TODAY’S PARABLE is linked to last Sunday’s about the two sons sent to work in their father’s vineyard. One promised to go and work there but he did not actually go. The other at first refused but later relented and went. The message of Jesus is clear (especially in the context of Matthew’s Gospel).
God’s people had disappointed their God. It was the formerly sinful Gentiles who took on the task of building the Kingdom. This should not be understood as anti-Jewish. On the contrary this was being written by Christian Jews for Christian Jews and it must have been a painful thing for them to see and accept.
Poor tenants
Today we have a parable saying more or less the same thing. Strictly speaking it is not a parable but an allegory. A parable normally presents one lesson and the details are not relevant; while, in an allegory, each detail of the story has a symbolic meaning.
The message clearly is that God’s people have been poor tenants in the Lord’s vineyard. However, we read this not to sit in judgement on certain people in the past. We must be careful to be aware of the relevance of this parable for our own situation. We are not reading it for historical reasons but for reflection on our own lives and behaviour.
The Lord’s vineyard
Both the First Reading and the Gospel focus on the Lord’s vineyard, that is, the place where God’s people are to be found. At first, Jesus chose the Israelites to be his own people. He was with them on their wanderings in the desert on the way to “a land flowing with milk and honey”. “What could I have done for my vineyard that I have not done?” the Lord asks in the First Reading.
But the response of the people/tenants in the vineyard was far from the expectations of the master of the vineyard: “I expected my vineyard to yield grapes. Why did it yield sour grapes instead?”
In Jesus’ story the owner sends his servants to collect the harvest. Instead, the tenants seized, beat, stoned and even killed the owner’s messengers. This happened again and again. The message is clearly understood by Jesus’ hearers. The Lord had sent his prophets to remind his people of their duty to serve, to be a fruitful people. Yet, one by one, God’s messengers were rejected.
No respect even for the son
Finally, the owner’s own son was sent. “They will respect my son,” the owner said. But no. He also was seized, thrown out of the vineyard and killed. They could now take over the vineyard for themselves. It reminds one of the arrogance of our first parents who thought the knowledge of good and evil would give them power over God; of those who tried to build a tower that would reach right to the heavens. And the killing of the son “outside the city” is a clear reference to Jesus dying on the cross outside the walls of Jerusalem.
Called to the Lord’s vineyard
Today, we are God’s people. We are the tenants in the vineyard. Now he expects us to produce fruit, fruit that will endure. The obvious question for us to ask ourselves today is: How are we doing? How much better are we than the chief priests, the elders, the Scribes and the Pharisees? We are specially privileged, by baptism, to be called to work in the Lord’s vineyard. Each week we are invited to gather together to hear the Gospel message and to make it part of our lives. We are all called to be members, active members of the Body of Christ, the Christian community, the Church.
Many martyrs
How do we see this call? Do we find it a privilege, a blessing, or a troublesome burden? How well have we received the message of the Lord?
Over the centuries, how many prophets in our Christian communities have been rejected, abused and even killed? We think of Joan of Arc, Thomas More, Oliver Plunkett and, in our own times, Bishop Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, the countless victims of violence in Central and South America, in Africa, not to mention Northern Ireland.
All these martyrs have one thing in common. They were killed not by pagans but by fellow-Christians, tenants in the Lord’s vineyard. We can hardly feel superior to the people Jesus is
criticising in today’s Gospel. Isaiah’s words in the First Reading are so true:
I expected justice but found bloodshed;
I expected integrity but found only a cry of distress.
In so many parts of the world we do not have to go far to see the relevance of those words.
What kind of grapes?
Even so, we may feel we have not personally been part of any of this. Yet, what kind of grapes do we as a parish community produce? Are they sweet and luscious or are they pinched and sour? Is our parish a real sign of Jesus’ presence and love in this part of our city? What kind of impact do we have?
Are we living out the words that Paul proposes to the Christians of Philippi in today’s Second Reading:
Fill your minds with everything that is true,
everything that is noble,
everything that is good and pure,
everything that we love and honour,
and everything that can be thought virtuous
or worthy of praise.
He goes on:
Keep doing all the things that you learnt from me
and have been taught by me
and have heard or seen that I do.
