In her book, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, the late author Rachel Held Evans compared fundamentalist Christian and Jewish experiences of reading the Bible. She wrote: “While Christians tend to turn to Scripture to end a conversation, Jews turn to scripture to start [one.]” Nowhere is this more true than in the parables of Jesus, and nowhere else is it more risky. It is all too easy to pick the low-hanging fruit of meaning and to ignore the challenge of deeper understanding of Jesus’ words. For example, the tendency of interpreters of the Parable of the Wicked Tenants has been to see Jesus as condemning the chief priests and Pharisees for their destructive stewardship of Israel; declaring that this would result in their being severed from the Kingdom of God and replaced by the followers of Jesus. We can see how problematic this is. Picking and digesting the poisonous low-hanging fruit of anti-Pharisee interpretation, as I have said before, has led the world down a dangerous anti-Semitic path. People today instantly think, “hypocrite” when a Pharisee is mentioned, but in Jesus’ day Pharisees were understood as a sect who was deeply faithful to strict Covenant practice. So, Pharisees may have been known as serious opponents of Jesus, but they were not demonized as hypocrites—not until after the time of Jesus. Thus, it is possible to engage the tension between Jesus and the Temple authorities without wholesale condemnation of the Jewish faith. It is possible to reject the language of severing and replacement and still read the parable faithfully. 

The Parable of the Wicked Tenants is one of a number of parables involving vineyards in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus tells three of them as he comes to Jerusalem and encounters intense opposition. His foes in the religious authorities are on high alert, and his message of the inbreaking Kingdom increases in urgency as he describes what it means to be part of the Dream of God. In his parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard that we heard a couple of weeks ago Jesus speaks of radical generosity. In the parable of the Man with Two Sons that we heard last week Jesus shocked his audience with the news that sinners and outsiders who repent and heed God’s call will be welcome in the Kingdom. And today we encounter a tale of violence, conviction, and alienation from the Kingdom; an interpretive minefield. 

Navigating this minefield is a challenge best met by reading with the right lens. There is Matthew’s early Christian lens, which I spoke of the last time I preached on this passage three years ago. Matthew’s lens was a product of intense conflict between the Jewish community and the Jewish followers of Jesus (not yet called Christians) in the period after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus’ teachings often reflected, not only the trauma of defeat by the Romans, but also Matthew’s anger against those who severed the followers of Jesus from the synagogue. It was like a really nasty divorce. So, it is not surprising that we would see Matthew’s Jesus speaking so accusingly to the Pharisees, because that is how Matthew felt about them.

But that’s not all that is going on here. The lens matters. 

What if we use Jesus’ lens? Jesus’ audience would have recognized that the Parable of the Wicked Tenants was based upon “The Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard” from Isaiah. It, like today’s story, is an example of a juridical parable—one in which the audience is manipulated into convicting themselves of the wrongdoing described in the story:

…My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.
² He dug it and cleared it of stones
    and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it
    and hewed out a wine vat in it;

Sound familiar?

he expected it to yield grapes,
    but it yielded rotten grapes.

³ And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
    and people of Judah,
judge between me
    and my vineyard.

Isaiah goes on to describe in vivid detail how God will destroy the vineyard. He concludes by convicting his audience of being the ones who have produced rotten fruit:

⁷ For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
    is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
    are his cherished garden;
he expected justice
    but saw bloodshed;
righteousness
    but heard a cry!

Isaiah’s lens on Israel is the lens of a prophet. Jesus, echoing Isaiah’s parable, is also using a prophet’s lens. And that is how we engage the tension of Jesus’ encounter with the Temple authorities.

The prophetic lens is one of loving critique from the outer edges of the inside of an institution—not completely absorbed by the inner circle, but not on the margins either. A prophet is in a position to have a clear view of what is happening from within the institution and is able to see it going off course. The prophet calls it to return to the right path or face dire consequences, which is where prophets get the reputation as future-tellers. But the most important aspect of the prophetic vocation is the urgent call to repentance and change. In the case of Isaiah, it was the call for Israel to return to faithfulness to God’s Covenant.

Jesus channels the prophetic voice of Isaiah in today’s parable, calling the Jewish people—his people, into their Covenant identity of love of God and neighbor. He urgently reminds them of their identity as those who have been called to produce the fruits of justice and righteousness since the moment Moses came down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments. 

The temptation will always be to pick the low-hanging fruit of allegorical interpretation that Matthew’s lens offers–to see this as a wholesale condemnation of the Jewish faith, severing them from the Kingdom because they rejected Jesus as Messiah. But how is that helpful to us today? We will benefit more from this parable if we focus on the stewardship of our own vineyard rather than an allegory that has done so much violence to the Jewish household throughout history. 

So how does Jesus’ lens and his prophetic call to produce the fruits of the Dream of God convict us and call us into better care of our vineyard? This Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day weekend gives us plenty to ponder in that regard. Just the existence of tension around the naming of the day speaks volumes, doesn’t it? Our country was founded on the one hand by explorers and seekers of opportunity and freedom who built it into a powerful and creative force with a history of much to be proud of. Yet it is also a land claimed according to a Doctrine of Discovery that encouraged Christian explorers to claim territory uninhabited by Christians as “discovered” in the name of their sovereign, in this case Ferdinand and Isabella. Which resulted in the genocide of most the Indigenous people who were here first. And we have doubled down by treating this this land—this vineyard–not as a mother who nurtures us with nature’s bounty, but as a resource to be exploited for gain and profit, poisoning our air, land, and water. It is a legacy of violence worthy of Matthew’s parable. 

So, here we are in the tension of this moment in this vineyard with its complex history. We have on the one hand a legacy of courage, imagination, and creativity, which we celebrate. We have on the other hand a legacy of genocide, slavery, environmental degradation and complacency that threaten our future. The many and varied prophetic voices of those who call us to the fruits of justice, healing, and sustainability are calling to us from the very center of that tension, out of love for who we still can be. And that’s the most crucial point: If they didn’t have hope, they wouldn’t bother.

Let the conversation begin.