Someone has said that the average man's idea of a good sermon is one that goes over his head and hits a neighbor.

I don't believe Jesus' parable at which we look today was a good sermon in that sense. It didn't go over his listener's heads. Though the story may seem a bit strange to us, the people knew precisely what Jesus was talking about. It may hold a lot of questions for us, but not for these chief priests, scribes, and elders of Israel. Jesus took a well-known Old Testament metaphor -- that of the vineyard. Read Isaiah 5 this afternoon, or sometime this week, to experience the vividness of the metaphor.

Jesus took that metaphor of the vineyard and turned it into a parable, and the parable was crystal clear to those who heard it. "The vineyard stands for the nation of Israel. The te…