The Parable of the Tenants
Matthew 21.33-45
Matthew 21.33-45: “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. “The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.” Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:
“‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?
“Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.
As a college Junior in 2000, I studied abroad in Malta, where I split time between math courses and the Jesuit seminary. One of my courses had the bold title, Anti-Semitism in the New Testament, and traced the Christian tradition of leveraging the teachings of Jesus and the letters of Paul (both Jewish) against Jews and Judaism. The parable of the tenants showed up, precisely because early allegoric interpretations decided that Jesus was talking about Jews dropping the ball and Christians being the new tenants. This interpretation continues to have a strong grip on average Christian interpretation because it is simple and commends “believers” over “non-believers” (of Jesus, not God). But it is also anachronistic, dangerous, and wrong. And I am rarely inclined to take a stance so strongly. It is WRONG.
Matthew, more so than the other Gospellers, is writing to a primarily Jewish audience that has embraced the teachings of Jesus. They were not “messianic Jews”; that, too, is an anachronism. They were Jews who found the rabbi Jesus to offer an interpretive lens into the Torah that was not only sensible but also joyful, and also found Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection to align with the Torah. Thus, it is fairly easy to say that Jesus was not preaching against himself, his religion, his family, and his friends here, but rather talking about approaches to tending God’s vineyard.
Per Isaiah 6, Israel has long understood itself as the vineyard of the Lord. Wine is a symbol for joy in the Bible and Israel’s own self-identification implies that they are to cultivate, tend, harvest, and make a lovely vintage of joy, for God and for the world. Isaiah acknowledges this symbol, and then takes the people to task for not following it. Jesus does something similar. The tenants of the vineyard perceive the owner of the vineyard, God, as an absentee landlord who just wants the fruits without any supervision, relationship, oversight, etc. They perceive the owner to be so far-off that they start to think the vineyard is theirs. And they not only neglect emissaries from the owner, but ridicule, mock, and abuse them. They are so twisted in their thinking that they hatch a ridiculous plan—they will kill the heir, so they stand to inherit. This is not about Jesus—he hasn’t died yet! This about people who forget whose they are and who God is and want to desperately control what is not theirs. Their plan is worse than a delusion. It cannot ever succeed and will only result in their losing their place in the vineyard. The scribes perceive Jesus is talking about them. Not because they are Jewish, but because they are wielding power over God’s vineyard and plenty of folks are missing out on the joy of the vine. Not because they read the Torah, but because they are not living into the commands to care for the poor, the stranger, the alien, to love their neighbors as they love themselves. Not because they do not acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, but because they do not perceive God’s presence or grace or justice in their midst. And they are depriving the world of the vineyard of joy.
And the scribes obviously disagree with Jesus. They think they are doing just fine. They probably think they are excellent managers of God’s vineyard. The Inquisition and Crusaders did, too. The only thing that stops them from stopping him is the crowd. The crowd perceive that there is some mismanagement going on—of their debts, of a theology that has God far away and far off, of managers acting like owners. This is not only a parable of leadership that went awry once or twice or thrice throughout the ages (or a month!). We know that when we look backward, and especially when we look at other people’s histories. Jesus might also be asking us to re-consider our own understandings of Church, of God, of leadership, of ownership.
Is God absentee? Sometimes we are inclined to think so, even if we do not want to say so. We often “pray” for things and get “no answer” from God, and then we have to decide why—maybe God is testing our faith or we aren’t worthy. We pray to change God’s mind and, when we do not prevail, have a crisis of faith. Maybe God is waiting to immanently change our minds? Many Christians do not know what to do with the Ascension of Jesus and the Second Coming—does this mean Jesus is absentee? We rarely pause to think about symbolism, preferring literalism. Symbolically, the Ascension puts the Incarnation back into heaven and, with the Orthodox tradition, allows humanity to be fully part of divinity, the concept of apotheosis. And sometimes we talk about whether or not we can “feel” God’s presence, presuming that our feelings dictate or even reflect reality. One of my favorite lines from Peter Van Breemen; God is more present in us than we are in ourselves. The part of God’s presence we are aware of is God’s immanence. The part of God’s presence we are not aware of is God’s transcendence. And if God is so deeply present in us, how can we become increasingly present with God?
What’s the work of the Church for? To prove our worthiness to God? To earn jewels in heavenly crowns? To make other people as miserable as we are from time to time? This parable reminds us that we are invited to be a part of God’s vineyard, to cultivate and tend and make joy—wine—for the world, for ourselves, for one another. And Jesus reminds us that the work of God’s people is to make joy. Which suggests that when the harvest starts to become bitter, it might have more to do with the seeds we plant and the stringent ways we tend them and the sort of wine we produce (and even drink)—sometimes we think vinegar is the good stuff!—than about God. And there is time to change our habits, to cultivate joy, to switch our palette from vinegar to joy!
There is even a word of comfort in that God does care about leadership and that there is accountability. I wish God responded more quickly sometimes to what I consider “bad leadership,” but I probably benefit from God’s patience on this point more often than I know. And it is likely that we all do. But God is able to cultivate faithful leadership, all the more with our willingness!