Who does Jesus think he is?  He has walked into the temple, and insulted the duly appointed and ordained preachers and teachers and criticized their teaching and decided to preach his own sermon.  And people are listening.

So the duly appointed authorities do what authorities do.  They assert their authority by challenging Jesus.  Who sent you here?  What Bishop appointed you?  What seminary did you go to?  What makes you think you can preach here?

Jesus responds to their challenge not by producing his rabbinic credentials, but by engaging them in dialogue about John the Baptist.  Jesus traps them, of course, in that clever way that characterizes his reported conversations.  If they affirm John’s authority, they have to acknowledge Jesus’ authority.  If they deny John’s authority, they lose credibility with the crowd.  Jesus, having literally turned over the tables in the temple, now turns the tables on the Pharisees, and we are left wondering, “who do they think they are?”

In the text, the Pharisees represent not specifically Jewish authorities.  They stand in the story for all who think that they are faithful followers of the law; but who are unable to see that in the person of Jesus, standing before them, God is fully present.  This is a new thing.  It is not the ritual of the temple or obedience to the law.  It is flesh and blood presence.  It is divine love being lived out in their presence.

This is a new day confronting the Pharisees — and the audience for Matthew’s gospel.  God’s story isn’t just about Moses coming down from the mountain with the law anymore.  It’s about Jesus coming to the mountain with the beatitudes and a sermon about loving your enemy and going the extra mile and forgiving excessively.  God’s story isn’t just about fiery pillar and clouds of glory, it’s about hands touching lepers and blessing children and walking dusty roads teaching and healing.  It’s a really new thing — and it’s about to get even stranger.

When we meet Jesus and the religious officials today, in Matthew’s timeline, it’s the Monday before the Friday when Jesus will be crucified.  Now it’s about God dying and rising from the dead in order to show the durability of love.

The Pharisees are faithful people, but they’re stuck in a rigid understanding of who God is and what God does.  They have frozen their religious beliefs at what they learned earlier in their lives, and they cling to that understanding while the power and presence of God stands right in front of them in the flesh.  And he has a word of judgment for them.

Well…when I think about the Pharisees that way I am forced to admit that “I are one”…most of us are, in some way or another.  How many of us who have been part of church for say five years or more have been upset when something changed?  How many of us have decided what we believe, and are unwilling to be persuaded by someone else’s point of view?

We are committed to things as they have always been, but God is steadily moving toward things as they are meant to be.

Like the Pharisees, we are confronted with Jesus parables of judgment.  As Mary Anderson, a Lutheran Pastor writes about us contemporary Christians, “the judgment comes when our discipleship in Christ is less defined than our membership in a congregation.” (The Christian Century, vol. 125 No. 19; September 23, 2008).  Let me turn that around this way.  When our membership in a congregation matters more to us than our discipleship in Christ, we are not where Jesus wants us to be.

Even some of us who take the gospel witness seriously have lost the ability to see Jesus Christ still at work in our personal lives, in the life of the church and in the world.  We behave as though we think God has retired and we are on our own.

So, we dare not look at the parable Jesus tells as just a parable for first Century Jewish Rabbis.  It is a parable for anyone who worships the God of the past without being alive to the God of the present or available to the God of the future.

Nobody wants to hear the preacher talk about judgment.  So we’ll just talk about Jesus story of the vineyard and the workers.

It passes judgment all right.  It accuses the Pharisees (and maybe us, too) of promising to show up in the vineyard as workers for the kingdom, and then failing to appear to do the work.  And then it has the audacity to affirm that those who stand outside the graces of established religious life will get into the kingdom ahead of us good religious folk.

The Pharisees must have been outraged.  But they don’t yet know about resurrection life.  We do, we know that the one who loses their life for the sake of the kingdom will gain it.  We know about grace.  We know that these parables are never just about judgment.  They are Jesus’ parables, and they are always infused with grace.

There is, for the Pharisees in the text, and for the Jewish Christians of Matthew’s church, and for us, imbedded in this parable a gracious invitation.

Grace always invites us to reorient our lives.

In the parable that Jesus tells, there are two types of people.  There are those like the religious officials, who have declared their allegiance with religious obedience, but have failed to nurture an alive, ongoing relationship that opens them to the power and presence of God incarnate in Jesus.  And there are those who turn their backs on relationship initially — aren’t religious at all, but eventually show up in the vineyard.

So who do you think you are?

Here’s the good news.  It doesn’t matter.  There is good news for everybody and this is the good news: it doesn’t matter if you’re late.

Jesus affirms the late comers.

If you know nothing else about the gospels, know that they portray Jesus as one who loves the least, the lost and the last.  And they proclaim that anyone who has seen Jesus love this way has seen God.

It is never too late to show up and begin a relationship with the living God who is on a journey with God’s people and is determined to change people and change communities and change the whole world — in short, to redeem all of creation.

This God is interested in you.  And Jesus comes to us in the words of the gospel to invite us into the vineyard.  What does this invitation mean?  It means first of all that God is willing to invest in you and me personally.  God loves personally.

Now we are not equipped, really, for this vineyard work.  But God has a fabulous on the job training program.  God works alongside us, and issues invitation after invitation after invitation for us to invest in God’s work.

What is God’s work?  It is the work first, of filling us with love, so that we stop needing the things that usually substitute for knowing we are loved: power, success, reputation, notoriety.

Secondly, God invites us, in Paul’s words to: “look not to our own interests, but to the interests of others.”

That’s why, in the church, we acknowledge that today is poverty Sunday.  A day to become aware of the material poverty that will always exist when there is an unequal distribution of resources, and know that Jesus calls us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and shelter the homeless.  We look to the interests of others, because that’s the work God has given us to do.

How does God do this?  Through relationship.  As Paul says, “It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

That’s who we are, really.  We are God’s work — invited into the vineyard — and it is never, ever, too late for us to claim the authority of our personhood, and live out our relationship with God.

Someone once said that there is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

As people who call ourselves Christians, our authority comes from Christ.  We do not claim it just by membership in an institutional church.  We claim the authority of Christ in our lives when we take up the work of Jesus with our resources, our hands.

We have authority when we are willing to embrace sacrifices in the name of justice and for the sake of others.

But if we believe that Jesus Christ as portrayed in the gospels points us to a living, active, engaged God who is investing in us day in and day out, and we believe that God is not finished with the world or with us — it is not too late to act like we believe it.

Our family may be a mess.  Our finances may be a mess.  Our spirits may be a mess.  Our church may seem like its headed for irreversible decline.  Our financial system may be melting down.  Our leaders may be failing us.

But it’s never too late.

It’s never too late ––– and that’s good news.