A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew
“Hear another parable. There was a householder who planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower, and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. When the season of fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants, to get his fruit; and the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first; and they did the same to them. Afterward he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ And they took him and cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him. When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.” The Stone Which the Builders Rejected Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The very stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.
(Matthew 21:33-43)
Fr. Pine’s Sunday Homily for Exodus Men
The parable of the wicked tenants is one of the more challenging parables in Matthew’s Gospel. Certainly, it seems to speak to the relationship of the Gospel to the Jewish people, and then to the Gentile people, which is something that has racked the brains of Christians for two millennia. We can think of St. Paul and his engagement with this question in Romans 9 through 11, upon the end of which he throws his hands up and says, “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor?” But I also think that our engagement with it is often very fruitful. And in part, it’s because it gives us a salvation-historical perspective. I think it’s also fruitful to situate our lives within this salvation-historical perspective because it helps us to conceive of our trials and temptations in light of the trials and temptations of the Church, or perhaps more broadly, of his holy people.
We see a unified intention informing God’s engagements with humanity. In the midst of our own trials and temptations, sometimes it may seem like God is being erratic or capricious. But we discern in this parable that God is not that way. He is unified in his intentions, and we see that he is pursuing us. He is in pursuit of his holy people. He is in pursuit of our souls. And we can conceive of our own trials and temptations within the setting of the Church’s trials and temptations, for they are like the labor pains as Christ is brought to birth in his Church. That’s an interesting image. It’s one that St. Paul uses, and it means that Christ needs to be brought to birth in each of us. He needs to tell his story in each of us.
What we witness in today’s gospel is that we’re kind of crazy, and that God is kind of crazy, but in a totally different way. We’re crazy in a bad way; God’s crazy in a good way. Let’s say more about that.
In our reading, we have these tenant farmers. They were employed with terms. We can think of those terms as a kind of law. But as is often the case, humans cannot abide the law. We see the very negative effects of this antinomian (anti-law) tendency. The tenant farmers say to themselves, “Let’s start beating, stoning, and killing people.” When the father sends the heir, they say, “Let’s kill him, and we’ll come into a rich inheritance.” This gets into the details of inheritance law in the first century, which we don’t need to address here in detail. But, taken from a reader’s distance, we can say, “Wait, what? They think that they will get good treatment because they killed the son of the owner?” This is crazy. Yet their craziness is even more insane when you get down to the very roots of it, because the fact of the matter is that they are already heirs.
Let’s think about this from a salvation-historical perspective and dial it all the way back to our first parents, Adam and Eve. What were they tempted by? The offer was “You will be like gods.” And they say to themselves, “That sounds attractive.” Then they sin because they want to be from God and for God, but in the way that they will it, and not so much in the way that God wills it. In other words, they can’t receive their life as the gift it’s intended to be. Thus, they end up losing out on the whole dispensation of grace. They are left to themselves. Adam and Eve were heirs. They were heirs to the promise in the sense that they were created in grace, and they were intended, with God’s original purpose, to abide in grace. They were to enjoy a kind of partaking or sharing in God’s nature—not just in his riches, but in his very nature. And in choosing to be gods of their own making, they lose out on being gods of God’s making.
We see a similar madness at work in the tenants, because they decide to kill the heir so that they can come into an inheritance. Yet, the fact of the matter is not only that the inheritance passes through the heir, but that the heir intends to incorporate them in his relationship with the Father. But they can’t see that because they look to themselves instead of to God.
Now, given the fact that we’re often crazy, like the tenants, we might think, “Well, God is sane.” It turns out God is also crazy, but he’s crazy in a different way, in a way that transcends sanity. It’s reasonable: Only God has access to the full depths of wisdom. One thing we see here is that God is in pursuit. We’ve said that from the outset, but we see it here in an especially concrete and vivid way. He’s in pursuit throughout the course of salvation history. His revelation of steadfast love isn’t given in an instant but over time, over the course of many ages. And the reason for that is that his revelation is attuned to our human condition. We live in time. It takes us a while to figure stuff out. That’s why we need good teachers who are deliberate in their pedagogical purpose, who take us by the hand and lead us through the steps. This is true of humanity at large—that it takes us time to heal and to grow, to mature in the way in which God intends us to mature. And so the timepiece is part of the very revelation of God’s loving kindness. It looks like God is insane because he keeps sending people who keep getting killed. They’ve already beaten, stoned, and executed people to a bewildering extent, and yet God says, “I’ll send the heir. They’ll treat him differently.” The fact of the matter is that they don’t treat him differently. God knows that. But in their treatment of him, something different does happen; namely, that in killing the only-begotten Son of God in human flesh, who undergoes that treatment for love of us and in obedience to the Father, salvation is unleashed in most potent fashion. God can save us in whatsoever way, and he chooses to save us in this way precisely because it tells forth his love in most excellent fashion.
The point is not so much that the activity of the tenants is different, but that the Son, who is God, who is the very love abiding from the foundation of the world, tells forth in human fashion, with human love, God’s purpose in a way that becomes undeniable to subsequent generations. People can still deny him, but in a way that becomes more patent, more obvious, because his purpose becomes easier for us to assimilate and nearer. His persistence communicates a depth of affection, which is concentrated in the revelation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s totally insane. But it’s a kind of insanity which goes beyond sanity, a kind of insanity which is actually the depths of wisdom. I realize I’m talking somewhat paradoxically here, but the purpose is this: This parable, which poses a challenge, often proves fruitful in our consideration of what the wisdom of God really means for us, that he has not left us to ourselves, that he continues to pursue us, which, taken to the very end of the world, will continue to draw us into relationship with him. That is cause for rejoicing.
