Sunday’s gospel tells at least two stories, maybe three. The first story is about God and the vineyard. The gospel echoes the prophet Isaiah, who in Sunday’s first reading compares God’s relationship with the people of Israel to a farmer’s planting and caring for a vineyard. God’s caring has brought the people out of Egypt, given them the commandments, and helped them settle the land. Isaiah laments in his time that Israel’s leaders neglect the poor and make alliances with kingdoms that worship other gods.
At harvest time a second story emerges about tenants and an owner. It tells Jesus’ story in allegory. God is the owner of the vineyard. The son, the owner’s heir, is Jesus. The tenants are Jesus’ opponents who succeed in having him put to death. The owner’s servants are the prophets who have sought to hold king and priests faithful to their relationship with God.
The narrator part in the gospel sets the scene. Jesus’ audience is the temple officials, who challenge his authority for having cleansed the temple. The setting is the temple courtyards. In telling the parable Jesus aims to confront the officials indirectly.
When Jesus asks the chief priests and elders to respond to the parable, their judgment reveals that they think they own the vineyard. “Put the tenants to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to others,” they say. They put themselves in the place of an aggrieved owner who must deal with rebellious tenants.
However, the allegory makes God the owner of the vineyard, and puts the temple leaders in the tenants’ place. The parable calls for a reversal. The officials are the tenants who should change, believe in the owner’s son, and produce a fruitful harvest.
All three synoptic gospels include this parable with its allegory about Jesus and indictment of temple officials. Christians need to remember Jesus is a Jew, trying to reform his religion. He has both opponents and believers among the leaders. Christians today have no reason to blame the Jewish people for Jesus’ death. They are our ancestors in faith.
- What fruitful harvest do you expect from religious leaders today?
Economically in Jesus’ time, 95% of the people were poor peasants who worked hard to survive. Roman soldiers from the occupying army often received land as payment for their military service and kept peasants as tenants to cultivate and tend their vineyards.
Poor, overtaxed peasants might have reason to resent and resist giving a Roman owner a share of the harvest. But the parable has no hint of this political motive. These tenants simply want the whole harvest and the vineyard for themselves.
The chief priests and elders don’t identity as tenants whose work is to cultivate and care for the people. They see themselves as entitled owners. As readers, we have already learned in the gospel that Jesus is teaching and caring for people who are poor in the temple, the very place where these leaders should be serving God’s people.
- Who needs care in our churches today that we are not seeing and serving?
We humans are all tenants of Earth and like those in the parable, our basest instincts are to draw everything to ourselves. God has given us a precious vineyard/planet/home, teeming with life and extraordinary resources, but we have mistaken God’s gifts for our possessions. Our greed has put our precious planet in grave danger. Pope Francis suggests our throw-away society is turning Earth into a garbage dump.
Pope Francis insistently connects repairing Earth with sustaining people who live in poverty. We can’t do one without the other. The common good requires opting to lift up the poor and vulnerable. Concerns for ourselves must lead us to love one another rather than keep ourselves safe from tenants of earth living in poverty and vulnerable to destructive storms and rising sea levels. Wealthy industrial nations like the United States have an obligation to help poorer nations fund new technologies that will stop the carbon emissions (Laudato Si’ #156-158).
If there is hope for us, it is Jesus’ message writ large across his life and death: whatever happens, love will not leave. Significantly this parable doesn’t end with its allegory of Jesus’ death. Christian tradition attaches a resurrection image, a third story. Jesus is the stone once rejected that has become the cornerstone of a new community.
The gospel is quoting from Psalm 118.22 to interpret who Jesus is. He is God’s Son, the inheritor of the vineyard. A homonym, words that sound alike, connects the parable and the quotation. In Hebrew the word for son is ben, and the word for stone is eben. Jesus, the Son who was crucified just as the stone was rejected, becomes in his resurrection the cornerstone on which a new community arises.
- What reservoirs of goodness in us can God draw on as together we tend our beautiful and fragile communities of faith?