Desperate Farmers
(Proper 22A)
9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
4 October 2026
Parish
Church Saint Luke, Grants Pass (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 major point of
reflection 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
whores). The week before that, it was
the parable of the bad personnel policy (the day workers hired at different
times yet paid the same; 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 what they see as an act of kindness can be
seen as corrupted by 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 Matthew’s take on the parable of the
wicked tenants, both use the rich images of viniculture to talk about our
relationship with God. We must bring
forth sweet and juicy grapes, acts of compassion and service, if we are to
truly be God’s vineyard, lest he clean up the garden, toss us out, and start
again with another vine stock more prone to fruit.
That much is obvious from the
Lectionary’s juxtaposition of these two passages. And, as far as it goes, is a good
message.
But
what is not so patently evident is how Matthew, once again, has reframed and
reinterpreted Jesus’ parable. When you
compare this parable with how it is preserved in Luke and in the Gospel of
Thomas, you see what Matthew or his tradition has added: all the little details that lead us to see in
the parable a complex story with many points of comparison s an 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., believes that Jesus’s
parable is about that earth-shattering event, the end of Second Temple Judaism
and the Temple cult with its legal practices.
He sees it as being replaced by Christianity. In this proto-supercessionist understanding
of the parable, the Landlord is God; the tenants, the Israelites and the Jews;
the agents sent and then abused, the prophets; and the “only son, the heir,”
Jesus Christ. The idea is that Jews over
the centuries rejected the prophets, and abused and killed some, and finally
rejected Jesus, who was killed outside the city wall. So the disaster in 70 CE was actually God’s
punishment.
I have to tell you, I have real
problems with this understanding of the parable. 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 not encourage or mimic supercessionism or any narrative that
would blame “the Jewish people,” for deicide.
Such ideas should be recognized as a negative, anti-gospel 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
Roman-ruled Palestinian had become.
Like the parable of the dishonest manager, or the parable of the bad personnel
policy, 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.
Just look at the land owner
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 land-owner. He sends his
henchman from the city to the farm 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. How much of the good life we enjoy
comes from work of others, and that unfairly?
How much is gained by the exploitation and violation of an already
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
