Wicked tenants

Address given at Templederry, St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 8th October 2017, the 17th after Trinity

Jesus really, really upset the chief priests and elders when they challenged his authority to teach in the Temple.

After he told them the parable of the wicked tenants - that is the name given to the reading from Matthew's Gospel which we have just heard (Matthew 21:33-46) - ‘They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, (who) regarded him as a prophet’, we are told.

Why were they so upset, I wonder? To understand, we must delve a bit.

The prophet Isaiah uses a vineyard as a metaphor for the Israelites as God’s people. God ‘dug (his vineyard) and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines’. God ‘built a watchtower … and a wine vat in it’. And God ‘expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes’. So, says Isaiah, God ‘will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns’.

It is a thundering prophecy designed to call the Israelite leaders in Isaiah’s time to repent for exploiting the Israelite people.

In his parable Jesus begins by quoting the opening lines of Isaiah’s prophecy almost word for word.

The chief priests and elders would surely have understood that the landowner who plants the vineyard stands for God. Jesus goes on to describe how the wicked tenants mistreat and beat and kill the vineyard owner’s slaves when they are sent to collect the harvest. And finally, when the owner sends his own son and heir, they kill him too, in the hope of inheriting the vineyard.

The author of Matthew’s Gospel, writing a generation later, believes that Jesus is the Son of God. He intends us to identify the son with Jesus. But notice that although Jesus often refers to God as his Father in heaven, he himself never publicly claims to be the Son of God. He leaves that identification for his disciples to make, and he swears them to secrecy.

The chief priests and elders, the Jewish leaders of Jesus’s time, would never have suspected Jesus was claiming to be the Son of God. They felt utterly secure in being good people, quite unlike those Isaiah prophesied against. Long after the days of Isaiah, Jerusalem was laid waste and the Israelites had been carried off as captives to Babylon. But the Jewish leaders traced their ancestry back to the faithful remnant of Israel that returned from exile to Jerusalem. They were confident that they yielded good grapes, not wild grapes.

Jesus asks them, ‘When the owner returns, what will he do to those tenants?’, and they reply, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time’. Just as, they believed, God had returned Jerusalem to their ancestors.

Nothing Jesus has said so far would have upset them unduly.

Jesus then goes on to quote from Psalm 118: 22-23.

‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’. And he addresses the chief priests and elders directly – we can imagine him looking them in the eyes: ‘Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls’.

Jesus would have been speaking in Aramaic, or perhaps Hebrew. Notice that in both the word for son - ‘ben’- sounds like the word for stone – ‘eben’. With this pun Jesus identifies the Son of God with the Cornerstone, which will break and crush anyone on whom it falls.

Jesus is unmistakably telling the chief priests and the elders - to their faces - that their behaviour is unacceptable to God and that their place as leaders will be given to others – just as Isaiah had to their predecessors. And Jesus has tricked them into pronouncing their own sentence! No wonder they want to arrest him and shut him up…

Christians have often interpreted this parable as a story about Christianity supplanting Judaism.

In this story, the vineyard’s owner is God. The tenants are the Jewish people. The vineyard owner’s slaves are the prophets sent by God and so often rejected and killed. The Son who came last is none other than Jesus himself, whom the Jews kill. So God will – rightly - reject the Jews and choose another people, presumably Christians, the followers of Jesus. The Jews will be broken and crushed by Christ, the Cornerstone. It is a vivid story of the ultimate doom of the Jews - but it is a false and very dangerous story.

It is false because Jesus - a Jew himself - focusses his criticism on the Jewish leaders in the Jerusalem of his own time, not on the Jewish people. In fact, the people’s belief that Jesus was a prophet prevented the leaders from arresting him there and then. The Jewish leaders will indeed be broken and crushed, and the Temple destroyed, a generation later, not by Christians, but by the might of pagan Rome, when they rise up in revolt. The Jewish people will survive as a diaspora, as they have to our own day. As the Acts of the Apostles tells us, though the earliest church was a Jewish church, it soon received gentiles into membership through the insights of St Peter and St Paul – both themselves Jews - in today’s Epistle reading we hear Paul boasting of his Jewish heritage. It is this mixed Jewish and gentile church that Matthew was writing for.

I said that this story is dangerous. It is dangerous because over nearly 2 thousand years it has been used to justify Christian persecution of the Jews, culminating in the Shoah, the Nazi genocide of European Jews. By their fruits you shall know them, says Jesus of false prophets. And the fruits of those who tell this story is the murder of millions of men and women each made in the image of God, just like you and me – this story is an evil blasphemy.

It is better, surely, to reflect on what Jesus’s parable tells us about the nature of God.

It tells us of God’s generosity. The owner provided the tenants with all they could wish for in a productive vineyard. In the same way, God by his grace has given us this wonderful living planet to tend and care for, and to feed us.

It tells us about God’s trust in us as human beings. The owner of the vineyard did not supervise his tenants like a slave driver. He went away and left them with their task. In the same way God entrusts us with his work, and he gives us the freedom to do it however we think best.

It tells us of God’s patience and mercy. The owner did not respond with sudden vengeance when his first messengers are attacked, he sent others. He gave the tenants every chance to respond, even sending his son and heir. In the same way God bears with all our sinning and will forgive us, if we will only repent. We Christians are assured of this by Jesus, God’s only Son, the corner stone once rejected by the builders.

It tells us of God’s judgement. When the tenants carried out their deliberate policy of rebellion and disobedience, God eventually took the vineyard away and gave it to others. In the same way if we who are sinners continue to refuse God’s forgiveness and fail to repent, we become useless to God. In the end God’s stern judgement on us will be to give the job he made for us to someone else. And we will die of shame. Perish the thought!

Let me finish in prayer with a Gospel Collect:

Almighty God,

your Son Jesus was the stone rejected by the builders,

and, by your doing, he has been made the chief cornerstone:

grant that, by the power of his Spirit working in us,

we may become living stones

built up into your dwelling place,

a temple holy and acceptable to you;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Amen