Matthew 21:33-46
October
4, 2020
We
are no strangers to warning labels in our society. It seems that just about
everything we use or consume or touch or even smell has a warning attached to
it. Pharmaceutical advertising is a stand-up comic’s dream come true, because
while an ad spends 50 seconds of a 60 second spot touting a new medication’s
amazing, miraculous, curative benefits, it spends the last 10 seconds listing
every conceivable side effect. Often, the side effects sound worse than the
illness that warrants the medication. But if the warnings were not given,
whether it’s on a new medication or something else, there would be a public outcry.
It is in the best interest of everyone to be warned about something potentially
dangerous or threatening to our health or well-being.
I sometimes think the same should be
true for scripture. A warning label should be pasted both on the outside cover
and on the inside. Before we turn one page of our Bible, whatever the
translation, there should be a warning that if we’re going to read it, we read
at our own risk. Maybe we need an even
stronger admonition, like the robot on the old television show, Lost in Space. “Danger, danger, Will Robinson.”
I don’t say this to be irreverent. I
say this because I believe that being faithful means that we must read
scripture on its terms, not ours. It is not easy to do. I would much rather
read the passages and stories in the Bible that confirm my understanding of God
and skip the ones that challenge my preconceptions and firmly held notions. Yet
if I want to be faithful in reading scripture, then I have to also read the
passages and stories and parables that challenge me, that push back at me, that
make struggle. I have to read scripture on its own terms, not mine. That is
where the warning label comes in. Reading scripture on its own terms may force
us to not only see God differently, but to see ourselves differently as well. This
passage from Matthew has the power to do both, so you have been warned. We read
it at our own risk.
As I studied this passage, what I
repeatedly read in commentaries is that this parable has been used to justify
anti-Semitism. If we read this story as pure allegory, it is easy to see how
that interpretation has been reached.
To
better understand the parable itself, we need to understand the scene in which
it is set. Jesus is in the final days before his arrest and crucifixion. He is
in the temple. He is in a confrontation with the Pharisees and scribes, the
religious authorities. They want to stop him, silence him, at any cost. They
have been challenging his authority. Jesus has responded to their challenges
with parables. Jesus responded to their challenge with a parable about a
vineyard, and a father and two sons. Our parable today is also about a
vineyard. It takes place in a vineyard.
The
vineyard would have been a relatable, familiar example to the people listening
to Jesus. In this story a vineyard was planted by a landowner. The landowner
plants it, puts a fence around it, digs a wine press, and builds a watchtower. This
was what any responsible landowner would have done. He leaves the vineyard in
the hands of his tenants and goes to another country. When harvest time rolls around, he sends his
servants to the tenants to collect his share of the harvest. Again, this would
have been standard practice. But the tenants turn on the slaves. They beat one,
they kill another, and they stone a third. Yet the landowner does not retaliate.
Instead he sends more slaves to them, and those slaves are treated the same
way.
I suspect that everyone who heard
Jesus tell this was thinking that surely the landowner would now rain down
punishment, rain down vengeance on the heads of the tenants. It was bad enough
that they beat and killed the first slaves sent to them, but to do that a
second time? No landowner would put up with that. But here’s the twist; not
only did the landowner not retaliate, the owner of the vineyard sent one more
emissary: his son. Surely, he thinks, his son will be respected. Surely, they
won’t harm the landowner’s own flesh and blood. But when the tenants see the
son approaching, they hatch a plot.
“Let’s
kill the son, and then we’ll receive the inheritance.”
They
seize the son, throw him out of the vineyard, and kill him too.
When Jesus finishes his story, he
asks the Pharisees,
“Now
when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
The
Pharisees respond,
“He
will put those wretches to death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who
will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
Just as Jesus did in the parable of
the father and the two sons, the other parable of the vineyard, the question
that Jesus asks of the Pharisees puts them in a position to condemn themselves.
The ones who refuse to give the share of the harvest to the landowner, the ones
who kill the slaves and son of the landowner, then have the audacity and sense
of entitlement to believe that the inheritance will still come to them, are the
ones who will be put to a miserable death. They are the ones who will lose
their place in the vineyard to others. The point of the parable seems obvious.
