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Matthew 21:33-46
The Parable of the Tenants
33 “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. 34 When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.
35 “The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. 36 Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. 37 Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said.
38 “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ 39 So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
40 “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
41 “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”
42 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:
“‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?
43 “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.44 Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.”
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. 46 They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.
Like the last few readings from Matthew’s gospel, this one tells us about events in the last week of Jesus’ earthly ministry. It’s a week of constant conflict between Jesus and the religious leadership of his people.
A few days ago, we said in a Reflection that the fig tree was one of the symbols for the Hebrew people, and especially for their religious establishment centered around the temple in Jerusalem. Our reading for today focuses on another of the common symbols for the religious life of the covenant people. The Hebrews considered their land to be ‘God’s vineyard,’ and Jesus uses that symbol as the basis for a parable that implies condemnation of the religious leadership in that vineyard.
He starts out by reminding his listeners of all the things that have to be done in the course of establishing a vineyard. In addition to planting the grape vines, you have to build a wall to protect them, dig a winepress and put up a watchtower. There’s a lot of work involved, and Jesus is making the point that God has been working for centuries to establish the covenant people in their promised land. He had “planted” them in the promised land, then had nurtured and protected them, punishing them when they were unfaithful but then bringing them back from exile so they could start again.
In the parable, the owner of a vineyard (presumably meant to represent God) rents the vineyard to some tenants and goes on his way.
At harvest time, the owner of the vineyard sends servants to collect the share of the fruit he was due. But instead of paying the owner his share, the tenants abuse and even murder his servants. It seems that Jesus meant these servants to symbolize the prophets God had sent to speak to his people throughout history. These prophets were sent to call the covenant people to be more ‘fruitful,’ but a lot of them had been abused and even killed by the people and their leaders.
In the parable the owner eventually sends his own son, thinking the tenants would respect him, but the son meets the same violent fate as the other servants – he too is murdered.
When he’s done telling the parable, Jesus does something that God does in other parts of the Bible – maybe most notably in the case of David, when he’s confronted by Nathan after sinning with Bathsheba. Jesus asks the religious leaders who had heard the parable to pass judgment on the characters in it. He asks them what the vineyard owner should do in response to the tenants’ crimes. The religious leaders say he should “bring those wretches to a wretched end,” and “rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”
And in saying that, of course, the religious leaders are condemning themselves.
Doesn’t Jesus seem to be saying that the religious leadership – the very people who were supposed to have devoted their lives to serving God – had somehow become so corrupted and sinful that they saw the kingdom of God as an entitlement they could exploit for their own benefit?
It seems to me that there’s a warning here for those of us who follow Jesus – and especially for anyone in a leadership role – to guard against allowing ourselves to think that the church is somehow “about us.” Each of us is called to labor in the vineyard for a while, to serve in God’s vineyard while we’re here, but this parable reminds us that it’s God’s church, not ours. So our first thought when it comes to the church – our local congregation as well as the one church in the world – needs to be how we can help to bear fruit for God through it, not what benefits we might get from our service in it.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for all the ways you have nurtured and tended your people throughout history – first as the covenant people of Israel and now as the church. Help us always to be committed to being fruitful, to making your vineyard productive for you. Guard us against thinking of that vineyard with a spirit of entitlement. Amen.
Every Blessing,
Henry
(The other readings for today are Psalms 111 and 112; Amos 4:6-13; and II Peter 3:11-18. Our readings come from the NIV Bible, as posted on Biblica.com, the website of the International Bible Society.)
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