The Vineyard and the Woes

Isaiah 5 (with Matthew 21:33–46; John 15:1–8)

Before this session, read Isaiah 5 in full. Listen first for the love song in the opening verses, and feel how it turns; then count the six woes that follow, and ask what each one names. And do not miss, in verse 7, exactly what fruit the Lord had been looking for all along.

What more can I do for my vineyard beyond what I have already done? When I waited for it to produce edible grapes, why did it produce sour ones instead?

Isaiah 5:4

A Love Song

Isaiah does a surprising thing at the opening of chapter 5: he begins to sing. I will sing to my love, a song to my lover about his vineyard (5:1). After the thunder of the day of the Lord, the prophet strikes up what sounds for all the world like a love ballad: a song sung on behalf of a dear friend about the vineyard he loves. The crowd would have leaned in. Everyone loves a love song, and vineyard songs were the love songs of the ancient world, full of romance and harvest and joy. Isaiah is doing on purpose what the prophet Nathan once did to David with his little parable of the ewe lamb: disarming his hearers with a story, drawing them in past their guard, so that the trap can spring before they ever see it coming.

And the song is, at first, all tenderness, the tenderness of a man who spares no expense for what he loves. My love had a vineyard on a fertile hill. He built a hedge around it, removed its stones, and planted a vine. He built a tower in the middle of it, and constructed a winepress (5:1–2). Count the labors of love. He chose the best site, a fertile hillside, the prime ground. He hedged it against the beasts. He cleared it of stones, one back-breaking rock at a time. He planted not just any vine but, as the Hebrew word indicates, the choicest, the noble red stock. He built a watchtower to guard it and hewed out a winepress in advance, so sure was he of the harvest to come. There is nothing a vinedresser could do for a vineyard that this Owner did not do. The care is lavish, total, and full of expectation.

And then the song breaks. He waited for it to produce edible grapes, but it produced sour ones instead (5:2). He waited for the vintage, and what came up was worthless, sour, stinking fruit, the sour grapes of a vine gone feral. Every hearer who knew vineyards would have felt the gut-punch of it: all that labor, all that love, all that expectation, and a crop fit only to be thrown out. The love song has a crack running down the middle of it, and through the crack we begin to hear something other than romance. We hear heartbreak.

It is worth pausing on the genre before we go further, because it tells us something the woes alone never could. This is a love song. The Lord does not open His case against Judah as a cold prosecutor reading charges off a page; He opens it as one singing of a vineyard He planted with His own hands and cannot stop loving even now. The judgment that follows is real, and we must not soften it; but it is the judgment of a broken heart, not a hard one. Behind every line of this song stands an Owner who wanted grapes, who looked and looked for them, who is grieved to the core that they never came. Keep that in view as the song darkens, for a God who grieves over a fruitless vineyard is a God who will one day do something about it that no merely angry God would ever do. The love in the song is the seed of the cross at the end of it.

Decide Between Me and My Vineyard

Now the singer turns, and the song becomes a summons. The Owner Himself steps forward and addresses the crowd directly: So now, residents of Jerusalem, people of Judah, you decide between me and my vineyard! (5:3). He empanels them as a jury. You decide, He says: stand between Me and this vineyard and render a verdict. Is the fault Mine, or the vine’s? And then the question no honest juror could dodge: What more can I do for my vineyard beyond what I have already done? (5:4). What more? Name one thing left undone. There is nothing to name. The Owner has been faultless; the vineyard is without excuse.

It is the Nathan trap, fully sprung. The crowd, listening contentedly to a song about somebody else’s vineyard, has been led to pronounce the obvious verdict (guilty, the vineyard is at fault, the Owner did everything right), and only afterward, in verse 7, will they discover that the vineyard is themselves. They have judged their own case. This is how the law so often does its work: it gets us to agree that wrongdoing deserves judgment, to nod along at the justice of it, and only then does it turn and say, as Nathan said to David, You are that man! (2 Samuel 12:7): you are the vineyard. We are always quick to convict the wild vine, right up until we are told its name.

