Proper 22A
Matthew 21:33-46
October 2, 2011

How's That Workin' For Ya So Far?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Once again we have a parable of Jesus and, once again, I have some serious reservations about its traditional interpretation. We have a long-standing habit of reading parables as allegories, reading them with the assumption that the people and things in the story refer to other things. The most common habit is to assume that a figure with a great deal of power, especially a male figure with a great deal of power, must symbolize God.

So when we come to the parable that is often called the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, we assume that the landowner in the story stands for God. And we read the rest of the story with that idea in mind. Our curriculum, for example, reads the landowner as God, the vineyard as God’s people Israel, and the tenants as religious leaders—the Pharisees and priests—who prevent the landowner (God) from receiving a full harvest.

There are some gaps in this reading. What or who, for example, are the grapes? What are the fence, the wine press, and the watchtower that the landowner had built? What is the wine that is produced from the grapes? Of course, we can make up what is lacking in this reading and supply answers to my questions. I’ll leave that as an exercise in the imagination.

As I have done before and will do again, I offer a different way of reading this parable. Maybe you’ll find it persuasive. Maybe you’ll find it unconvincing and prefer some version of the traditional reading. Maybe you’ll be confused and find yourself trying to decide. Whatever happens, you’ll be wrestling with the text and trying to decide what it means and that, as far as I’m concerned, is a good thing. Besides, it’s fun. So let’s have some fun with this story.

Let’s start by setting aside the traditional reading and seeing what we can see that the traditional reading hides. What do we see? We see the landowner, the vineyard he has created, his tenant farmers and their troubled relationship. In other words we see something real that Jesus’ hearers could actually have seen in their own social world.

We know this landowner. He’s a frequent flyer in Jesus’ parables. He is an oikodespotês, the absolute master of a household. This was not a household like we might imagine—a single-family dwelling where a nuclear family lives. A household was made up of a man, his wife, (or occasionally a widow), their children, their domestic slaves, the clients for whom the master was the patron, their servants, and their agricultural slaves. A household was a very large enterprise, and the oikodespotês was its master. He was its master in rather absolute terms. He had enormous power over his wife, even more over his children and unlimited power over his slaves. The oikodespotês was a wealthy man who controlled a great deal of property and held enormous power over many people. We might call him a landlord, if we took seriously enough the fact that he was a landlord.

The “lord of the land” plants the vineyard. He places a wall around it for its protection. He digs a trough for pressing the grapes. He builds a watchtower. He is clearly going into the wine business and he’s starting from scratch. Well, not actually from scratch. The land wasn’t sitting idle when he began. There were crops being grown, livestock being raised. And there were people living on the land, peasants who owned small plots that produced most of what they needed for their families.

In Jesus’ day, in Roman Palestine, the way that land was being used was changing. Small-scale peasant agricultural was giving way to large farms. Subsistence crops like barley and wheat and animal husbandry in sheep or goats were giving way to cash crops produced for export to the cities of the Roman Empire. The economy of Roman Palestine was becoming monetized—payments for taxes and fees that before would have been made with a share of what was produced now had to be made in cash. And there was not enough cash. Peasants found themselves owing more than they could produce. Loans that could not be repaid resulted in the small plots of peasant farmers being bought up by wealthy landowners like the one in the story.

He was not about to waste his time and investment raising something so unprofitable as food. He wanted a cash crop. So he built a vineyard on land that had been growing barley or wheat. He wasn’t like some of the folks near here who decide they’d like to go into the wine business. He cared nothing for the land, for the vines, for the grapes or even for the wine. What mattered was the money.

So, the small plots have been put together. The vines have been planted. The wall or fence around the vineyard has been installed, the wine press dug, and the watchtower built. The landlord had no interest in actually living on his land. He wanted to be in a city and there were none of any real consequence around. What he needed were some people who could manage his vineyard, people who knew a little something at least about farming. Where would he get some people like that? and how would he motivate them? The obvious answer is to lease the vineyard for a share of the harvest to ex-peasants. They may even have been the very same peasants whose land it used to be. So the arrangement is: loan the peasants money so they can pay their taxes and fees, foreclose on them when they can’t repay the loans, change the land over to a cash crop, and lease the land back to its former owners.

Now, in some ways we can see how this would have been better for the peasants than simply being thrown off their land.

In the story of my ancestral people there is a very dark episode, when the Scottish highland lairds discovered that more money could be squeezed out of the hills raising sheep for their wool than by raising cattle for their beef. Common grazing lands were seized by the lairds. Clansfolk who by long-standing custom had been under their laird’s protection were instead evicted by him from their blackhouses and their little farm plots. At bayonet point they were turned out to fend for themselves, their houses burned, their livestock killed. Some were killed outright. Thousands died from exposure or starvation. Tens of thousands fled to the cities of the south or to the British colonies in the New World. The episode is called the Highland Clearances and the highlands have never recovered.

