Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people: “Hear another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey. When the vintage time drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to obtain his produce. But the tenants seized the servants and one they beat, another they killed, and a third they stoned. Again, he sent other servants, more numerous than the first ones, but they treated them in the same way. Finally, he sent his son to them, thinking, ‘They will respect my son’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.’ They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?” They answered him, “He will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times.” (Matthew 21.33-41)
The latter section of Matthew’s gospel, particularly chapters 21 through 23, a small part of which we hear today, is often called “the controversy section.” The reason is simple–the theme is controversy. Rabbi Jesus has finally entered Jerusalem, the end point of his mission, and his presence in the city stirs up controversy, particularly among the religious leaders. One of Jesus’ first actions in the city is to go to the Temple where he tosses out the money changers, an act that brings him face-to-face with the religious leaders who demand to know by whose authority he has done this atrocity.
It is only the start of the controversy that will swirl around Rabbi Jesus as he moves about the city. When confronted by the religious leaders who demand an explanation from him, he tells three parables or stories as an answer to their scrutiny. We heard the first last weekend with the story of the two sons. The second story is found in today’s selection, a story that concerns a vineyard owner who leases out his property to tenants.
As we heard, the tenants were unscrupulous and took measures to undermine the owner’s rights. When the owner sent servants to collect his due, the tenants beat, killed, and stoned them in succession. Thinking they would respect his son, the owner sends his heir to collect the rent, but the tenants do to him as they have done to the servants. They take him outside the vineyard where they murder him.
That deceitful action results in the owner of the vineyard “putting to a wretched death” the tenants and removing them from the vineyard. He then rents the land to other tenants who will provide him with the fruit from the harvest as the first tenants should have done, but did not do. Rabbi Jesus concludes the parable with a simple prediction, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”
This parable, unlike others, does not require much analysis. Its intention and its message are clear. There is an analogous relationship between the participants in the parable and the current situation playing out in Jerusalem. Already in the Hebrew scriptures, particularly in the writings of Isaiah the prophet, the vineyard is a favorite image for the trusted relationship or covenant between the Lord God and the chosen people of Israel.
And, as the Hebrew scriptures also make clear, that relationship is continually tested because the people refuse to follow their commitments to the Lord God. When the Lord God calls forth prophets to remind the people of their unkept promises, the people respond by killing these men, not wanting to hear what they have to say. So, Zechariah was stoned, Jeremiah was put in stocks and thrown into a cistern, and Uriah was killed. And, as we know well, John the Baptist was beheaded.
Rabbi Jesus, taking the part of the son in the story, will soon enough meet the same fate as the prophets who were sent by the Most High God, his death on the cross the ultimate rejection of the covenant by the religious leaders in Jerusalem. And, as the parable makes clear, the vineyard now will be taken from them and given to others who will bear forth a harvest. Matthew, writing near the end of the first century, clearly intends the new tenants to be understood as the followers of Rabbi Jesus who are now responsible for seeing that there is a fruitful harvest.
It does not take much work to contextualize the parable in our own lives, the possibility ever-present that we also reject the words and works of Rabbi Jesus in a multitude of ways, proving ourselves little different from the first tenants in the story, drawing into question our own faithfulness to the promise we have made to be true sons and daughters of the Most High God.
Our faults and failures do not require a fine-tooth comb in order to pick all the nasty nits from our soul. They are quite obvious, even if we prefer to turn a blind eye to them. They stare us in the face most every day. For that reason, I would like to turn our attention to the less obvious ones, using an overlooked phrase in this parable as a springboard for a closer examination of our misdeeds.
That phrase occurs near the end of the parable when the bad tenants decide to rid themselves of the son whom the owner of the vineyard has sent to collect the pay owed him. Rabbi Jesus says that the farmers “took him, and threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.” It is not without significance that the tenants took the son outside the vineyard to kill him.
First, according to Jewish law, killing someone in a vineyard would result in the ground becoming unclean, in this way contaminating the produce, meaning everything would be lost. So, that is the most obvious reason for their choosing to commit the murder outside the vineyard, this desire to keep their profit while also committing a heinous act.