There is a severe mercy in being trapped this way. None of us can be helped while we still imagine the trouble is somewhere else, in some other vineyard, with some other people’s sour grapes. The law’s hardest and kindest work is to walk us, by our own reasoning, to the moment we say of ourselves what David said when Nathan’s trap closed on him: I have sinned against the LORD! (2 Samuel 12:13). Only the man who has stopped defending the vineyard can be given a new vine. So the song’s trap is not cruelty; it is the necessary undeceiving, the same work the throne room did to Isaiah and the courtroom did to Judah, bringing a comfortable, self-satisfied people to the one confession from which grace is able to begin. And grace did begin there: Nathan’s very next words to David were, the LORD has forgiven your sin.

And so the sentence falls, and it falls as a withdrawal. I will remove its hedge and turn it into pasture, I will break its wall and allow animals to graze there. I will make it a wasteland … I will order the clouds not to drop any rain on it (5:5–6). Notice the shape of this judgment. The Owner does not send a plague of locusts or a torch. He simply stops protecting. He takes down the hedge He had built, lets the wall fall, withholds the rain, and the vineyard, left to itself, is overrun in a single season with thorns and briers. It is the same judgment as the sources of security removed in chapter 3: sometimes the most terrible thing God can do is to stop holding back the ruin we have chosen for ourselves. And mark who alone could do the last of it: order the clouds not to drop any rain. No mere farmer gives orders to the clouds. The Owner of this vineyard is the Lord.

He Waited for Justice

Then comes the verse the whole song has been driving toward, and it names both the vineyard and the sour grapes at once. Indeed, Israel is the vineyard of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the people of Judah are the cultivated place in which he took delight. He waited for justice, but look what he got—disobedience! He waited for fairness, but look what he got—cries for help! (5:7). There it is: the vineyard is the people of God, planted and tended by the Lord Himself, the cultivated place in which he took delight, the delight of His heart. And the fruit He came looking for was justice and fairness: justice in the courts and rightness in the streets, a people who treated one another the way the covenant required.

What He found instead is caught in a piece of wordplay that does not survive translation, but is worth hearing. He looked for mishpat (justice) and found mispach, a rare word of uncertain meaning, rendered by the NET as “disobedience” and by many others as “bloodshed.” He looked for tsedaqah (fairness, righteousness) and heard tse’aqah, a scream, the cry of the oppressed calling for help. The words are near-twins; they sound almost identical on the tongue; and that is the horror of it. What the vineyard produced was not the flat opposite of justice but its sour counterfeit: something that looked and sounded enough like the real thing to pass at a glance, and was in truth its very inversion. From a distance the grapes were the right shape and color. Up close, they were poison.

We should let verse 7 correct a notion we are prone to: that the fruit God looks for from His people is mainly religious, attendance, ritual, the right words said in the right order. He has already told us in chapter 1 what He thinks of religion offered with bloody hands. Here He says plainly what fruit He came to the vineyard expecting: justice and fairness, that the strong would not devour the weak, that the courts would not be for sale, that the cry of the oppressed would not be the background noise of a comfortable society. The sour grapes the next verses will name are not, for the most part, liturgical sins. They are the sins of a people who took all the Owner’s care and turned it into the means of trampling one another.

And the question turns upon us as surely as it turned upon Judah. The Owner still comes to His vineyard looking for fruit, and the fruit He looks for has not changed across the centuries: not how full our calendars of religion are, but whether His grace has made us just and merciful, whether the weak are safe among us, whether our yes is yes, whether the cry of the overlooked has gone up from our own households and our own congregations even while we were singing. It is a searching thing to ask of a comfortable people. But it is far better to be searched by the Owner’s question now than to be caught off guard by it at the harvest. He is looking, even now, for grapes.

The Son Sent to the Vineyard

We cannot read this song as Christians and stop where Isaiah stops, because the Lord Jesus would not let us. Centuries later He stood in the temple courts, ringed by the chief priests and elders of His own people, and told them a story that begins in words all but lifted from Isaiah 5: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a fence around it, dug a pit for its winepress, and built a watchtower (Matthew 21:33). Every ear that knew the Scriptures would have recognized the song at once. The Lord Jesus was singing Isaiah’s vineyard song back to Isaiah’s people, and then carrying it forward to its terrible end.

