A Song of the Vineyard
Proper 22 Year A; Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 or Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 19 or 80; Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46
Last week I emphasized the need to contextualize the Gospels of these last two months of the liturgical year within the mounting drama of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem. His conflict with the chief priest is not the basis for a theory of Christian-Jewish relations; it is an account, in what is arguably the most Jewish of the Gospels (Matthew), of the conflict between the Jewish Messiah and the authorities of the time.
The Gospel this week brings us more vineyards, owners, and workers, and again the situation of ancient Palestine provides at least a general backdrop. Jesus tells of a group of tenants who manage a vineyard, yet return to the owner not the expected share of the crop but violence and murder. While some of this at least might have sounded like a nasty scene in the back-blocks of first-century Judea or Galilee, there is a clear connection between this parable and a much more ancient text, Isaiah 5:1-7, which Roman Catholics and those following Track 2 of the Revised Lectionary will also read. In this older prophetic parable, sometimes called “Song of the Vineyard,” Israel and/or Judah are the vineyard itself and also the tenants, who reject God by causing injustice. Isaiah’s bitter complaint is part of a call for justice in the land:
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;he expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;righteousness,
but heard a cry! (Isa 5:7)
The Isaiah reading stops there, but the prophet goes on to make clear the issue is not (just) vague wickedness, but the same phenomenon that Jesus treats as premise both in last week’s and this week’s Gospels, of displacement and impoverishment of small landholders by expanding large estates:
Ah, you who join house to house,
who add field to field,
until there is room for no one but you,
and you are left to live alone
in the midst of the land! (5:8)
In both Isaiah and in the Gospel, the relevance of this as a critique is admittedly subtle, since God is obviously the absentee landowner himself. However both passages assume that what is appropriate for God—to be Israel’s landlord—is not appropriate for Roman invaders and other land speculators “playing God.”
The other thing we can learn from Isaiah’s backdrop to the Gospel is that these parables both reference a dispute between God and Israel, but do not question the unending love and loyalty of God to Israel. Quite the contrary, this love and loyalty are the basis of the complaint. Without it, both the older song and the newer parable would lose their meaning. Both involve a devastating crisis for Israel, but both assume the covenant faithfulness of God, even in the face of human failure.
Those reading Track 1 of the Revised Common Lectionary and Exodus instead of Isaiah do not have this background material, but do have the fundamental statement of that same covenant to which God will always be faithful, even when people are not. The Ten Commandments or Decalogue, while often abstracted into general moral principles, are in fact the key terms of an agreement (covenant) that God makes with Israel after the liberation from Egypt. Buried a bit obscurely in the list is the command not to “covet” (20:7) which is of course about greed, but more concretely refers to just what Isaiah had complained about: the joining of house to house, field to field.
Thus the failure of Israel to live into the covenant with the God who had freed Israel from its own experience of landless bonded labor in Egypt can also be assumed in the background of this Gospel, although Jesus’ critique seems more narrowly-focussed than Isaiah’s. The chief priests as tenants are Israel’s leadership, the people and the land the vineyard itself. The rejected tenants are thus not the people, but the rulers. Their failure to recognize the Son is inseparable from their complicity in Roman colonial rule, itself a failure to acknowledge both the true God and King of Israel, as well as the means of further dispossession and injustice.
To be explicit about one possible misreading then, the parable of the vineyard does not mean that the Jews are displaced from divine favor, and that the Christians have arrived instead; it means that this present leadership had failed, and Jesus the true King had arrived instead. Yet of course in this parable—more allegorical than most—Jesus is referenced as the son who is disposed of by the tenants also. The use in the closing line of a citation from Ps 118 (“the stone that the builders rejected”) combines as a reference to Jesus’ own coming rejection and exaltation, but also as a reminder of the abiding significance of Israel (the edifice whose cornerstone he has become).
The Epistle this week also reminds us of what has and has not changed in the relationship between God and Israel. Paul addresses the Church at Philippi, its members mostly of Gentile background, where some temptation has arisen to pursue Jewish identity in terms of that Mosaic covenant once given at Sinai, along with the sign of circumcision for males. Paul is more forthright here than anywhere else about his pride in his Jewish heritage—Israelite, Benjaminite, Pharisee—bound up in that covenant with Moses. This Philippian group however he wants to disabuse of the idea that their Christian calling is to mimic his own ancestry by fulfilling the terms of Moses’ Sinai covenant. Instead he emphasizes the character of the new covenant that has been made in Christ, which is now central even for him.
Yet this, again, is not a theory of Jewish-Christian relations. We could find better material in the Letter to the Romans to remind us of how Paul sees the continued—in fact unchangeable—nature of God’s covenant faithfulness to Israel itself:
They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen. (Rom 9:4-5)
The abiding love of God for Israel is not displaced or reduced by the failures of leadership of nation. And just as God could still be damning of injustice and infidelity to the covenant then, so too now Christians who believe we have been made part of the family of God (as had been foreseen even in Isaiah; see Isa. 56) are subject to the same assurance, and the same demand.
God’s covenant faithfulness, extended to the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, does not constitute either a rejection of the Jews or a free pass for the Gentiles. When we join house to house, field to field, when we find ourselves complicit in forms of authority that benefit the self rather than the whole community, we invite the same condemnation. Yet the power of God to renew, to redeem, even to give life to the dead, is where Jew and Gentile alike place our hope:
‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes’ (Ps 118: 22-23)