Thomas Kleinert
In the town where I grew up, the hillsides facing west and south were covered with vineyards, and one of the churches I served on the Swiss border was surrounded by them. Vineyard is a word that takes me home. I see hills with rows of vines, bathed by the sun. I remember the summer silence between the rows, where all you can hear is the buzz of bees and bugs. I remember seeing workers in the winter, pruning back last year’s branches; workers in the spring, tying the tender, new growth to support wires; workers in the summer, removing some of the grape clusters to direct the vine’s nutrients to the remaining ones; and I remember workers in the fall, carrying huge buckets on their backs and harvesting the fruit of their labor, and of the sun and the rain and the soil and the generous grace of God.
A vineyard is not just another field where this year you grow soybeans, and next year you grow corn, and the year after you switch to alfalfa. Vines can live for over a hundred years, and while the yield begins to decline after twenty years, the character of the grapes doesn’t. A vineyard isn’t a patch of dirt that could easily be used otherwise; it is a planting intended to stay and bear fruit.
Vineyard is a much more common metaphor in scripture than, say, barley field. I wonder if it is because the true fruit of a vineyard aren’t grapes, but wine - wine to gladden the human heart.[1] Fields are for daily bread, but a vineyard is for joy, shared joy.
When you are at a wedding reception, you expect the best man to rise at some point and give a toast, and after you’ve been to a couple of weddings, you kinda know what you may look forward to when he gets up. Likewise, in ancient Israel when a man stood and said, “Let me sing for my friend a love song about his vineyard!” everybody knew that it would be a song about the groom and his bride. Any song that begins, My friend had a vineyard on a very fertile hill, holds great promise. Isaiah’s song tells of hard work and careful preparation, and in the listeners’ minds images emerge of a young man who showers his bride with love and attention, who does just about anything anyone could imagine to please her. But suddenly the music ends and the song is over. The vineyard didn’t yield sweet grapes but only sour little things. Not much of a love story – and what follows sounds terrifying.
And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. Isaiah didn’t sing a love song about a friend of his and his bride, he spoke in a parable about God and God’s people Israel. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? Was it wrong to expect a harvest of joy? Well, if not, what went wrong?
God came looking for justice, but instead found bloodshed; for righteousness, but instead heard cries of distress. In the Hebrew this is a vivid pun: God came looking for mishpat, and instead found mispach; for tsedaqah, but there was only tse’aqah. Change just one letter, and you get something very different. Change just one letter and village turns into pillage, laughter into slaughter; a friend into a fiend. God came looking for justice and righteousness, but found only bloodshed and the cries of the oppressed. There was no harvest of shared joy, and here the prophet’s song turns from themes of loving care to violent rage:
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a wasteland;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns.
Jesus told the temple leaders in Jerusalem a parable about a landowner who carefully planted a vineyard, and they knew right away he was riffing on a theme from Isaiah. They heard him add tenants to the familiar metaphor of the vineyard, wicked tenants who abused and killed the slaves sent by the landowner to collect the expected fruit, but there was only bloodshed. They noticed the not so subtle allusion to Israel’s leaders not only refusing to heed the warnings of the prophets and repent, but silencing them. Jesus told the temple leaders in Jerusalem this parable on Tuesday, three days before he would be executed.
The story becomes painfully transparent for Matthew’s readers. Having killed the landowner’s slaves, the tenants, dreaming of taking possession of the vineyard, killed the landowner’s son. The story ends with Jesus asking, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” And the chief priests and elders jumped right in: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
Those were their words, not his. It was their way of making right what had gone terribly wrong, not his. And Jesus didn’t say, “You are the wretches, and you have judged yourselves.”[2]
When Matthew’s community told this Jesus story, the fledgling Christian community was beginning to separate from other Jewish groups. In the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., followers of Jesus and other Jewish groups were trying to make sense of the traumatic experience. Matthew’s community and others saw the violent devastation as divine punishment for the temple leadership’s role in Jesus’ death – and that perspective colored how the stories of Jesus’ conflict with the leaders were told. Some of the scenes, including this one, sound like the narrator is not only talking about Jesus’ arguments with the chief priests and elders, but about the tensions between Matthew’s own small Christian community and the Pharisees who were also seeking to rebuild Jewish life after the destruction of the temple. They were in the process of separating, and we don’t tell our best stories about each other when we are going through a separation.
Matthew has Jesus tell the chief priests and Pharisees, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” Matthew wants his small community, made up of Jews and a few Gentiles who followed the teachings of Jesus, to recognize themselves as the “people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” The statement was an affirming and empowering one for a community under pressure and in conflict with other groups over how to live faithfully as God’s people. The tenants of the vineyard, the Jerusalem leadership, had failed to cultivate justice and righteousness, and now it would be the small band of Jesus-followers’ turn to bear fruit in righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees.[3]
At the time when Matthew’s gospel was taught, composed and written down, this thought was lifting up the lowly, but when the Christian movement went from underdog to most-favored-cult status in the Roman Empire, these words took on a very different flavor. Now they began to be heard as saying, “The kingdom of God has been taken away from the Jews and given to the church.” And the embrace of the idea that the church had replaced Israel as the chosen people of God, led to centuries of violence against Jews, all the way to the gates of the Nazi extermination camps and the harvest of terror, death and ashes. And it didn’t end there. The spirit of supersessionism has shaped European cultures in deep ways over centuries, contributing to ideologies of chosenness and supremacy that poison our life together to this day.
We must read the texts that are sacred to us very, very carefully. We must read them in the Spirit of Jesus. Let’s take another look at the owner of the vineyard. We’re not expected to see him as just another agricultural investor who happens to behave in very peculiar ways. We’re meant to see God, just as in Isaiah’s song of the vineyard. God who sent prophets so God’s people would repent, and our life together would be shaped by justice and righteousness. The owner doesn’t say much in this story; his only line is, “They will respect my son.”
But the tenants didn’t — we didn’t. For as long as we can remember, human beings have looked for ways not to be God’ tenants with sacred responsibilities toward the land, its owner, and toward each other. We’d rather be the owners ourselves. We’re the children of Adam and Eve, created to till and keep the garden, but we’d rather make the whole place our own.
The story ends with the death of the son, the son who asks us who have heard him live and tell it, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” Again, we’re not meant to stay inside the story, because if we did, we’d have to ask, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will those tenants do to him? Why would he expect to be treated with any more respect than the people he sent, including his son?”
In our own imagination, we are quick to envision an ending following the logic of violent retribution, but God is free to write a different ending to the story. We believe and affirm that God has done so by raising Jesus from the dead. We believe and affirm that God’s response to our violence is not more violence, overwhelming violence to end all violence like the war to end all wars. We believe and affirm that God’s response to our violent rejection is life: life in the distinct shape of Jesus. Life in the shape of a community that embraces God’s vision of justice and righteousness, rejecting any visions of supremacy and domination. We believe and affirm that Jesus is Lord, and so we give thanks and repent. And we begin to follow again, humbly and with courage, for the sake of life, the shared joy of life in God’s reign.
[1] Psalm 104:15
[2] See Nathan and David 2 Samuel 12
[3] Matthew 5:20