For in His telling, the Owner does something Isaiah’s song had not yet revealed. He leases the vineyard to tenant farmers and sends slaves to collect his portion of the crop, and the tenants beat one, kill another, and stone another. These are the prophets, Isaiah among them, sent to the vineyard and abused. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son” (Matthew 21:37). And there is the answer to the Owner’s heartbroken question back in Isaiah 5: What more can I do for my vineyard? There was, it turns out, one thing more the Owner could do, one thing Isaiah’s song had not yet imagined: He could come Himself, in His Son, into the vineyard. He could send the Heir.

And we know what the tenants did with the Heir. “This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and get his inheritance!” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him (Matthew 21:38–39). The vineyard that had broken the Owner’s heart with sour grapes would break it again by murdering His Son outside the wall, exactly as the Lord Jesus would be led outside the city gate and crucified. The question What more can I do? is answered, at the last, at Calvary. The Owner did the one thing more: He gave His own Son to the very vineyard that would kill Him. There is no greater love than that, and no greater indictment.

And the detail that the Heir is killed outside the vineyard is not incidental; the New Testament will not let it pass. The writer to the Hebrews observes that the bodies of the sin offerings are burned outside the camp, and that Jesus also suffered outside the camp (Hebrews 13:11–12), led out beyond the city to die. The vineyard cast its Owner’s Son over the wall to be rid of Him, and in the deep mystery of God that very casting-out became the place where the world is cleansed. The rejection the tenants intended as a murder, the Father intended as a sacrifice. They threw Him out; and as He went, He was bearing the sin of the vineyard that threw Him.

But the parable does not end in the dark, and here the gospel breaks clean through the law of the song. The Lord Jesus pressed His hearers to pronounce sentence on the wicked tenants (and they did, condemning themselves just as their fathers had in Isaiah’s day), and then He turned the whole thing over with a line from the Psalms: The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (Matthew 21:42; Psalm 118:22). The Son they cast out of the vineyard and killed, God raised up and made the cornerstone of a new building. The rejection was not the end of Him; it was the making of the cornerstone. The murdered Heir is the foundation of the house.

And upon that rejected-and-vindicated stone a new building rises. Peter, who had heard the Lord Jesus tell this very parable, would later gather up the stone imagery and say that you yourselves, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house upon Him (1 Peter 2:5): that the very Stone the builders flung away has become the foundation of a temple made of forgiven people. So the vineyard song does not end with a blighted and empty field after all. Out of the rejection of the Son, God raises a new vineyard, a new house, a new people, built not upon their own fruitfulness, which failed, but upon the cornerstone they could not break. The murdered Heir did not merely survive His rejection; He built a house out of it.

And we dare not hear this as a story about other people’s sin. The Lord Jesus warned that the kingdom would be taken from those who would not bear fruit and given to a people who will produce its fruit (Matthew 21:43), and that warning stands over every recipient of the Owner’s care, the church not least. We are now the tended vineyard; we have had the hedge and the tower, the word and the sacraments, every labor of His love lavished on us. The parable puts to us the same question it put to them: when the Owner comes looking for fruit, what will He find on our vines? It will not do to point back at the old vineyard and shake our heads. The sour grape grows just as readily in our rows.

The True Vine

How, then, will any vineyard ever bear the fruit the Owner seeks? Not by trying harder to be a better vine. A wild vine cannot will itself noble; a feral grape cannot resolve to be sweet; that is simply what it is. If the vineyard of Israel, with every advantage and every labor of love lavished upon it, still produced sour grapes, then the problem lies deeper than effort can reach. The vine itself must be changed. And so, on the night before He was led out of the vineyard to die, the Lord Jesus said the very thing that answers Isaiah 5 from the inside: I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener (John 15:1).

