MANY and various are the meanings derived from the
term, Vineyard: but Isaiah recorded clearly that the vineyard of the Lord of
hosts is the house of Israel. Who but God planted this vineyard? He it is who
let it out to husbandmen and went into a far country: not that God went from
place to place, he who is always present everywhere. But he is more readily
present to the careful, and absent from the careless. He was away for a long
time, lest he should seem too insistent in his demands. For the more generous
the liberality, the more inexcusable is perversity.
MATTHEW says well that he hedged it round about: that is, he walled it in with the protection of divine defense, lest it should be an easy prey to the inrush of spiritual wild beasts. And he dug a winepress in it. How are we to interpret this reference to the winepress? Is it not connected with those psalms that are entitled, For the winepress, in which, through the Holy Spirit, the mysteries of the Lord's Passion seethe over with foaming new wine? Whence those men who were filled with the Holy Ghost were thought to be drunken. Therefore. in this parable the man dug a winepress in which the inward fruit of the clusters of reason should pour forth its spiritual juice.
HE built a tower, raising, as it were, the spire of the law: and this vineyard thus fenced, prepared and equipped, he let out to the Jews. And at the time of the fruit he sent his servants. It is well said, Time of the fruit, and not harvest, for there was no fruit from the Jews, no harvest from this vineyard, of which the Lord said, When I looked that it should bring forth grapes, it brought forth wild grapes. Therefore, not with the wine of gladness, not with the new wine of the Spirit, did this vineyard overflow, but with the blood of the murdered prophets.
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