When we reach the end of today’s story, the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, we hear the Evangelist tell us how to interpret it. “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.” The chief priests and Pharisees are attempting to steal the vineyard from its rightful owner. The vineyard is the Kingdom and the landowner is God. Jesus promises rough treatment of the wicked tenants. That’s the gist of the story, and it seems that there shouldn’t be much more to say about it, beyond the interpretation that the Evangelist has provided us. But let’s unpack the story, and hear what more it may reveal.
“A landowner...planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress...and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants, and went [away].” The physical details are interesting: a fenced vineyard, a winepress that’s a hole in the ground, a watchtower. The expectation is that the vineyard won’t be secure from vandals, thieves, and animals, without a fence and a tower. The landowner is preparing for danger from without, not within, not from his tenants. The assumption is that he can trust his tenants, that they will respect and protect the property just as he does.
They are tenants and they have a lease. A lease, even a long-term one, is by definition temporary. But the tenants want to turn the arrangement into ownership, and they try to enforce this by killing the landowner’s agents and even his heir. They think that they can get away with this because the landowner is in another country. He will never return, they think. But he does. He treats them as harshly as they treated his agents and heir, and their lease becomes very temporary indeed. The narrative is rather tough here, advocating death to the tenants. This sounds very harsh to us, but it reminds us of the uncompromising, all or nothing character of Jesus’s teaching. And of course, the heir in the story is Christ, who suffered death at the hands of the authorities.
The vineyard is the Kingdom, and the watchtower is the Temple, which is both the gateway to the Kingdom and its defense. The chief priests and the Pharisees are expected to produce a harvest, the fruits of the Kingdom. By their fruits we shall know them, and in this story they produce nothing but violence.
Jesus is saying plainly that religious authorities are temporary placeholders only; they don’t own their tradition --- they are the caretakers of it, and they are expected to tend it, to cultivate it, to produce the fruits of the Kingdom: all the good things that we can think of. Love, peace, wisdom, care for the poor, the sick, and all the virtues and moral behaviors that we know, are the fruits of the Kingdom. Not to make this harvest the goal of all religion leads to spiritual death, and physical death as well. The harsh words about death are warnings of the reality of spiritual death and the consequences of forgetting what the tradition is for. The history of the Church is littered with struggles for ownership of the tradition, for actual ownership of property and money and power, by people past and present who confuse the Kingdom with their own control. But mostly they forget that they are tenants only, not owners, that the Church itself is only a leaseholder in the vineyard, expected to “give [the landowner] the produce at harvest time.” The plain statement that there are “other tenants” is a reminder of spiritual reality, that God the landowner is not limited to the Church in spreading the Kingdom, just as he was not limited to the religious authorities of Jesus’s time.
I admit that I don’t quite know what to do with the very short story of the “stone that the builders rejected,” which the Evangelist has dropped into the narrative about the tenants. It’s meant to refer to the heir killed by the tenants, and to foreshadow the Crucifixion, but, beyond that, it seems to me that it is out of place in the parable. It would be better placed later in the Gospel, closer to the Passion. It’s function here, especially of the line “the one who falls on this stone will be broken,” is to reinforce the harsh language threatening the wicked tenants with death. And it reinforces the all-or-nothing character of Jesus’s teaching. It would be possible to work out a mystical interpretation of the stone and what it represents, but that would take us a long way from the main point of the parable.
It is possible to understand the parable of the wicked tenants as an implied critique of the idea of ownership. In our society, we take the notion of property, ownership, and rights derived from them, for granted. We are almost unconscious of them, they are so deeply embedded in our culture. The fact that the vineyard has a fence and a watchtower does not surprise us, for we surround ourselves with fences and watchtowers, real and virtual. We can hardly imagine life without them. The parable tells us that there are alternative tenants, who also accept the idea of ownership, who will be happy to take over the lease, and expel the original tenants. That awareness underpins the threat of expulsion, which gives force to the parable. It applies to everyone. When Jesus says, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom,” he says that to everyone, not just the original tenants.
God is the landowner, and all of us are tenants in God’s world. No one, in the end, really owns anything. We have tenancy for a while, and, to be sure, some tenants are rather more impressive, more powerful, richer than others, as we know, but they are still tenants. God expects us to produce “the fruits of the kingdom.” If we do not, bad things can happen, as we see and hear about every day. Perhaps that is one possible meaning of the “stone” that we can fall on, and be broken. If we don’t acknowledge who the landowner really is, and act like God’s world belongs to us, then disasters can follow: personal, social, economic, environmental, and more. Let us remember who the landowner is, and, like good tenants, work to produce the fruits of the Kingdom. Amen. (7-8.X.17 Adv.)
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