There is the gospel hidden behind the whole sad song. Israel was the vine that failed; the Lord Jesus is the true vine that does not, the one and only Vine that brings forth, in full, the justice and fairness the Owner came looking for and never found. He is the true Israel, the faithful Son, who renders to the Father every cluster of good fruit the old vineyard owed and could not pay. And then He says the astonishing thing: I am the vine; you are the branches (John 15:5). The way a wild branch comes to bear good fruit is not by self-improvement but by being grafted into Him, cut away from the old feral stock and bound into the true Vine, so that His own life runs up into us and bears, through us, the fruit we could never have produced on our own.

And there is a tender thing in that image we should not miss, having just watched a whole vineyard laid waste. The Father, the Lord Jesus says, is the gardener, and He prunes every branch that bears fruit so that it will bear more fruit (John 15:2). The branch grafted into the true Vine is not then left alone; it is tended, and sometimes the tending is the knife. The pruning of a fruitful branch can feel, from the inside, very like the laying waste of chapter 5; the cuts are real and they hurt. But they are utterly different in kind. The wild vine was cut down in wrath and abandoned to the briers. The branch in Christ is pruned in love, by a Father who is after more fruit and not less, and who never once mistakes one of His children for an enemy. The very same blade, in different hands, means opposite things.

Which is why He adds, with a bluntness our self-reliant hearts resist: apart from me you can accomplish nothing (John 15:5). Not a little; nothing. The branch does not manufacture grapes; it bears them, drawing everything it has from the vine. This is the whole Lutheran instinct about the Christian life pressed into one image. We do not become fruitful by gritting our teeth and resolving to produce justice and fairness; we become fruitful by remaining in Christ, receiving His life through His word and His Supper, and letting Him bear His fruit through us. The good grapes of the vineyard, when at last they come, are His grapes, grown on branches He has grafted and sustained. Even our fruitfulness turns out to be His gift, and not our achievement.

The Six Woes

Before the song’s judgment falls in full, Isaiah turns from the vineyard to its grapes and names them, one rotten cluster at a time, in a series of six funeral cries. The Hebrew word that opens each one, hoy, rendered in the NET as Beware, is more than a warning: it is the wail a mourner makes over a corpse, and Isaiah pronounces it six times over a people not yet dead but already, in their sin, as good as buried. Hear what the sour grapes actually were.

Beware, those who accumulate houses, who also accumulate field after field until there is no land left (5:8): the land-grabbers, the wealthy consolidating estate upon estate until the small farmer is squeezed out and the poor have nowhere left to stand. It is the greed that turns God’s gift of land into a private empire, and the Lord answers it with desolation: the many fine houses left empty, the overworked land yielding next to nothing (5:9–10). Then: Beware, those who get up early to drink beer, those who keep drinking long after dark (5:11): the dissipated, who give morning and evening to the next pleasure, who have stringed instruments and wine at their parties, so they do not recognize what the LORD is doing (5:12). The judgment is exile and a grave grown wide: Therefore my people will be deported because of their lack of understanding (5:13).

Beware, those who pull evil along using cords of emptiness are as good as dead, who pull sin as with cart ropes (5:18): those who haul their sin along behind them like an ox dragging a loaded wagon, openly, defiantly, even daring God to act: Let him hurry, let him act quickly, so we can see (5:19). It is the scoffing of the practical atheist, who has bet that God will do nothing and sins on the strength of the wager. Then comes the woe that may be the most modern of them all: Beware, those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness, who turn bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter (5:20). This is moral inversion: not merely doing the evil but renaming it, swapping the labels, so that the very words good and evil are made to trade places. In the last session we heard Luther’s call to name a thing what it actually is. Here is the funeral cry pronounced over the whole project of refusing to.

Beware, those who think they are wise, those who think they possess understanding (5:21): the pride of the autonomous mind, the wisdom that needs no instruction from God, the very loftiness the day of the Lord came to level, now lodged in the intellect. And finally, Beware, those who are champions at drinking, who display great courage when mixing strong drinks. They pronounce the guilty innocent for a payoff, they ignore the just cause of the innocent (5:22–23): corrupt judges, heroes only at the drinking bout, who acquit the guilty for a bribe and strip the innocent of their due. Six woes; and together they are the diagnosis of the sour grapes: greed, dissipation, defiance, moral inversion, intellectual pride, and the perversion of justice. This is what grew in the rows where the Lord had looked for justice and fairness. Up close, the poison.