These last words are quite a challenge for all of us. But if we can live them out, then, says St Paul, “the God of peace will be with you.”
Parish vineyard
Our parish is our vineyard. It must not produce sour grapes that no one can eat. It must be open to the various ways the Lord speaks to it, whether those people are Church leaders or prophetic voices which may sometimes say things which are painful to hear.
There is always a temptation for a parish to become a security blanket for those who do not want to face up to the challenges facing every society. When that happens, it tends to cling to old, fixed ways of doing things and to resist change. People who propose changes that are necessary in serving a constantly changing society may be resisted and resisted very strongly. Each parish can find itself producing its core of “chief priests and elders” (who, by the way, may not be the clergy) who will make sure that prophetic voices (who may be the clergy) and people with real vision will be effectively blocked.
It is just as easy for us in these times to fail to recognise the voice of God in the messengers he sends us, just as the Jewish authorities of Jesus’ time failed to recognise the Word of God in him. It was Cardinal Newman who said more than 100 years ago that “To live is to change; and to be perfect is to have changed often.” If we are not really making sure that our vineyard produces rich grapes, not only for us but for others, too, to enjoy, then we are falling short as “tenants”. It may well happen that the Lord may ask others to come and take our place.
If our church was closed down, sold off and turned into a dance hall what real difference would it make to our district? Of course, we who come here regularly would miss it, but what of others who never step inside? Are we really concerned about that impact or do we think more of our own personal religious obligations and needs? Do we measure the quality of our parish by what goes on in this building or by what happens when we leave it? Obviously, both are important but there cannot be one without the other.
VINEYARD OWNER
Jesus employed many different ways of communicating the Good News of God’s love to His disciples. He instructed them through prayer, miracles and the Scriptures. He instructed them through ordinary conversation and, finally, he instructed them through parables, as in today’s “Parable of the Tenants.”
The owner of the vineyard leases it to some tenant farmers. For three successive years the tenants forcibly resist the owner’s efforts to claim his rightful share of the harvest. They even murder his agents who come to collect. And after three harvests, they are in a position to claim ownership of the land by means of what we call nowadays “Squatters Rights”. To legally resist such claims the owner himself ( or his son ) must present himself and lodge a formal complaint. We know the rest of the story: his son is sent and murdered. Finally the owner himself goes, ejects the murderous tenants and appoints others in their place.
Like any other parable, forty of them in all, Christ makes it quite clear for His listeners to identify the characters in the story! The ‘vineyard’ clearly stood for the people of Israel. The vineyard owner is God. The farmers are the rulers and priests who supervise the country. The servants are the prophets sent by God throughout the centuries. Their untimely disappearances make up an unbroken obituary column throughout the scriptures. The son here is clearly Jesus.
Aesop ( creator of the “fables” – moral stories – of ancient times ) tells a story about a dog with a bone. The dog crosses a bridge over the river.) He looks at his reflection on the water. He decides it is a second dog with a bigger bone. He goes for the bone. His own bone falls to the stream bottom. Now he has no bone. The tenants in today’s parable are just like that dog. Because of greed, they lose their jobs.
Aesop’s parables ranks among the best “fables” of all time. It is retold, like all good stories, time and time again. Even in the Liturgy, it comes up again on Tuesday/Wednesday of Holy Week. It is a “parable of defiance” ( William Barclay ). Unlike other parables, which have one central point or message and other references can be changed, the parable of the vineyard is transparent and was understood by all the listeners. Christ knows he is to be assassinated, but fearlessly He calls the bluff of his murderers. He has no intention of running scared.
God had already said, “What more was there for me to do for my vineyard that I had not done?” ( Isaiah ) God looked for uprightness and justice. Instead God saw injustice against neighbors and heard the cries of the oppressed.
The situation or “plot” in the story was not rare in Israel. Wealthy absentee landlords were a dime a dozen. Labor problems abounded, and farmers renting vineyards often declined to pay rents. When the landlord sent his agents or his son to pick up his rents, the hapless fellows were abused and even disposed of. People listening to Jesus knew very well about those situations or had themselves been agents or victims of the same “plot”.
