Maybe they thought
they had to earn their father’s love. Maybe they viewed
their father as some overbearing and demanding taskmaster. Both
sons probably viewed him this way in the beginning, but the one son
later changed his mind. What was it that caused him to change his
mind? Maybe he realized just how much his father loved him.
Maybe he looked at all the blessings, benefits, and gifts he had while
living under his father and concluded that his dad wasn’t
treating him like a slave after all and that work in the vineyard might
be a way of showing his father his love and thanks for all that dad had
done for him.
Jesus changes our minds about what kind of heavenly
Father we have. We don’t have a God who hates us and just
wants to treat us like slaves, making life miserable for us, but a God
who loves us more than we can possibly imagine, loving us enough to
give His only-begotten Son into death for us, in order to keep us from
perishing. This, then, changes our minds about work in His
vineyard. We come to realize that we are not trying to work for
our Father’s love nor are we trying to become His children by our
love and obedience. Jesus has done everything for us and
it’s all gift, given to us at our Baptism. Repentance,
faith, and works of love are all things we do now because we are
God’s sons through the work of the Son, Jesus Christ.
Everything we do now for our Father is a way of showing Him our thanks
and praise for the love He’s shown us in Jesus.
In the end we must confess that we are sons who do
our Father’s will only on account of the Son who did His
Father’s will for us, our Savior Jesus Christ. With His
blood shed at Calvary, applied to us at Holy Baptism, God has
reconciled us to Himself and adopted us as His sons, bringing us into
His kingdom. He daily and richly forgives us our rebellion and
the sin that still clings to our good works. And He continues to
pour out His love upon us through Christ by way of His Word and
Sacraments, so that we might repent of our sins, believe the Gospel,
and gladly and cheerfully do His will. Repent, then, trust in
Jesus, and go work in the Father’s vineyard, serving your
neighbor through your various vocations. This is the
Father’s will. It’s what He’s working in you,
His beloved sons, through Jesus Christ. Amen.