It is worth holding this list up like a mirror, for not one of the six is a museum piece. We still accumulate house upon house; we still get up early for our preferred intoxications, whatever they happen to be, and do not recognize what the Lord is doing; we still drag our sins behind us in the open and half-dare God to mind; and we still (perhaps most of all) call evil good and good evil, and congratulate ourselves on how enlightened we are to do it. The six woes are not a photograph of a vanished people. They are an X-ray of the human heart, ours included. And it is fitting that when the Lord Jesus came preaching, He opened His great sermon not with woes but with a string of blesseds: Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matthew 5:3–6). Where the law could only cry woe over the sour grapes, the gospel pronounces blessing upon the empty hands that have given up at last on their own fruit and come to the Vine.

His Hand Is Ready to Strike Again

Beneath all six, Isaiah names the one root they grow from. For they have rejected the law of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, they have spurned the commands of the Holy One of Israel (5:24). That is the taproot of the wild vine: not first this scandal or that, but a settled contempt for God’s word, the refusal to be told, the rejecting of the very instruction that could have made them fruitful. Every rotten cluster on the list grew up out of that one rejected root. A people that spurns the word will, given time, grow every grape on this list.

And so the judgment comes, and it comes in fire and earthquake: the Lord furious with His people, the mountains shaking, the corpses lying in the streets. And over it tolls a refrain we will hear again and again in the chapters just ahead: Despite all this, his anger does not subside, and his hand is ready to strike again (5:25). It is a terrible line: an arm raised to strike and not yet brought down. The Lord lifts a signal flag for a distant nation and whistles for it, and it comes: swift, tireless, its arrows sharpened and its horses’ hooves hard as flint, roaring over its prey like young lions (5:26–29). The instrument of judgment is already on the march from beyond the horizon: Assyria first, and Babylon behind it.

Linger a moment on that refrain, his hand is ready to strike again, because the book is not finished with it, and neither is the gospel. Through the chapters just ahead the hand stays raised, the judgment unspent, the arm lifted to strike and never brought down. It is one of the most ominous images in all of Isaiah: a hand that will not come down. And yet there is a place, far beyond this dark chapter, where the raised hand of the Lord comes down at last: not upon the vineyard, but upon the Owner’s own Son, whose hands were spread wide and nailed to a cross for it, so that the blow the vineyard had earned fell, instead, upon Him. When was the LORD’s power revealed through him? Isaiah will ask before long (53:1), and the word he uses for that power is, literally, the Lord’s arm. It is revealed, in the end, stretched out upon a tree.

And then the chapter simply goes dark. One will look out over the land and see the darkness of disaster, clouds will turn the light into darkness (5:30). That is where the song of the vineyard ends: not with a resolution but with the lights going out, a ruined land staring up into a blackened sky. It is one of the bleakest endings in all the prophets, and Isaiah means it to be. He has shown us a vineyard that took infinite love and gave back poison, and a darkness now settling over it like the lid of a tomb. But mark the place well, for the darkness is not the last word this book will speak. Only a few chapters on, into a land exactly this dark, Isaiah will say: The people walking in darkness see a bright light (9:2). The vineyard’s black sky is waiting for a light it cannot make for itself, and the Light, when He comes, will say, I am the light of the world! (John 8:12).

Gathering the Threads

The song of the vineyard is almost all law, and we have let it be law, because that is the kindest thing we can do with it. It shows us an Owner who did everything love could possibly do and got sour grapes for His trouble; it names those grapes in six funeral cries; and it ends with the lights going out over a land that had spurned the word. If we are honest, we have found ourselves somewhere in those rows, for the sour grape grows as readily in the church’s vineyard as in Israel’s, and the woe on those who call evil good was not written only for the eighth century before Christ.

