The Song of the Vineyard

A crowd gathers in a Jerusalem street. A man begins to sing, and at first it sounds like a sweet love song. People smile and lean in. But by the last verse, nobody is smiling any more.

We are in Jerusalem, more than seven hundred years before Jesus. The prophet Isaiah lives here, in the days of the kings of Judah, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. These are prosperous times for some. The rich are building big houses and adding field to field. But the poor are being pushed aside, and the courts are not always fair. Everyone in Judah knows about vineyards. The hillsides are covered with them. So when Isaiah wants the people to hear a hard message, he does not start with a warning. He starts with a song.

“Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard.” Let me sing about my dear friend and his vineyard, Isaiah says. My friend had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. And listen to how hard he worked on it. He dug up the ground. He cleared out all the stones, one by one, and piled them up. He planted it with the very best vines. He built a watchtower in the middle, so someone could guard it from thieves and animals. He even cut a winepress out of the rock, ready for the harvest. He did everything a vineyard owner could do. And then he waited, looking for good, sweet grapes.

But when harvest came, the vines gave only wild grapes. Small, sour, worthless grapes. Now the song changes. The friend himself seems to speak. “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard.” You decide, people of Jerusalem. “What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” Why, when I looked for good grapes, did it give sour ones? The listeners must be nodding. What a waste. That owner was so patient. And the owner announces what he will do. I will take away its hedge and let animals eat it. I will break down its wall and let it be trampled. I will not prune it or dig it, and thorns and briers will grow up. And then a strange line: I will command the clouds not to rain on it. Who can command the clouds? Only God.

Then Isaiah tells them plainly. “For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant.” The vineyard is you. God is the one who loved it, and planted it, and cared for it. He rescued his people from Egypt, gave them a land and taught them his ways. And what was he looking for? “He looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.” God wanted fairness and goodness to grow among his people. Instead he found the powerful crushing the weak, and the cry of people who had been treated unjustly. The love song turns out to be a song about God's broken heart.

In Hebrew, the last line of the song is a play on words. God looked for mishpat, justice, and found mispach, bloodshed or oppression. He looked for tsedaqah, righteousness, and heard tse'aqah, a cry. The words sound almost the same but mean the opposite. Centuries later, Jesus told a parable about a man who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a winepress and built a tower. His listeners would have recognised Isaiah's song.

You'll find this song in Isaiah chapter five, verses one to seven. A vineyard loved and cared for, and a God who longs to see justice and goodness grow. So here is a question to carry with you. What kind of fruit would God find growing in the way you treat other people?