I despise this parable. I always have. Hate, violence, and murder. Images of incarceration and indentured servitude. These are indeed wicked tenants. But I’m not sure the vineyard owner isn’t a little bit wicked too. The fence, the watchtower, the going away and letting them fend for themselves. I find the parable deeply troubling.
And this is even before we talk about the potential anti-Semitism.
Wicked Tenants (Day 37 of A Simple Lent) | Wednesday
The parable is troubling. A man sets up a vineyard, gets some tenants to work it and goes away to a far off land. He sends a slave to collect his share of the produce and he is beaten and sent away with nothing.
The man sent a second slave and he was beaten, too.
The man sent a third. This one was murdered.
The man kept sending more and more slaves, and they were all murdered.
He has one person left to send: his own beloved son. They wouldn’t kill my son, would they?
Yes they would. They think without an heir, the vineyard would be ours.
So Jesus then asks the chief priests, scribes, elders, and people rhetorically:
What then will the owner of the vineyard do?
Then immediately answering his own question:
He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.
and quoting the Psalmist, he speaks of the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone.
Anyone else now thinking of Luke’s ending to the Triumphal Entry from Sunday and GOD raising up replacements from the stones?
Who Are the Wicked Tenants?
On the one hand, the parable seems really straightforward. Clearly in the beloved son he’s talking about himself. And these wicked tenants are the Temple leaders. The symbology is pretty straightforward. And given the context, this is how those leaders understood it.
This is Jesus’s response to the chief priests, scribes, and elders who confronted him about authority and he turned it around on them. We read about that yesterday.
Verse 12, cut off by the lectionary, reads:
When they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away.
The “they” is those chief priests, scribes, and elders who confronted him about authority. So these people heard this and saw themselves as the wicked tenants in the story.
But as time went on, thanks to harmonizing of gospels and separation of the proto-Christian community from the synagogues and the established Jewish community, a different sense of the tenants arose. That the wicked tenants were the Jewish people and the Christians were the replacement tenants.
This thinking is dangerous at best; anti-semitic at worst. And for many, there is no other way to read this parable. It is so straightforward, right?
A Wicked Parable
The trouble with this view of the parable is that it not only paints a troubling view of the Temple leaders, but of GOD, if we are, indeed, to read the vineyard owner as GOD.
We certainly want to when we see the foretelling of the Passion, with Jesus as the beloved son. It is really hard not to see that. I think that’s on purpose.
But I don’t see GOD as an absent vineyard owner with a bunch of slaves he cares so little about and sends constantly to their doom.
And the vineyard doesn’t sound like a paradise, a second Eden. It sounds much more like a prison or a work camp with its fences and a watchtower {Who is up there? Who is watching?}.
And lastly, why does the man send slaves to his own vineyard? To collect his share of the produce. Like a tax, I suppose. It doesn’t say how much his share is supposed to be, but perhaps it is significant.
If GOD is the vineyard owner, he is not loving and merciful. He is collecting his share, rather than expecting them to offer it. That GOD sounds like a distrustful paternalistic Big Brother.
A Both/And Parable
Nothing says that we must pick between these readings. Both can be true. It can be a story of a GOD who is so fed up with the Temple leaders that replacements will be found. It can also be a story which gives us an example of who GOD is not.
Both can be true at the same time.
But there is one more thing that gives me pause: the inheritance.
This piece always gets me in the gospels. Whenever someone refers to inheritance, it sticks out. And here, you have the wicked tenants contemplating the murder of the beloved son with the belief that with him out of the way, the vineyard would be theirs.
Who in their right mind would think that? As a writer, this sticks out like an infected thumb. Why would they think they would get the vineyard when the owner dies?
{And, simultaneously, if this is an analogy for GOD, who would suppose the Temple leaders would gain ownership of the Temple when GOD dies? That doesn’t fit.}
This is a strange motivation when we think about it. Why would they think they have standing to inherit? The only conclusion is that there is nobody else, and they are already working the land, so perhaps they would receive it through the courts.
But they would certainly expect vengeance from the owner, knowing he would not want such sadists to inherit his property. They should expect a spiteful response.
The best parables force us to confront truths we don’t want to face. They don’t deal simply in the obvious.
- In the Lost Parables, we see examples of extraordinary generosity and celebration over retrieving the lost at the expense of the safe.
- In the Good Samaritan, we see an act of generosity and mercy coming from the enemy.
- In the Parable of the Ten Pounds (we heard about on Sunday), GOD is certainly not the landowner as one of the slaves stands up to his injustice.
Here, the depiction of the vineyard as a sort of prison makes me feel some sympathy for the wicked tenants. I know I shouldn’t, but it makes me understand them better. Understand their distrust of the owner; understand why they might take to violence, for they may feel slaves themselves and this is their rebellion.
The Temple Leadership certainly thought this parable was against them. But I wonder the many ways it should keep causing us discomfort; how we should wrestle with our own assumptions; how, as we approach the end of Holy Week, we will face the darkness. With assurance of a vengeful GOD? Or with hope that even from the stones, GOD’s act of new creation can give new life to our world?
While not a simple parable, there is simplicity in knowing that when we brush away some of the certainty, the exploring of what Jesus might be leading us to see is an actual journey. And in some ways, a kind of destination. That Holy Week is a time of wrestling and unsettling that can lead us to a deeper, more trustworthy faith.
NOTE: the lectionary doesn’t cover the action of Wednesday of Holy Week: the anointing of Jesus. I encourage you to check out what I wrote last year. And, while you are at it, you might want to read why I think that is a huge mistake.
[For further reflection, read last year’s meditation for Wednesday of Holy Week!]
Daily Office Readings
Or visit the alternative Daily Office I often use.
Homework
This week’s homework is to simply be present in prayer, giving this week to GOD.
[No worksheet this week!]
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