The vineyard song ended with wild grapes. This passage inspects the harvest, six times over, and each inspection begins with the same word: "Woe."
The first two are almost mundane. Some buy field after field 8"until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land." The isolation they wanted becomes the isolation they get. Then come the drinkers, up early and feasting with lyre and harp, 12"but they do not regard the deeds of the LORD." These are the oldest temptations there are. The woes name respectable sins, a comfortable people doing well, and that is what makes the passage unsettling to read.
The next woe describes people who 18"draw iniquity with cords of falsehood," dragging sin behind them like an ox pulling a cart, and who mock God for being slow: 19"let it come, that we may know it." They dare him to act, as though delay meant judgment would never arrive.
The fourth woe is the hinge: those who call evil good and good evil. It describes relabeling. Confusion is an honest mistake; this is deliberate and active, like a thief who breaks into a shop at night to switch the price tags so that what was cheap reads as valuable and what was valuable reads as worthless. Once a person decides that their own appetite gets to define good and evil, the labels become negotiable.
The last two follow. 21"Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes," a wisdom answerable to nothing outside itself. And then the judges, 22"heroes at drinking wine," who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deny justice to the innocent. Greed opens the list and corrupt courts close it. Between them sits a society in which appetite feeds self-justification, and self-justification feeds injustice, each woe the child of the one before.
The consequence comes as fire on stubble, their root 24"as rottenness." Then the refrain: 25"For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still." It will return four more times in the chapters ahead. Patience stretched to its limit waits for the right moment, and the refrain reminds the reader that the anger is still held back. Every repetition is another day of mercy.
And the instrument is summoned. 26"He will raise a signal for nations far away, and whistle for them from the ends of the earth." A whistle is what a shepherd gives a dog, the gesture of someone unimpressed by an empire's opinion of its own might. The nation will march, and it will march because the God who was patient far longer than six woes deserved has finally whistled.
Ask which label you have been quietly switching. Where has a preference of yours come to be described as a virtue? There is time to turn back before the whistle sounds.
Prayer
Father, we have too often relabeled our appetites as wisdom and called good whatever served us. Forgive us for dragging sin behind us like cart ropes and daring you to be slow. Your hand has been stretched out toward us far longer than we deserved. Before the whistle sounds, turn us back, and let what grows in us be the fruit you planted. In Jesus' name, amen.