The Futility of Violence
It’s not a parable about wicked tenants. It’s about the
futility of violence. How one approaches a parable like the one in Matthew
21:33-46, beginning on giving it a title, is problematic. A title which the
parable, when told, it never had. Neither Matthew nor Jesus says, “This one is
called: The Parable of the Wicked Tenants.” The title labels the tenant farmers
as wicked for being unhappy about their situation. Most, if not all of them, have
had their family ancestral farmland foreclosed due to debt and gobbled up by an
absentee landlord. They are frustrated, not wicked. The lands the tenant
farmers had lost was inherited land. It had been in the family for centuries. At
the time of Jesus, and even more profoundly at the time Matthew’s gospel
appears, farms and vineyards were often foreclosed and now owned by city-elites
of the Roman Empire.
Another problem is a history of the church reading these
stories as allegories – each character in the story, we say, is code for
someone else. Looking at the allegory in Isaiah 5:1-7 some six centuries before
Christ, one might have a legitimate point of making the owner of the vineyard
God; the tenant farmers to be the kings and leaders of Israel, some of whom
were notoriously corrupt; and the vineyard itself is Israel. Oh yes, and for
centuries in Church preaching it has been assumed that the new “people who
produce the fruits of the kingdom” was in fact the Church itself. To
interpret the parable in this way, and cast Israel, or “the Jews,” as “wicked
tenants,” means the Church established the very roots of anti-Semitism and
Christians as “God’s new people.” Such interpretations persisted through The
Holocaust, and today feed the increase of attacks on Jewish people and
synagogues here in the U.S, and throughout the world.
As already noted, at the time of Jesus, and four decades
later when Matthew’s gospel appeared, an unjust system of wealthy city elites who
lent money to struggling family farms foreclosed them. The tenants needed to
borrow money because of taxes to the Temple, toll-booth taxes, or tariffs, to
move their goods to market, and further tribute taxes, or protection money, to
be paid to the Roman Empire. Further, the Empire now “owned” the entirety of
Judea, Galilee, and most of the surrounding territories. Any notion that “The
earth is the Lord’s, and everything therein” had been usurped by the Empire and
its need for more and more resources to sustain its power. God was no longer
viewed as “the owner” of the vineyard. And the kind of violence one hears about
in the parable is aimed more and more against the Empire, not God, eventually
resulting in a sort of peasant revolt beginning in the year 66 CE, and crushed
by Rome in the year 70, with Jerusalem and The Temple burned to the ground. Thus,
the nearly 4,000 years of Yahwism and Abrahamic religion came to a halt – for there
was now nowhere to make the appointed sacrifices.
This means that after the year 70 CE what we know as
Rabbinic Judaism became normative. It had its origins in the years of captivity
in Babylon and rabbis led the study of biblical texts while developing several
different groups of texts to interpret what the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob willed for creation and the people appointed to care for creation and one
another. And although there were home communities of people who followed Jesus
as a movement within this new form of Judaism, it would be sometime in the late
1st century or early 2nd century that anything like “the
church” as an organized entity appeared. That is, the parable is not about
Christians and Jews as we think and know of them. It’s not about God. It is
about the Empire, or the State’s, oppression of the people of the land –
peasant tenant farmers – through systems of property foreclosures, taxes, tolls,
tariffs, and an armed military enforcing it all. The church’s collective
misreading of this parable has not only caused the sustained existence of
anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, but also blinded much of the church from
recognizing the signs of what in the 20th century became the origins of
authoritative, corporate fascism in Italy and Germany. Only a handful of Protestant
Confessing Churches resisted the fascist oppression.
Standing among the ashes of Jerusalem, however, there are still
deeper lessons to ponder. The futility of armed rebellion and violence was
revealed. By the year 70 CE, some four decades after Jesus, the peasant revolts
had failed spectacularly. This appears to have resulted in a never-ending
spiral of violence up to the present day. In one corner, we hear Vladimir Putin
just this week threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons against Ukraine
and countries of the NATO alliance, calling into question just what constitutes
a sovereign nation-state. In the other corner, is the president of the United
States threatening to “annihilate” Iran and its entire civilization – one of
the oldest civilizations on the face of the Earth – while also threatening to
make all countries in north and south America client states. This also calls
into question what constitutes a sovereign nation-state.
The parable also explores the themes of inheritance and who
are rightful heirs of the land, and frankly, calls into question the very
credibility if ancestral lands. At the micro level this means homes and farms,
but at the macro level it means Empires absorbing more and more countries and
territories. Willliam Herzog III, in his book, Parables as Subversive Speech,
suggests the parable raises these still relevant questions: How can people and
even sovereign nation states reclaim their honorable status as heirs, or as
sovereign nations, if violent revolts always end in futility? Are there other
ways to reassert their claims? [page 113]
The oldest strands of the four gospels are the Holy Week
narratives in which Jesus eschews armed revolt, and instead, in proclamations
like the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, and other teachings, does
exemplifies another Way – the way of non-violent resistance. It is how the
early church operated until in the fourth century the Emperor Constantine
elevated the church to Empire status. Others like Ghandhi and Martin Luther
King Jr achieved at least temporary success through non-violent resistance. But
even those gains are currently in danger of being reversed as the violence of
empires appears to escalate.
Jesus asks us to pray for bread that is given daily. To pray
for our debts to be forgiven as we forgive the debts of others. To hallow God’s
name. For God’s will to direct all that we do and all that we say.
Blessed are those who know their
need for theirs is the grace of heaven.
Blessed are those who weep, for
their tears will be wiped away.
Blessed are the humble for they are
close to the sacred earth.
Blessed are those who hunger for
earth’s oneness for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the forgiving for they
are free.
Blessed are the clear in heart for
they see the Living Presence.
Blessed are the peacemakers for
they are born of God.
[The Casa del Sol Blessings of
Jesus based on Matthew 5: 3-9, by John Philip Newell]
May our prayers be for the peoples and nations of the world
to find a Way beyond the futility of violence so that all persons may live in
peace and security.
Amen.
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