How We Read The Texts Proper 22A

 

How We Read The Texts

A few days ago, I thought I knew where I was going with today’s parable, most often called The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. But then I began to dig deeper and everything changed. 

Matthew’s Jesus in chapter 21:33-46 speaks of a “landowner” who creates a vineyard on his property, similar to how the prophet Isaiah describes God creating our Earth. He sends his servants to his vineyard to collect “his produce.” The tenants killed one, beat another and stoned a third. He sends more servants, and it comes to the same end. He sends his son thinking surely, they will respect him, But no, they toss him out of the vineyard and kill him hoping to “get his inheritance.” Jesus asks those who are listening, “When the owner comes himself, what ought he do to those tenants?” [Note,  he does not call them wicked!] They reply, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Jesus gives a quotation again from the prophet Isaiah about a rejected stone that becomes the cornerstone of God’s kingdom which will be taken away “from you,” and given to those who will bear the fruits of the kingdom. “From you” presumably means the chief priests and elders who challenged by what authority Jesus was turning over tables and withering fig trees. Suddenly. they say among themselves, “He is talking about us, the gatekeepers of the rituals and traditions of our people!” 

Beginning with the early church and through the centuries to the present day, it has been presumed that God is the landowner, Jesus is the Son, and the tenants are the Jewish people who reject God’s Son. Which is why people call it The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. This has caused no end of troubles. It is a parable in Mark, Matthew and Luke that Nazi interpreters used to justify killing the Jewish people in the Holocaust. But a god who would “put those wretches to a miserable death” does not sound like the God of the Exodus and the Ten Commandments who is described in the Hebrew Testament (Old Testament) as “gracious, merciful, abounding in steadfast love, and who relents from punishing.” This is not the God of the Exodus and Ten Commandments. This landowner is not the one Jesus tells us to love along with our neighbor. 

If it were not already called The Parable of the Wicked Tenants, what would we think all this might mean? First, the landowner. The Greek text calls him an oikodespotes. He is an oiko despot, literally a home or property despot. Despotes is the word from which we get the English word despot. Its meaning is precisely the same in Greek as it is in English. It means an absolute and arbitrary ruler, from whom there can be no appeal. It was the title slaves were required to use in addressing the master who owned them as property. [i] 

Typically, in first century Roman occupied Israel, oikpdespotes meant some rich city slicker, or even a foreign investor, who has usurped farm land from peasant farmers who were in debt and then hired the former owners of the land to work the land as slaves or tenant farmers. Try to imagine what it is like not only to lose farmland that had been in your family for generations to some large agri-business corporation, and then have to suffer the humiliation of working that land to produce profits to the oiko despot. Suddenly, this story sounds like a possibly justifiable peasant revolt, which revolts were not uncommon throughout the land. Suddenly, Jesus seems to be telling an all too familiar and recognizable tale – especially since the chief priests and elders in Jerusalem were enmeshed in this economic enslavement collecting their share of taxes on the land, and collecting further taxes to be sent on to Rome – The Ultimate Oiko Despot! 

Rome, seen in this light, becomes the very Oiko Despot that the Israelite peasant farm slaves would love to overthrow so as to get their family farmland back. Which makes this a tale about another kind of justice. Jesus begins and ends the parable with references to Isaiah, a prophet poet who is deeply concerned with God’s care of justice for the people of the land, the poor peasant tenant farmers, widows, orphans and resident aliens. Beginning around the year 63CE the people of the land did revolt against the Roman occupation, resulting in the Temple and all Jerusalem being burnt to the ground. The chief priests and elders ultimately have had no place to be authorities over the traditions and rituals any longer. Rabbinic Judaism as we know it was born shortly thereafter. 

The problem and danger of giving these parables a title and a singular interpretation becomes obvious. In his book, Parables as Subversive Speech, William Herzog II suggests that “…Jesus’s parables…were not meant to be stories with either a clear moral or a single meaning that could be gleaned by reading them ‘correctly.' Rather, they were meant to be discussion-starters, whose purpose was to raise questions and pose dilemmas for their hearers. They were open-ended stories that invited their hearers to enter into conversation for the purposes of exploring the social scenes they presented and connecting the hearers to the realities of their lives to the larger systemic realities in which they were caught.” [ii] 

Jesus says, let those who have ears, hear. What do we hear? In which “larger systemic realities” do we as a society, or a church, find ourselves caught? Has the Church been a good steward of the Kingdom of God? Could the vineyard be the creation which God “in the beginning” hands over to us as stewards, caretakers? Do we care for Earth’s resources? Or, do we exploit them? Or, could the vineyard be all of humankind in our beautiful and creative diversity? Are there such things as systemic racism? Do we honor the dignity of all people? Are there places where workers today are being exploited? Do we care for women and children everywhere? Do we care for our democracy and republican form of government? Or, is it time to overthrow it and hand it over to the oiko despots of this age? 

These are just a few of the systemic realities which surround us every day. And letting stories like Jesus’s parables be discussion-starters in which we listen to the texts and listen to one another and the nearly endless possibilities of application to our lives. And we must be cautious when an English translation of the Bible assigns a title to a story like the story of this vineyard. It is one thing for Matthew, Mark and Luke to portray the chief priests and elders to think its all about them. But they already thought everything was about them. And many of them were just doing their level best to live within the friendly confines of the Ten, and ultimately 613 commandments found in Torah – the first five books of our Bible. 

What this story is not, I am convinced, is a story that means to conclude “the Jews were wicked and killed God’s Son. This is the most wicked and perverted reading of this tale, and to think anything like could come from the mouth, heart and soul of Jesus is offensive.  Rome, and Rome only, was responsible. When it comes to biblical interpretation, we can do better than that. May God, in God’s infinite mercy, love and graciousness help us to be compassionate to see the best in one another, and especially to see the best in all others. No exceptions. Amen. 

[i] https://godswordtowomen.wordpress.com/2007/12/30/oikodespotes/ 

[ii] Herzog II, William, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed  (Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 1994) p.259.