“I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard:

“My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines.  He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.

“Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard.  What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it?  When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad?”   Isaiah 5:1- 4

 “The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the nation of Israel, and the people of Judah are the vines he delighted in.  And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.”    Isaiah 5:7

Note the cost that the owner was willing to pay to produce wine. He already owned a fertile hillside, ideally suited to produce choice grapes. But it could only do so if certain things were done. The lot had to be dug up.  All stones that might hinder the growth of the vines had to be removed and thrown onto rows, out of the way. Only then was the ground ready to receive something it could not possibly produce on its own – never – a living vine, the best there is.  A new life graced a formerly unproductive plot of land.  But more had to be done, a costly tower had to be built to guard those choicest vines from harm. He willingly paid the price. Then all is in vain if there is no press to extract the wine from the grapes so, again, he paid the price to have a wine-press built. What more could he have done to assure a good product?  It is rhetorical, nothing!  All had been done. All the ground had to do was to nurture the choicest vine.

That is the cause for the lament of the song.  Something went terribly wrong.  The choicest vines produced bad fruit. That is the point of the story.  The owner, the dresser, the investor looked for good fruit but found only bad.  The whole enterprise was a colossal failure.

But the Word of God announced that Jesus would appear and under his loving care good fruit will surely happen.