The peasants of Roman Palestine fared a little better than that. Some of them became tenants on land their families had owned. But we can also understand their shame and their anger. We can understand if, just below the surface, there was a deep-seated resentment and simmering rage. We can understand, too, if the resentment and rage gave birth to dreams of recovery and of revenge. We can imagine that those dreams might have connected with the dream of a messiah, an anointed one, who would come to deliver God’s people from Roman rule and all that it had come to mean.

When this kind of ideas are in the air, it begins to feel as if the whole world is dry tinder, just waiting for any spark to set off the fire that destroys an old world and opens the way for a new. It begins to feel as if all it would take is one act of rebellion and revolution would blossom everywhere, that if one person would dare to strike, God would intervene and God’s salvation would be revealed.

There were people who were preaching this, but Jesus was not one of them. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that non-violence was a core part of Jesus’ message. That didn’t mean non-resistance to oppression, but it did mean that resistance would have to be non-violent resistance.

I think that Jesus told this parable as part of his message of non-violent resistance. It goes something like this: granted that the experience of peasants in Roman Palestine was awful. They were being treated unjustly; their oppression was an insult to the glory of God, as oppression always is. Salvation in any meaningful sense of the word would have to include a change in how the economy worked. It would have to include political changes, too. Of that, for Jesus and for his hearers, there was no question. That’s what I think.

The question was, “How?” Maybe the natural reaction was violence. Rage tends to move toward violence. But that raised questions. It is permitted to use violence to end oppression? Doesn’t violence end up making victims of the innocent? And even if you could avoid shedding innocent blood, does it really bring the change that we’re looking for if the weak and the powerful change places? Can vengeance ever be justice? That’s one set of questions, a set that questions the ethics of violence.

But there is another question, a question that is seldom asked, let alone answered: Does violence work?

I remember listening to an interview with a man who was supposed to know a lot about how to fight insurgents. The interviewer was asking him whether it was worthwhile to seek some kind of negotiated peace with some elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The man answered that you could try negotiations but history had shown that sooner or later you would have to use military force. I do have an opinion about the merits of that answer, but I’m certainly no expert either about counter-insurgency or about Afghanistan, so I’ll keep it to myself. What struck me first of all was the structure of the answer and the fact that you could move the terms around and it would make equal sense. He said that you could try negotiations but sooner or later you were going to have to use military force. He could just as easily have said that you could try military force but sooner or later you were going to have to negotiate. The second thing that struck me was that military force was the default position. Anything else would be considered risky, untried and dangerous.

Now it’s obvious to me that people have a wide range of opinions on the use of violence as a problem solving strategy. I respect that and I find that there almost always a story behind the stance that each person has decided to take. If you’d like to talk about your stance, I promise to respect your story and I hope for the same from you. I’m not out to change your mind, at least not by a frontal assault.

What I’d like to do is to direct our attention back to the parable that Jesus is telling. Jesus’ parables work by throwing a story alongside the social reality that people know. Somewhere along the line the story and the reality collide and that collision is the point of using parables to teach. This is a story about people who are under the heel of an oppressive regime. In the story they decide to respond with violence to their situation and specifically to the agents of their absentee landlord who come for his share of the harvest. This is understandable, if not acceptable.

But then things get really weird. The landlord comes up with the idea that these tenants who have killed his agents will respect his son. Does he not understand that they don’t like him?

Our descent into the bizarre continues in the next move when the tenants get the harebrained notion that, if they kill the landlord’s son, somehow the vineyard will become theirs by legal right. “Hey, that’s the heir. Let’s kill him and we’ll get the inheritance!” How stupid could they be? Don’t they watch any TV at all? Have they never seen a courtroom drama?

Their strategy won’t work. Not just killing the heir to get the inheritance, but the strategy of violent resistance itself. The violence doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because the landlord and especially the empire that stands behind the landlord know violence. It’s their strategy. It’s their game. And they are masters at it.

The Romans in their time had the most effective ways of applying violence in the world. They had a system of transportation and communication that was so efficient that they could get a message from anywhere in the empire to Rome in a big hurry. They had legions garrisoned at vital points around the empire. If a subject people rebelled, there would be an entire Roman legion on the ground at the hot spot in less than three months. In contemporary terms that would be like our being able to get a division anywhere in the world in twenty-four hours—something the Pentagon can only dream about.

Jesus intended for his followers to transform their world. He intended for them to set the oppressed free. He intended for them to see that justice was done. But he knew that none of this could be achieved by violence, for the simple reason that violence was the Roman’s game, played on their home field, and according to their rules. If they played the game, they would lose. No other possible outcome. Period. And he told this story to make this clear to his followers.

Unfortunately for us today, he didn’t go on in the story to tell us what sort of a strategy would work. I do think he offers us a workable strategy, one that has achieve remarkable success when it has been tried but which, for reasons not quite clear to me, isn’t tried very often. He offers us a workable strategy, but not in today’s text. But if we can get clear what won’t work, we might be ready to hear what does when it comes around.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.