Jesus says it. The Pharisees are the wicked tenants.
If the Pharisees are the wicked
tenants who kill not only the slaves, but the son, then it’s not difficult to
make the leap that the Jews are the ones who are sent out of the vineyard, and
the Christians are the new tenants who “produce at the harvest time.” Reading the
parable this way makes it an “us versus them” scenario. But here is where the
warning label is needed. What makes us think that we – Christians, good church
goers, etc. – are always the good guys? I have asked this question of us
before. What makes us assume that we are the “good guys” in every story or
parable?
Jesus
pushed the Pharisees and the religious leaders and all those who thought they
knew God’s will to realize that God was and is doing a new thing. God would not
be limited by their dogma. Nor will God be limited by ours. Jesus goes on to
quote,
“The
stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
Yes, reading this parable strictly
as allegory makes it far too easy to point fingers and make judgments and assume
that we understand it in the right way. Warning. We should never assume. But do
you know what is really troubling to me about this passage? Do you know what really bothers me about the
story that Jesus tells? What bothers me
is that the landowner must have been a fool. Why did he persist in sending
people to these tenants? Why did he not learn from the terrible results the first
time?
I
read nothing in this passage that suggests that the vineyard owner was secretly
oppressive or evil or deserved this kind of violent response from his tenants. Yet
violence was their response. Every person or persons he sent to them was met
with terrible violence. I don’t think anyone hearing this parable would have
blamed the landowner if, after the first time his slaves were beaten and
killed, he had retaliated in kind. But he didn’t. He just sent more people, and
when they were horribly killed, he sent his son. What a fool.
But if this story, whether it is
meant to be heard and read allegorically or not, reflects on God in any way,
shape or form, then doesn’t that mean that God is foolish? Is God foolish? Is God’s love, God’s persistent, unending,
unconditional love, foolish?
Maybe it is. But then again, it all
seems foolish, doesn’t it? It is foolishness that God is born as a helpless,
homeless baby. It is foolishness that God suffers and dies. It is foolishness
that God takes on this weak and finite flesh of ours to show us what it really
means to be human, to open our eyes to the kingdom right here in our midst.
God
does everything a fool would do. God does not give up on us, even though we
deserve it. God does not stop loving us, even though we would stop loving
someone else who treated us the way these tenants treated the landowner; the
way we treat the Creator and the Creation. God persists for our sake,
foolishly. Does this mean that there is not judgment for our actions? No, but
that judgment is always tempered with mercy, with love. And by the world’s
standards, it is a foolish love. God shows us an undeserved and unreserved
forgiveness, and an extravagant grace. That is foolishness, isn’t it? Paul wrote
that the cross is foolishness. As the cornerstone of God’s new thing, Jesus said,
“The
one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone
on whom it falls.”
I have always heard those words as a
terrible and violent punishment, a terrible, violent judgment. But perhaps what
it really is foolish. Perhaps the only way that we can truly recognize and feel
and respond to God’s foolish love is when we our hard hearts and our closed
minds are finally broken open. I know that in my own life, it has been those
moments when I feel the most lost, those moments when I have felt the most
alone, that I found God right there beside me. And I realized that beside me was
where God had been the whole time, loving me: extravagantly, unreservedly,
foolishly.
Today, as we come to the table to
take bread and wine, we do so knowing that Christians around the world are
doing the same. To many people, it must seem like a foolish thing to do. How can just eating a piece of bread and
swallowing a bit of wine be sacred? How does this one act proclaim hope when
the world is so hurting, so broken? Maybe in the eyes of the world it is
foolish, but this bread and wine reminds us that we are more alike than we are
different. Whatever our language or
culture or worldview, we come to this table in hope that love still has the
power to overcome evil, that light can still conquer the darkness, that peace
is not just a fleeting dream. We come to this table hopefully, trustingly,
foolishly, knowing that the good news, the amazing, wonderful, overwhelming
good news, is that God loves us foolishly first. Praise be to God for that foolish love.
Let
all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!”
Amen.
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