The Parable of the Blackest Stuff on Earth -- FPC sermon excerpt

Black is getting blacker.

When I say black, I’m not talking about race. I’m talking about the color black. I recently read about researchers who have created a material that absorbs almost 100 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made. It’s about 30 times as dark as the government’s standard for the blackest shade of black.

According to The Washington Post (February 20, 2008), this material is a Roach Motel for photons — light checks in, but it never checks out. It is made of hollow fibers that suck up all the surrounding illumination. Looking at it, you get a “dizzying sense of nothingness.”

“It’s very deep, like a forest on the darkest night,” says one of the researchers in New York who created the material. “Nothing comes back to you. It’s very, very, very dark.”

Speaking of things that are incredibly dark, Matthew 21:33-46 is the parable of the wicked tenants. Jesus tells the story of a landowner who leases his vineyard to tenants and goes to another country. The tenants seize his slaves and kill them, seize more slaves and kill them, then seize the landowner’s son and kill him. These tenants are the Blackest Stuff on Earth, sucking up all the light that comes to them.

For years, Christians have interpreted this parable in a particular way. We have thought of the landowner as God, and the vineyard as the nation of Israel. The tenants represent the Jewish leaders, and the slaves are the prophets sent by God. The Jewish leaders beat, kill and stone the prophets, and then God sends his son — interpreted as Jesus. The Jewish leaders kill him, too, making God furious and determined to destroy them.

At the end of the parable, God 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” (Matthew 21:41). These other tenants are usually identified as Christians, thought by some to replace the Jews in God’s plan of salvation. “Therefore I tell you,” says Jesus to the chief priests and the Pharisees, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (v. 43).

Now it is not difficult to understand the parable in this way, especially in light of the conflict that was occurring between Jesus and the Jewish leaders of his day. But we make a mistake when we assume that Jesus was speaking about all Jews when he described the violent and greedy tenants in the vineyard. This parable has, unfortunately and tragically, been used for centuries to persecute members of the Jewish faith, people who have never personally killed God’s prophets or attacked God’s son. When we jump to the conclusion that God is rejecting all Jews for all time, we forget that the apostle Paul promised that “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26).

It is wrong for us to punish the many for the sins of the few. We make a terrible mistake when we assume that a whole group of people is the Blackest Stuff on Earth.

So what is the message for us today? I’m convinced that Jesus wants us to go deeper than the traditional interpretation I just shared with you. Instead of assuming that the wicked tenants are always Jewish leaders, let’s imagine that the tenants are each and every one of us. Then we have to ask ourselves, “Are we behaving in ways that suck up all of the light that comes to us? In what ways can we reflect the light that comes to us from God, and avoid being the Blackest Stuff on Earth?”