It is a difficult parable for a world in which violence, injustice and the cries of those who suffer are never very far away.
The first thing I want to say about it is something many will have heard me say before. It is a drum I keep banging because I think it is important. When reading parables, I am wary of assigning fixed roles to every character; this person is God, this person is Jesus, these people are the Jews, these people are the Gentiles.
Sometimes there are loose connections, but not absolute parallels or roles. For instance, Matthew clearly wants us to see something of Jesus in the rejected son, and by the end of the passage the chief priests and Pharisees realize that Jesus is speaking about them.
But once we turn a parable into a rigid allegory, every characteristic of every character can become something we feel obliged to defend. And sometimes that leaves us defending things that really should disturb us.
The story begins with a landowner who plants a vineyard, puts a fence around it, digs a winepress and builds a watchtower. Then the vineyard is leased to tenants and the owner leaves.
This was not an unimaginable arrangement. Absentee landowners were a feature of life within the Roman Empire. Someone with sufficient wealth could own land while tenants actually worked it, returning a proportion of the produce to the owner.
Strangely, it is not completely unlike some contemporary forms of business. Investors own companies they may never visit. Managers oversee them. Workers produce the goods or services. Profits travel upwards through the hierarchy.
Sometimes everyone benefits. Sometimes enormous profits are made while those doing the hardest work receive the smallest share.
The parable does not tell us that this particular landowner was exploitative. But reading against the grain makes me curious about the lives of the tenants. Was this some kind of uprising from the tenants? Were they protesting their working conditions or their payment?
When harvest time arrives, the landowner sends enslaved people to collect the produce. The tenants seize them. One is beaten, another killed and another stoned. It raises important questions to muse on.
The text does not answer many of my questions. Were the tenants simply greedy? Were they dishonest? Were they angry? Were they struggling to feed their families? Did they believe the division of the harvest was unjust? Was the landowner demanding more than had originally been agreed?
Or had resentment simply been allowed to grow until people who once felt powerless discovered that violence gave them a terrifying kind of power?
And why turn their violence against the enslaved people who have been sent to collect the produce? They seem to have the least power of anyone in the story. They are caught between the demands of the landowner and the anger of the tenants. Where was the tenants’ compassion for those who were even worse off than themselves?
Another group is sent. The same thing happens. The previous violence was not just a one off but a sustained plan.
Finally, the landowner sends his son, thinking, “They will respect my son.” (37)
The tenants do not. They seize him, throw him out of the vineyard and kill him.
Then Jesus asks a fascinating question, “What will the landowner do to those tenants?” (40)
Important to note, it is those listening to the parable who provide the violent ending. They say that the landowner will put the tenants to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to someone else. Violence answered by violence. Death answered by death.
And that is precisely why I resist assigning roles. I would become uneasy with simply saying that the landowner is God. If I do that, I am left with a God embedded in a hierarchical system involving slavery, and a God whose final response to violence is greater violence.
Scripture contains many different images of God, some tender and compassionate and others deeply disturbing, but I do not want to justify violence merely because it appears within a parable.
There is another danger here as well. Historically, this has often been interpreted that the tenants were the Jewish people, the enslaved messengers as the Hebrew prophets, the son as Jesus and the new tenants as the Christian church.
That interpretation has contributed to the terrible idea that Christianity replaced Judaism because the Jewish people rejected and killed Jesus. I cannot accept that reading. Jesus was Jewish. His followers were Jewish. His opponents within this passage were Jewish. This is an argument taking place within Judaism, not Christianity standing outside Judaism condemning it.
Matthew even tells us specifically that the chief priests and Pharisees realized Jesus was speaking about them. The criticism is directed towards particular leaders and their stewardship, not towards an entire people.
And there is another piece of the puzzle which I think is enormously important. The parable deliberately echoes Isaiah 5, which is also one of today’s lectionary readings. Isaiah describes someone planting a vineyard, clearing the land, planting vines, building a watchtower and digging a winepress. The similarities are impossible to miss. Isaiah tells us that the vineyard did not produce good fruit and thus became waste, barren and overgrown. Then Isaiah says the owner hoped the vineyard would produce justice and righteousness but instead got bloodshed and a cry of suffering. (5:7)
Perhaps, this changes the way I read the parable. Rather than who is the parable about I could read it as what sort of fruit is the vineyard producing?
This causes me to read the parable from the viewpoint of everyone caught within it.
From the tenants’ point of view, I can imagine injustice, exploitation, resentment and anger which reaches the terrible point at which anger becomes violence and victims create new victims.
From the landowner’s point of view, I can imagine betrayal, loss, anger and grief and the temptation to answer violence with still greater violence.
From the viewpoint of the enslaved messengers, I can imagine people trapped within a system over which they have little control, sent into danger by someone else and killed because of a conflict that is not of their making.
And from the son’s point of view, I can imagine someone sent into an increasingly dangerous situation because a parent believes that somehow his presence will solve it.
There are no winners. That may be what strikes me most strongly about this parable today. Everyone loses. The enslaved people lose their lives. The son loses his life. The tenants lose the vineyard and, according to the ending imagined by Jesus’ listeners, their lives. The landowner loses servants, harvest and child.
Violence has solved absolutely nothing. Perhaps I don’t need to make this disturbing parable comfortable. Perhaps I don’t need to find a neat interpretation in which the good people win, and the bad people are punished.
Perhaps its discomfort is precisely the point of the parable. Centuries later, the situation may not be much different There are still injustices that need confronting. There are still systems that need changing. There are still voices raised to say that things cannot continue as they are.
Yet the discomfort of the parable is that violence is a solution. The challenge is to seek the change without reproducing the violence.
