From the Daily Lectionary for Wednesday in the Fourth Week after Pentecost
Matthew 21:33-46
“Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:
“‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes’?
“Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
What makes a parable a parable is that the meaning on its face at first seems clear, but upon further reflection, one has to reconsider any preconceived rushes to judgement. A parable by design plays upon the biases of the audience, and draws its imagery from everyday life. This parable, though in the hearing of the “crowds,” is directed, like the two before it, to the chief priests and elders, the Jewish power structure.
On the surface the moral seems clear. The landowner represents God who entrusts his tenants to produce a successful crop. The tenants decide to keep the produce for themselves, and murder the landowner’s son in order to occupy the vineyard as their own. The question to the elders is, “what will the landlord do?” The elders answer, as Jesus might have expected, “he will put those wretches to a miserable death;” and then release the land to other tenants, and plant a new crop. Seems simple. God punishes wrongdoing, right?
Here’s what I think: Remember, the parable is being told to the elders and priests, the elite power structure of Israel. Land was owned by an elite few (the elders and priests themselves might have owned land). It was common that the landlord was absentee, that is, through connections with the empire, they could own land in the far reaches of the realm, and live elsewhere. Labor was cheap. Slaves were in abundance, so the landlord could count on his land being worked for his benefit in his absence. The workers would have received an unsustainable pittance for their labor, while the absent landowner reaped the profit. The rich get richer; the poor stay poor.
We know by now that for Matthew there is no love lost for the system. The system functions for the benefit and well-being of the elite few on the backs of those who amount to slave labor. It is the system itself that engenders violence. The workers are desperate to make ends meet; and in this parable they snap. Their violence is akin to rioters in our own country burning down a police station. Jesus isn’t condoning violent behavior, but he is condemning the system that evokes it. The system is untenable. People are unable to live in dignity, and when people live in shame, they act out. The end of the parable is perhaps the most disheartening: the landowner simply begins again. The system stands. The cycle continues.
Jesus is pointing to the elders’ and priests’ complicity to an unjust system; that the cornerstone of the faith is compassion, and dignity, and shared abundance, a system operating under the rubric of love and the justice that love engenders. This is yet one more moment in Matthew’s narrative that speaks of faith as public; that at the heart of the matter is our call to challenge and change the injustice that infects the systems of our common life. If that means saying it in the church, or in the public square… challenging the heartlessness of the status quo…. Then so be it. If we ask the question of ourselves, “what would Jesus do?” Matthew has an answer: He would speak up, and, not only that, he would give his life for the cause.
A Prayer of the Incarnation (BCP, p. 252)
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.
