Read Carefully

Readings: GN 37:3-4, 12-13A, 17B-28A; MT 21:33-43, 45-46

I wrote about this a few years back and want to return to it again because I think it is critically important part of what we need to keep reflecting on – especially during Lent when we are encouraged to think about “repenting”. 

In the gospel Jesus tells a parable to the Pharisees about a landowner who sends messengers back to the vineyard and each gets beaten and killed by the workers.  Finally, the landowner sends his son – whom the tenants beat and kill as well.  Jesus goes on to say that the landowner will then take the vineyard back, kill all of the occupants and give it to more deserving people.  The Pharisees “recognize” that the story is somehow about them and grow angry.

Ask any lawyer, words matter, and one of the more challenging aspects of this passage is that Jesus said that this was a parable.  So what?  Well most of us were taught to read this story as an allegory.  You might be saying, “OK, who cares?”  Here’s the difference.

Remember, an allegory is a story where certain parts of the story are meant to be symbols or representations for something else.  So most of us were taught to read this story as: The landowner is God, the “tenants” are the Jews, the messengers are the prophets and Jesus.   The tenants kill the messengers and, ultimately, the landowner’s son and the landowner kills them all and starts over with new people (the Gentiles).  

Pretty familiar, right?  Many biblical interpreters have sat around a table saying, “Sounds good to me!” and have pretty much overlooked the overt violence of the landowner in this story and the relatively blatant anti-Semitic overtones.  

Is this the interpretation that Jesus intended? Was the God of Jesus’ understanding the kind of God who would wipe out everyone and hand the vineyard over to someone else?  Is there anything else that could be going on here?

Jesus said that this was a parable.  While a parable is like an allegory, oftentimes a parable is trying to reveal a truth that  is not always meant to be obvious.  And Jesus often used parables to upend common understandings and reveal something else about the world.

From what I have read, there are numerous modern biblical interpreters who are questioning an allegorical reading of this passage – saying that it misses what Jesus was trying to tell his hearers and “spiritualizes” a very powerful teaching on economics and power.

These interpreters reflect that a landowner like the one mentioned in the story would be a member of the wealthy elite.  Why?  Because only a wealthy person could “afford” to start a vineyard (which takes 4 – 5 years of work to bear ANY fruit) and then go on a journey.  Furthermore, vineyards were often bought by wealthy folks who displaced the people working small farms who lived there before the land was bought (the landlord just puts a hedge around things and calls this his own property). Thus when the land was “bought”, the people who lived there suddenly became tenants who now had to pay rent to live on the land they had been living on.  And then the landlord goes on a trip!

The messengers who come to collect for the absentee landlord would be the hired hands who come to take away what little the tenants and their families have. And the “police forces” of the day would help to enforce the “rights” of the owner to do with his land as he wished. And then the landlord would “pass on” his property to his childen. 

Do you see how this entirely changes the meaning of the story and where we might be located in it? This story now has echoes of the theft of land from indigenous communities and the destruction of historically Black communities to make way for white communities.

With this new perspective, we might glimpse underlying justice issues that are not visible through an allegorical reading.  New questions might emerge for us related to how the landowner came to possess the land and question if anyone was dispossessed in the process.  We might interpret the actions of the tenants differently when we consider that the messengers were being sent to collect payment from them.  We might hear the tenants’ dream of inheriting the land (back) differently if the son of the landowner was no longer alive.  And we might view the landowner’s violent actions differently as he “cleaned house” and wanted new tenants who would do as he wanted.

If we read the parable this way, it might beg the questions, “So where is God in this parable?  Where are we in this story?  Why would Jesus tell a story like this? And why would he tell it to the Pharisees and leaders?  What would make them angry in hearing a story like this?”

William Herzog, a former professor at Colgate Rochester Crozier Divinity School in Rochester, wrote a groundbreaking book in the 1990’s called Parables as Subversive Speech.  His contention was that the parables were meant to subvert systems of oppression and reveal underlying dynamics of power.  If we are reading the parables of Jesus, he says, and do not have our worldview challenged in some way, we’re probably missing something essential.

It’s very likely that we will never know what, exactly, Jesus was trying to teach in this story.  But it is also likely that we might need to unlearn a lot of what we thought we knew about scripture and about Jesus if we’re going to be more attentive disciples.  

Just spend a few minutes today reflecting on what an alternative reading of this parable might mean for you.