But Matthew always invites us to look beyond the obvious intent. And when we do that, we see soon enough that Rabbi Jesus’ own death occurred outside the city. As Matthew will tell us later in his gospel, “They led him off to a place called Golgotha to crucify him.” That place, of course, was outside the city gates of Jerusalem. The evangelist wants us to connect the dots in this story, seeing this particular phrase in the parable as a precursor to Rabbi Jesus’ own death at the hands of the religious leaders, the identity of the son in the parable also clearly revealed to us by way of these few words. Matthew is saying here the same thing that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews said when he wrote, “Jesus suffered outside the gate.”
Of course, as the leaders saw it, it was a fitting end to a troublemaker. As they saw things, Rabbi Jesus was not fit to be in the city with them. Crucifying him alongside two common criminals, their message was clear. People such as these did not belong inside the city gates. They were outcasts and outlaws, not deserving a place inside Jerusalem, thrown away like garbage on the trash heap outside the city walls.
In some ways, it was destined that the life of Rabbi Jesus would end this way. His mission was always to the least and the last, to the losers and to the lost. It was how the religious leaders most often spoke of him, derisively saying that he was “the friend of tax-collectors and sinners.” In other words, friends of people on the outside.
And, as we know, Rabbi Jesus took ownership of this affiliation, befriending the outcasts, bringing them back inside the gates, seating them at table with him. He healed the sick, touched the leper, and embraced the very ones shunned and excluded from the community. In fact, the last story he tells his disciples comes two days before the Passover meal, which initiates his last hours upon the earth.
In that story, he forewarns his followers that they will be judged on their treatment of the outcast and those out-of-step. “I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.” He concluded the story by saying, “What you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.”
So, as I see it, if we really want to mine the parable of the wicked tenants for personal reflection, then perhaps the best place to look is found in that phrase that showed the tenants horrendous treatment of the son, described to us as “seizing him, throwing him out of the vineyard, and killing him.” That said, if we really want to understand the level of our rejection of Rabbi Jesus, then we may have to direct our attention beyond the city walls.
In other words, how often do we also throw Jesus outside the gates of the city, refusing to find him in the poor, in the neglected, in the outcast? How often have we turned a deaf ear to the cries of the oppressed, turned our backs on the people we think are beneath us, turned away from the immigrant because he or she is in our estimation outside our concern?
I fear most of us would be quick to say we are nothing like the tenants in the story, believing ourselves to be good and faithful followers of Rabbi Jesus. The problem, truth be told, is in the narrow lens that we use to define our discipleship. Or, said another way, we constrict the ways in which we follow the ways and words of Jesus.
Because of where we look, we more often than not find Jesus inside the gates, not outside the gates. We expect to find him inside our church doors, not outside them. We feel ourselves close to him as we sit in our cushioned pews, but do not feel the same closeness when we step outside and come face-to-face with “the other,” the people we disdain and dismiss because they are outside our way of life.
We need only recall another of Rabbi Jesus’ stories, this one about the poor man Lazarus who lived outside the gate of the rich man’s mansion, ignored and excluded from a place inside at the man’s table, left to die alone, just another dirty, ragged, and easily-forgotten face in the mass of poor people who live in slums and shanties outside the city. That story does not end well for the rich man.
Again, the problem is not that we aren’t trying to follow Jesus; it’s that we don’t want to follow him outside the gate, thrown onto the pile of garbage with the riff-raff, the rabble-rousers, and the rejects. And yet, that is exactly where the story tells us that the son of the vineyard owner ended up and, as time proved, it is precisely where Rabbi Jesus drew his last breath. Not inside Jerusalem with the higher-outs, but nailed to a cross outside the walls with outlaws and outsiders.
The point seems clear. Being a faithful follower of Rabbi Jesus means following him outside the gates where the hoi-polloi, the half-wits, and the harlots have been exiled. If we only follow him inside the city, rubbing elbows with the prim and proper, the pampered and the prosperous, then we have not gone with him to Golgotha, which was outside the city. Instead, we have chosen to stay in Jerusalem where it is safe, surrounded by people who are in lock step with us and who smell and sound much the same as we do on Sunday mornings.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 