Desperate Farmers
(Proper 22A)
8:00 a.m. Said Mass on the Labyrinth,
10:00 a.m. Said Mass with cantors live-streamed from the chancel
4 October 2020
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80: 7-14 Philippians 3:4b-14 Matthew 21:33-46
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
We have seen in the last few weeks several parables of Jesus that have been re-interpreted by Matthew’s Gospel: Matthew regularly takes a parable that has a single point and turns it into an allegory, a story with several points of comparison. Last week, it was the parable of the two sons, the big talker and the big doer (Matt. 21:23-32). Jesus meant this as a simple contrast between saying and not doing on the one hand and not saying but just doing on the other; Matthew turned this into an allegory about the religiously orthodox (Pharisees and scribes) and repentant notorious sinners (tax-collectors and sex-workers). The week before that, it was the parable of the day laborers (Matt. 20:1-16), which Matthew understood as an allegory about the grateful ones come lately to faith and the resentful ones who have been here a long time. On Jesus’ lips it was a critique of the unfairness of the marketplace and the careless ways of the wealthy, where an act of kindness triggers anger by those not favored, due to the unfairness of the larger system. The week before that, it was the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matt. 18:22-35). Again, what for Jesus had been an edgy critique of the careless rich, great and small, had become for Matthew an allegory about the need for us to forgive others if we expect to be forgiven ourselves by God.
The images in today’s readings, the parable of the vineyard in Isaiah, and the parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew, both use the rich images of viniculture to talk about our relationship with God: we must produce or risk being discarded. That much is obvious from the Lectionary’s juxtaposition of these two passages.
But here, once again, Matthew has
reframed and reinterpreted a parable of Jesus.
When you compare it with how it is preserved in Luke and in the Gospel
of Thomas, you see what Matthew has added:
all the little details that tell us to see in the parable a complex allegory:
the direct allusion to the parable of the vineyard in Isaiah, the complex narrative
about different slaves being sent and some getting killed and others just
beaten, or the detail of the murdered son’s body being tossed out outside
vineyard. Even the concluding question,
“what do you think that landowner is going to do to those tenants?” is missing
in the original form.
Matthew, writing after the Roman army’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem
in 70 C.E., sees Jesus’s parable as an explanation of that earth-shattering
event: God clears the vineyard by destroying the Temple and filling its place
with the Church. In this supercessionist
understanding of the parable, the Landlord is God; the tenants, the people of
Israel; the agents sent and then abused, the prophets; and the “only son, the
heir,” Jesus Christ. The idea is that God’s
chosen people over the centuries rejected the prophets, and abused and killed
some, and finally rejected Jesus, killed outside the city wall.
As much sense as it would have made
to Matthew, this understanding of the parable is deeply problematic. St. Paul never believed that God had rejected
his people, or had changed his deal with them, only that God had included
Gentiles in the scope of grace and election.
And the violent and dark history of Christian anti-Semitism, with
pogroms and massacres regularly happening on Good Friday over the centuries,
demands that we eschew supercessionism or any version of the blood libel
blaming “the Jews” for deicide. Such
ideas, though part of scripture, should be recognized as an unholy foray of the
mind, just like the Psalmist’s murderous prayers that his enemies’ babies’
brains be smashed against the wall.
The story as originally told by Jesus is a shocking tale of how desperate
tenant farmers in first century Palestine had become. Its original point was to contrast how wrong
the world was in this system of things with how things might be if God’s reign
were here in full power. The opening
line, “the kingdom of heaven is like,” is better translated as “let me tell you
a story about what God’s kingdom is, and what it isn’t.”
Just look at the landowner here: he is
not sending those servants out of any concern for the tenant farmers. He is sending them, probably with
strong-armed goons, to pick up the latest installment of squeeze. The farmers, desperate, resort to strong-arm
tactics to defend themselves, not once, but twice.
Think about how such a parable would have been heard by the crowds of peasants
and day laborers following Jesus. He
starts the story of an absentee landowner.
He sends his henchman from the city to the farm to get the produce for
this season. The farmers have had
enough! They rise up and send the goon packing! I can imagine that Jesus’ audience here
probably cheered. The landowner sends
another, bigger, goon with more “motivation” to come back with the goods. But again, the poor tenants send him away
empty handed! The crowd at this point
is going wild at this story where things are finally going as they ought
to! But then the landowner sends his own
son—an only child—to make sure the tenants haven’t been secretly paying
kickbacks to the goons to get them to go back empty-handed. The crowd becomes silent in anticipation of
how this interesting story will end.
But the tenants, seeing the son, misunderstand what’s going on. They think that the landowner has died, and
that the son is making an inspection tour to make sure his inheritance is in
order. And so they kill him, thinking
that they will get squatters’ rights on unclaimed property if the son himself
has not left a will. The crowd is in
doubt now; they don’t know who to side with.
They see the twist in the story, the unexpected fact that the Landowner
is not dead. And they know what he is
going to do at the murder of his son by these lawless tenants. He will wreak a terrible vengeance,
slaughtering the farmers and their families, and replacing them with docile,
productive ones so he can go back to city to enjoy the high life off the
proceeds of the farm.
I doubt that there was any cheering now.
The poor people in the audience have just heard a story that reminds
them of how they simply must mind their own business and play along with the
oppressors lest things go totally wrong.
The rich in the audience, the religious leaders, the lawyers, know that
Jesus has just blasted the system of oppression that has made them wealthy and
powerful. No one cheers, but everyone
wonders at the story.
This story should make us wonder as well.
Most of the turmoil in our nation in recent months stems from a sense of
grievance of those whose lives and livelihoods are at risk due to the caste
system of color in the U.S. This has
been expressed generally peacefully, but on occasion has broken into violence
reflecting the violence implicit in the system.
How much of the good life we enjoy comes from work of others, and that
unfairly? How much is gained by the
exploitation of others and the violation of an increasingly fragile natural
environment? How is it possible to
address unjust systems of power and wealth?
Is it right to do so, and if so, what means are just and right to do so? The Landowner and the tenants in this story
have clear ideas of honor, fairness, and law.
I wonder how our ideas of such things fare in such a world as seen in
Jesus’ story. This week, I invite us
to let this story work in us, and make us wonder a whole lot.
In the name of Christ, Amen
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