But we have also heard the gospel the song cries out for and cannot itself supply. The Owner’s question, What more can I do?, was answered at a cross outside the city wall, where He gave His Son to the vineyard that would kill Him, and where the rejected stone became the cornerstone. And the failed vine has been answered by the true Vine, the Lord Jesus, who bears in full the fruit we never could, and who grafts our wild branches into Himself so that His life bears His fruit through us. Isaiah 5 leaves us staring up into a darkened sky. The gospel turns our faces toward the great Light who was even then on His way, and bids us remain in Him; for apart from Him we can accomplish nothing, and in Him the vineyard bears good fruit at last.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. Isaiah opens with a tender love song and invites the crowd to decide between me and my vineyard (5:3), only to reveal in verse 7 that the vineyard is themselves. How does this work the same way Nathan’s parable worked on David (2 Samuel 12:1–7)? Why is being led to judge our own case more powerful than being accused outright?

2. When the Owner came looking for fruit, He waited for justice and fairness and got disobedience and cries for help (5:7). What does this teach about the kind of fruit God seeks from His people, and how does it connect to His rejection of religion with bloody hands back in chapter 1?

3. The Owner asks, What more can I do for my vineyard beyond what I have already done? (5:4). How does the Lord Jesus answer that question in His parable, where the Owner at last sends His Son (Matthew 21:33–39)? What does it mean that the Heir was killed outside the vineyard?

4. A wild vine cannot make itself bear good grapes. How does the Lord Jesus’s word (I am the true vine … apart from me you can accomplish nothing, John 15:1, 5) answer the failure of Isaiah’s vineyard? Why is it freeing, rather than discouraging, to learn that our fruitfulness is His gift borne through us, and not our own achievement?

5. Of the six woes, the fourth pronounces doom on those who call evil good and good evil (5:20). Why is renaming evil even more dangerous than simply doing it? How does this connect to Luther’s call to name a thing what it actually is?

6. Isaiah traces every sour grape to one root: they had rejected the law and spurned the commands of the Holy One of Israel (5:24), and the chapter ends in darkness (5:30). Why is spurning the word the root from which all the other woes grow? And how does the promise that the people walking in darkness see a bright light (9:2) keep this dark chapter from being the last word?

Looking Ahead

Isaiah 5 left us in the dark; the next sessions begin to let in the light. We have already visited the throne room of chapter 6; now we come to chapter 7 and one of the mountain-peaks of the whole book. The setting is a political panic: two enemy kings are marching on Jerusalem, and Ahaz, the faithless king of Judah, is shaking with his people just as the trees of the forest shake before the wind (7:2). The Lord sends Isaiah to steady him with a promise, and even offers him a sign (Ask for a confirming sign from the LORD your God, 7:11), and Ahaz, cloaking his unbelief in a show of false piety, refuses to ask. So the Lord gives a sign anyway, over the head of the unbelieving king, a sign for the whole family of David and for all the ages: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14, ESV). That verse is quoted from the ESV, which keeps the word “virgin” as Matthew 1:23 reads it. We will take up that sign (its near horizon and its far) and the name that holds the whole gospel in a single word: God with us.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 7 in full, and read Matthew 1:18–23 alongside it. As you read, notice Ahaz’s fear and his false piety, and ask why the Lord would give a sign to a king who would not even ask for one, and what it means that the sign is a child called God with us.

Closing Prayer

O Lord of Heaven’s Armies, You planted us as a vineyard (hedged us, cleared us, and gave us every good thing) and You waited for the fruit of justice and fairness; and we have brought You sour grapes. We have joined house to house and ignored the cry of the poor; we have called evil good and been wise in our own eyes; we have spurned Your word, which alone could have made us fruitful. We have no defense to offer, and like the crowd in the prophet’s song, we have judged our own case.

And yet, O Father, when we ask what more You could possibly have done, You point us to a cross outside the wall, where You gave Your Son to the vineyard that would kill Him, and made the rejected stone the cornerstone of Your house. Graft us, we pray, into the true Vine, our Lord Jesus Christ; let His life run up into these dead branches and bear His own fruit through us, for without Him we can do nothing. Turn our faces from the darkened sky to the great Light who has dawned upon us; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.