Gala Sobol, Gospel Parable of the Wicked Vinedressers. 2008.
Desperate Farmers
(Proper 22A)
8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
8 October 2017
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland
(Oregon)
Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80: 7-14 Philippians 3:4b-14 Matthew 21:33-46
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.
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
(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, as we saw, 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 the parable of the wicked tenants in
Matthew, 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. 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 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.
That much is obvious from the Lectionary’s juxtaposition of these two passages. 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 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.
This understanding of the parable, as
much sense as it would have made to Matthew, is deeply problematic if you take
it as what Jesus intended. 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 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. 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
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 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. 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
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