Wild Grapes

Isaiah 5:1-7:
Let me sing for my beloved
my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.

What more was there to do for my
vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry!

There is much talk of fruit in the bible. It makes sense; communities in biblical times were largely agricultural. There is a very easy correlation in planting and harvesting crops to growth and health. The consistent result is always fruit…or the lack thereof. Good fruit = everything is healthy; everything is as it should be. Lack of fruit, or bad fruit = something is wrong; things are not as they should be.

The poetry of this passage in Isaiah is disturbing. God reveals His heart in a way that seems to communicate confusion and frustration over His people’s condition:
What more is there to do with my vineyard that I haven’t already done? I’ve chosen the most fertile soil; I dug it myself, cleared it of stones and planted the best breed of plants. I built a watchtower in the middle of it to watch over and care for it; I’ve built and prepared the vat in anticipation of the great harvest, and only wild grapes. Wild Grapes!! What am I supposed to do with wild grapes??

So, what’s so bad about wild grapes?

I decided to Google the term and came across the Chateau Z vineyard in Lynchburg, Virginia. You can tell from their website that these guys are passionate about wine making and breeds of grapes and cross-breeding grapes. Very interesting stuff. Here is what they had to say about wild grapes:
Here are the wild grapes currently in the collection at Chateau Z. All are very resistant to disease and insects, but they are not wine or table grapes by any stretch of the imagination. These grapes can develop high sugar contents but it is always accompanied by high acid levels, often 5-10 times higher than cultivated grapes. A big goal that has always been in the mind of American breeders is to get the great disease and insect resistance and lose the acid and (often) strange flavors.

I immediately recognized these grapes. My entire childhood my grandmother lived in the same house until she died. Every spring we would wait for the trellis in the backyard where her porch swing hung to blossom in the thickest, green grape vines. We would wait and wait, every now and then plucking a fat, purple grape and popping it into our mouths only to screw up our faces in a sour pucker and quickly spit it back out. This would continue throughout the summer until we realized that they would never become sweet. I realize now that for however good these grapes looked, they were wild grapes; they were worthless. By the end of summer the grapes would produce only high levels of frustration as they were smashed by shoes and bare feet and tracked in through the back door, staining the linoleum. The first time I heard my grandmother swear was when she one day went out in her socks and stepped on one of these herself.

Strong, resilient, resistant to disease and insects…acidic, sour, worthless. Wild grapes.

So what am I to do? I’ll tear down the protective hedge and wall that kept the wild beasts out, they will move in and feast and trample the vines. I’ll command the sun and rain to not bother with shining and watering. I will stop caring for it myself, it will become a barren wasteland overgrown with weeds and thistles; I will move on.

What was the fruit, the good grapes that God was looking for?
I looked for justice, but found only bloodshed.
I looked for righteousness, but heard only an outcry.

Justice and righteousness.

This is a common theme throughout Isaiah, God is looking for justice and righteousness. God is not merely looking for resilience, for longevity, for resistance to evil, God is looking for His people to produce something.

Listen to what He says through Isaiah in chapter 1. After going on for a while about being sick of their religious practices that feign holiness, He says starting in verse 16:

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your deeds from
before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless (the orphan),
plead the widow’s cause.

Keeping ourselves pure and undefiled from the world, from evil, is only one part of what God is looking for. When we stop here we become acidic, sour, maybe strong and resilient, but utterly useless. Learning to do good, seeking justice, correcting oppression, bringing justice to orphans and pleading the widow’s cause are all very tangible things that require us to DO something.

So how do we know when we are doing enough?

That’s just it, we cannot do enough! This is where the children of Israel got it so wrong over and over again. Jesus came and taught not a new holiness and righteousness, but brought clarity to the holiness and righteousness that God was truly looking for; holiness and righteousness that grows like ripe, delicious, hearty fruit on a well tended vine. And the root of that vine is Jesus Himself. When we find our base in Him, when we have our beginning and growth and sustenance in Him, then we take on His health and not our own. We begin to bear the kind of fruit that is pleasing to God as the natural product of who we are in Him. He begins to direct our lives and we stop worrying about doing, and what should I be doing, and how much should I be doing; and instead I am open to His leading each and every moment of each and every day. Doing then becomes a part of my life, not because I am seeking action, but instead because I am open to His leading and doing just becomes the natural and regular overflow of who I am. This is where God’s Kingdom comes and His will is done, in us, His chosen Kingdom instruments.

We are His Kingdom agents, cooperating with all that He is looking to accomplish in this world. Not wild and useless grapes, but ripe and delicious cultivated grapes of great value and worth and use.

The interesting thing about this vineyard is that it is the grape who decides; will I be wild, or will I plug into the vine and allow Him to define who I am?