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“But You Said You Would” 

Matthew 21:23-32 

When I was a kid, there was one phrase that had an almost magical ability to get me in trouble with my parents: 

But you said you would! 

Now, in my defense, I usually deployed this phrase when I believed I had a very strong case 

My parents had said we were going to do something. 

Or that I could have something.  

Or that something was going to happen.  

And then, for whatever perfectly reasonable adult reason, plans changed. And apparently, I was not the kind of child who could simply accept this new information and move on with her life.  

No. 

I had evidence. 

But you said you would. 

And technically, I was right. They had said they would. Which, as it turns out, is not always the winning argument a child thinks it is. Because sometimes plans change. Sometimes circumstances change. Sometimes adults discover information that the child demanding justice from the back seat of the car does not possess.  

But none of that mattered to me.  

You said you would. And if you said you would, then you were supposed to do it.  

Of course, somewhere along the way, I grew up. And I discovered the unfortunate truth that keeping your word is considerably easier when you are the child keeping track of everybody else’s promises.  

Because adults say things too. 

I’ll take care of that. 

I’ll call them tomorrow. 

I’ll definitely remember.  

And most of the time, we mean it. But then life happens. Something comes up. We forget. We get distracted. We change our minds. And suddenly there is a gap between what we said we would do and what we actually do. 

Which brings us to this strange little story Jesus tells in our scripture passage this morning.  

A father has two sons. He goes to the first and says, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” And the son says no. But later, he changes his mind and goes. The father asks his second son the same thing. And this son gives exactly the answer his father wants to hear: “I go, sir.” Except he never goes.  

And then Jesus asks, “which of the two did the will of his father?” The answer is obvious. The first. The one who said the wrong thing but eventually did the right thing.  

And suddenly, I find myself hearing an old familiar phrase.  

But you said you would.  

Because Jesus is about to ask some deeply religious people whether there is a difference between saying yes to God and actually going where God asks us to go.  

And to understand why Jesus tells this story, we have to back up for a moment. Jesus does not simply wander into the temple one morning and decide that everyone needs to hear a nice story about keeping their promises.  

There is a confrontation happening.  

Jesus has entered Jerusalem. He has entered Jerusalem. He has overturned tables in the temple. He has healed people there. He has been teaching. And the chief priests and the elders want to know: 

By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority? 

This sounds like a reasonable question. These are, after all, people responsible for the religious life of their community. Someone has walked into the temple, disrupted everything, and started teaching. Asking who authorized him does not seem particularly outrageous.  

Except Jesus knows this isn’t simply a request for information. So instead of answering their question, Jesus asks one of his own. Where did John the Baptist’s authority come for? And suddenly the chief priests and elders have a problem. Because they know exactly what will happen depending on how they answer. If they say John’s authority came from heaven, Jesus will ask the obvious follow-up question. Then why didn’t you believe him? But if they say Jesus’ authority was merely human, they have another problem.  

The crowds believed John was a prophet. So they discuss it among themselves. They weigh their options. They calculate the consequences. And finally they give Jesus the safest answer they can come up with: We do not know. They’re saying: We don’t want to answer. Because answering would require something from them.  

That’s the tension underneath this entire conversation. These are people who know an enormous amount about God. They know how to have a conversation about God without ever allowing the conversation to demand anything of them. Which, if we’re willing to admit it, is not only a problem for chief priests and elders two thousand years ago.  

Those of us who have spent a long time in church can get very good at this. We can sing hymns we haven’t head in 20 years and somehow still remember the third verse. We know the language. And there is something beautiful about that. These practices shape us. These words carry us when we don’t have words of our own. They connect us to generations of people who have worshiped before us.  

But knowing the words is not the same thing as allowing these words to change us. Because every Sunday we say things in this room that are enormous if we really mean them. We say that we believe in forgiveness. We say that we love our neighbors. We say that we belong to Jesus. And Jesus keeps asking. Okay. What happens next? Because faithfulness begins when the things we say about God start shaping the way we actually live.  

And that’s when Jesus tells them about two sons.  

It would be easy to hear this parable as nothing more than a warning about keeping our promises. Don’t be like the second son. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. And that’s probably good advice. But I don’t think that’s all Jesus is doing here.  

Look again at the first son. His first answer is wrong. His father says, Go and work in the vineyard today. And he says, I will not. There is no ambiguity with his response. But then Matthew gives us this tiny detail: Later he changed his mind and went.  

He changed his mind. And according to Jesus, that is the son who did what his father wanted. That matters because Jesus isn’t really talking about two sons. He's talking about the people standing in front of him. Jesus tells the chief priests and elders that the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of heaven ahead of them. And I imagine that landed about as well as you would expect. But then John the Baptist came preaching repentance. And they listened, changed their minds, and went.  

Meanwhile, the people who had spent their lives saying yes to God saw all of this happening and refused to move.  

Maybe that’s the part of the story we need to hear. Because sometimes we act as though faithfulness means having always gotten it right. But repentance requires the possibility that we might discover we were wrong.  

Changing your mind can be hard. Especially because there is a particular kind of humility required to say: 

I was wrong. 

I need to do something differently. 

Maybe that’s why Jesus asks, Which of the two did the will of his father.  

Maybe the invitation for us this morning is not to prove that we have always and the right answer.  

Maybe it is simply to ask: 

Where is God asking me to go now? 

When I was a kid, “But you said you would” was an accusation. It was my way of keeping score. You said this was going to happen. You made a promise. And now I am here to remind you that you have failed to live up to it. 

But I don't think that's how Jesus tells this story. 

I don't think Jesus is standing in the vineyard with his arms crossed, keeping a list of every promise we have failed to keep. Because if that were the point, the first son wouldn't be the hero of the story. He said no. He got it wrong. And still, there was time to change his mind. 

And maybe that is the good news for us. Every week, we come into this place and say some extraordinary things. We say that we believe in grace. We say that we believe in forgiveness. We say that every person is beloved by God. And then we walk out those doors into a world where we get another chance to decide whether those are simply words we know how to say—or truths we are willing to live. 

We will not always get it right. Sometimes our actions will fall short of our words. Sometimes we will say yes and fail to go. Sometimes, like that first son, our first answer to God will be an emphatic no. But our first answer does not have to be our final answer. 

We can change our minds. We can turn around. We can apologize.We can try again. 

We can take one more step toward becoming the people we have been saying all along that we want to be. 

So perhaps the question Jesus leaves us with this morning isn't, “Have you always gotten it right?” 

Thank God. 

The question is much simpler: 

What will you do now? 

Because God is still calling. The vineyard is still there. There is still work worth doing. And by the grace of God, there is still time to go. 

Amen.