We are God’s tenants, guests, and stewards.
(Is 5:1-7 and Mt 21:33-43)
Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people: “Hear another parable.” St. Matthew seems to be on a roll! Today’s parable of the “Wicked Tenants” is the second of three parables directed to the chief priest and elders. Preceding it is the parable of the two sons, which we heard last Sunday and which confronted the Jewish leaders with their lack of response to John the Baptist, a failure that is compounded by a subsequent lack of faith in Jesus. That parable issued a summons to change their minds and believe in Jesus before it is too late. The third parable, which we will hear next Sunday, is about a king who gives a wedding feast for his son, but the invited guests repeatedly ignore the invitation and refuse to come, and mistreat and even kill the messengers. In the end, the king’s servants are told to go out into the streets and gather everyone they find, bad and good alike, to be guests at the wedding feast.
But let’s now turn to this morning’s parable. It echoes the passage from Isaiah, which we heard in the First Reading. Both texts relate the same actions of the vine grower: he plants, digs a winepress, and builds a tower. There is the same narrative buildup to the climactic expectation of enjoyment of the produce and the same disappointment that such does not materialize. That provokes the same question posed by the owner: “What will he do?” (The $64,000 question!)
We notice that there is a critical difference in the ending of Matthew’s parable as compared to that of Isaiah 5. In Isaiah, the vine grower is God, the Lord of hosts, who is disappointed with the yield of wild/sour grapes from his carefully cultivated vine, Israel. He announces its fate: let it be destroyed. Matthew, however, does not simply repeat the familiar story but offers a new version in which not the vineyard but the tenants are destroyed. The vineyard remains and is entrusted to others.
Lest we who listen with modern ears be naïve about what is really going on in this parable, it is important that we not regard it as simply an exaggerated story about greedy and murderous tenants. It is actually a familiar story from the world of Jesus. It reflects well the situation of unrest that existed in Galilee at the time and continued to intensify up to the first Jewish revolt against Rome in the years 66-70. The economic situation for many was quite precarious. Famine, lack of rain, overpopulation, and heavy taxes could put a struggling farmer over the brink. In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, it is estimated that somewhere between one- half and two-thirds of a farmer’s income went to taxes that included Roman tribute, payment to Herod and the procurators, and land rent to the large landowners. Land remained all important. Consequently, a peasant would go to any length to retain or regain its ownership. Thus, the murderous hostility of the laborers toward an absentee landlord is a true-to-life detail of first-century Palestine. Of course, several elements in the parable are not realistic and carry an allegorical meaning, serving Matthew’s ever-present intent to interpret the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of the Scriptures. (Rich material there for many homilies....) But what I’d like to focus on this morning, is only the character of the owner of the vineyard and that of his tenants.
1) The character of the owner of the vineyard: Because the owner is a figure representing God, the parable causes the hearer to reflect on what kind of person sends messengers, one after the other, including his own son, each of them pleading with the tenants to come to their senses and honor their agreement with him. His persistence is certainly striking; he just doesn’t let up in trying to get his share of the produce. However, I don’t think Matthew is presenting here an image of God who is impervious to the suffering of the servants he sent, or viciously punishing the wicked tenants who mistreat and kill them. Rather, I think he is holding up to us the pathos of God, who so desires to draw all into divine mercy that he sends
messenger after messenger, even his beloved son, and longs for a positive response to invitation after invitation. Of course, in order to collect his due, he could have sent the police (as we would today) or recruited his own army of thugs. He could have returned violence for violence, but he did not. He is persistent—but in a nearly gracious way.
Nonetheless, the eschatological note of the parable makes it clear that there does come a time when a fruitful response needs to be evident; we cannot continue to spurn the offer indefinitely. And so, the choice that faces us today, as well as the tenants in the parable (and the chief priests and elders in Jesus’ time whom the tenants represent), is this: will we reject God’s offer and incur self-condemnation, or will we recognize God’s invitation even in “the stone rejected by the builders that became the cornerstone”? It is noteworthy that by quoting from Ps.118 and Daniel 2 here, Jesus interprets his own story: the stone which the builders rejected and the son are the same. Commentators point out that in Hebrew the letters of the word for “stone” (eben) are the same as in the word for “son” (ben) but with one letter added.
2) What about the character of the tenants? This is revealed by one key detail of the story: namely, what is at issue throughout is not “ownership” but “stewardship.” “Stewardship” has become something of a buzzword in our day: stewardship of natural resources and the earth we share as home; stewardship of a monastic patrimony or legacy that is to be passed on to future generations; stewardship of our personal health and talents, etc.
It seems that in this story about divine tenants, somewhere along the way someone misplaced the tenant’s agreement and wrote up a deed instead. Regardless of the economic circumstances in Palestine at the time, the tenants were essentially the owner’s guests, entrusted with the job of supervising and caring for the vineyard. What’s more, the owner’s consistently nonviolent response was a way of reminding them that being guests placed them in relationship with a host who placed them in relationship with each other. Those relationships could be based on gratitude, not on competition, so that everything necessary for life could be shared and there would no longer be too little for some because others had too much. What was true for them is also true for us.
The Good News is that, as guests, they had free access to far more than they ever could have earned for themselves! Instead of a vineyard full of one-acre tracts divided by barbed wire, they had acres and acres at their disposal—not to own but to use and enjoy—through the generosity of the owner. All he asked was that they take care of it and that they give him a portion of what they produced, not because he needed it— after all, he probably turned right around and gave it away himself—but because they needed it. They needed to give in order to remember who they were: namely, grateful guests who received their lives into their hands like the gifts they are, and who returned the favor by giving themselves away to others.
Today’s Gospel reminds us that we are God’s guests in the “vineyard” of this world—welcome on this earth and welcome to it so long as we remember whose it is and how it is to be used. We can love it as our own. We can care for it by hand and take deep pleasure in the harvest. But what we may not do is spurn the owner and persecute his messengers, because to do that is to court our own destruction. To do that is to forget who we are and where we came from. We are God’s guests, his stewards—we tend the earth and its riches, and our personal lives with all their graces, on someone else’s behalf. We do not live for ourselves but for Another/others. We are expected to represent God’s interests, being as generous with each other as God is with us. We are not owners. We were never meant to be. That is not the way of the Reign of God.