Today we can apply this situation to us, to the injustices in our own towns, country and around the world. People cry for affordable housing, for decent wages to provide for their families. Many cry for respect and dignity when they are disregarded because of race, religion or gender. Immigrants cry to be accepted. The homeless, the mentally ill, the lonely, and the elderly – all cry for a chance of a decent life. We were all God’s chosen plant in His vineyard.
Jesus concludes the parable by saying that the owner of the vineyard will replace the tenants, and that the new tenants “will give Him the fruits of their seasons.” “The Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.”
STONE REJECTED BY THE BUILDER
Jesus was in the temple precincts surrounded by some of the top religious leaders. He had never been so close to so many. With incredible courage, he decided to tell them a parable that was really addressed to them. It turned out to be the hardest criticism of their religious work ever pronounced by Jesus.
When Jesus began to speak about a landowner who planted a vineyard and took so much care and means to let it grow, they must have listened with curiosity. The vineyard represented the people of Israel and everyone knew the song of the prophet Isaiah that spoke of God’s love for his people, represented by the vineyard. The religious leaders were responsible for that vineyard that God so truly loved.
What nobody really expected was the accusation that Jesus was about to throw at them: God was truly disappointed. Centuries had gone by and nobody had been able to reap the harvest of justice, solidarity and peace that God had expected from the vineyard.
Time and time again, God had sent his servants to the tenants to collect the fruits, but the landowners had seized his servants, thrashed one, killed another and stoned a third. What else could God do for his vineyard? According to the Gospel narrative, the owner sent his own son thinking that they would respect his Son. The tenants, however, killed him to take over his inheritance.
The parable cannot be more transparent. The leaders of the temple must recognize that the landowner must find other tenants in whom he will find more trust. Jesus wastes no time in applying the parable to those religious leaders: “I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.”
Surrounded as we are by so many crises that cannot be solved by temporary reforms or distracted as we are by different opinions that hide the really essential issue, we fail to listen to God’s call to a radical return to the Gospel. Today’s parable offers serious questions that require real answers.
Are we really the new people that Jesus wants to produce the new fruits of his kingdom or are we again disappointing God? Are we truly working for a more just and humane world? How are we responding, as part of God’s project, to the victims of the present economic crisis and the millions who are dying of hunger and malnutrition in Africa?
Are we responding to the call of God’s Son who has been sent to the vineyard or do we send Him out, in various ways, out of the vineyard? Are we busy with the message that Jesus entrusted to us or do we keep distracted with so many worldly and secondary interests?
What are we really doing with so many men and women that God had sent to the vineyard to be taught about love and justice? Where are God’s prophets and Jesus’ disciples and witnesses today? Don’t we find some of them in the world any more?
CHEATING GOD
The parable of the wicked husbandmen is so harsh and cruel that we Christians find it hard to believe that such prophetic warning, which Christ addressed to the religious leaders of his time, might have something to do with us.
The story is about some land owner who leased his vineyard to some tenants, before he went abroad. When vintage time drew near, something shocking happened. The tenants refused to hand over the crops. The landowner could not collect his long-awaited fruits.
The tenants’ daring was unbelievable. The servants sent by the landowner were systematically thrashed, stoned and killed one by one. Still worse: when the owner sent his own son, they seized him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him so that they could take over his inheritance.
What could the landowner do with these tenants? The religious leaders who were listening to Jesus’ parable could only draw one conclusion: the landowner will bring those wretched tenants to a wretched end and lease the vineyard to other tenants. They condemned themselves. Jesus himself told them: “have you never read the scriptures? I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.”
In the Lord’s vineyard there is no room for those who do not produce fruits. The Kingdom of God that Jesus announced and proclaimed cannot have tenants that are not loyal to his Son and who make themselves rulers of the people of God. They will be taken out and substituted by “people who will produce its fruit.”
Sometimes we may think that such threatening parable is applicable only to the time before Christ, to the people of the Old Testament, but not to us, the people of the new alliance, because Christ told us that He will be with us till the end of time.
That is a big mistake. The parable is addressed to us, too. God is not going to bless a sterile Christianity if we do not produce the expected fruits. God is not going to put up with our own deviations, imperfections and infidelities. So even now God wants all the unworthy tenants in his vineyard to be substituted by a people that will produce fruits worthy of His kingdom.