Our Gospel today presents what is known as the parable of the tenants. It is a difficult parable, to say the least. Difficult, maybe, because it is shows with such gritty detail the way the world so often works: workers who violently and unjustly take what does not belong to them, a distant landlord who responds with further violence. If this parable is an allegory, it is hard to tell who the characters are meant to be and what moral they are meant to convey.
In fact, along with our reading from Isaiah, the parable of the tenants stands behind one tradition of interpretation that suggests, in stark terms, that the vineyard owner is God, and the tenants are the Jews. Israel, in rejecting her Messiah—the son of the landlord—has acted unjustly and therefore abandoned her chosen status. She will therefore be punished and replaced by a people more worthy of God’s favor.
If, in this twenty-first century, after the horrors of the Holocaust, and amid ongoing anti-Semitism in the world, we worry about the implications of that interpretation, we can rightly ask whether there is any other way to read the parable. Aside from the disturbing implications of anti-Jewish readings, there’s also the problem that, by equating the tenants with the Jews, Christians manage to avoid any criticism of their own behavior. Readings of Scripture that manage to blame everything on somebody else are constantly tempting but usually misguided.
Now, to be sure, the parable, as Jesus tells it, is definitely directed at the chief priests and Pharisees. Matthew tells us as much, because he notes how they understood this message and, well, didn’t much appreciate it. At the end of the parable, Jesus is also direct in his language. He says, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.”
Who is the main target here? Surely it is fair to say that in one sense, the target is indeed Israel, or at least its contemporary leaders. But we need not read into that some kind of universal rejection of Israel, or of the Jewish people. Because the ways that Jesus criticizes Israel apply no less to the Church.
The problem is not so much that Israel as a whole had rejected God, but rather that her leaders, especially those confronting Jesus, had forgotten that they were tenants. They had forgotten that their identity and their hope came from God alone. They had developed, as Paul describes it in Philippians, a “confidence in the flesh.”
We are not owners. We are tenants, all the way down to our existence and life, which is, at every moment, a gift of God. And we, perhaps even more than the chief priests and Pharisees, seek to make something more of our tenancy. We think we own ourselves, and that we can do with our bodies and our souls whatever we want. And, like the Pharisees, we often see our salvation, our identity as Christ, more in terms of a right, of an unqualified inheritance, than a tenuously held, wholly undeserved gift.
There are, as St. Paul writes in Philippians, reasons to be confident, but they all come down not to us, but to the faithfulness of Christ Jesus. We can be confident that in him, we can find everything we need to be faithful. We can be confident that in him, we will find not a vindictive or an unjust landlord, but a God whose deepest desire is to share everything he has with us, even after we have done the worst thing possible.
With that confidence in mind, the parable of the tenants should remind us not that we are the lucky ones who have received the vineyard after the first tenants failed. It should remind us, rather, that we too are more than capable of the kind of rebellion and failure and unfaithfulness shown in the parable. The principal meaning of the parable for us, then, is less a historical description of the role of Israel than it is an encouragement to faithfulness in the Christian life. Are we tending the vineyard where we have been placed? Are we cultivating good relations with the vineyard’s owner?
Rabanus (an eighth-century commentator, quoted in St. Thomas’s Catena Aurea) writes, “Morally, a vineyard has been let out to each of us to dress, when the mystery of baptism was given us, to be cultivated by action.” I think this is a wonderful image: in baptism, we are given a vineyard to tend. We are given ourselves, in other words. We are lent, by grace, the time in creation to grow fruit, to do good. The fruit, the work, isn’t really ours, but we have pleasure in it all the same, and the owner has promised a great share in the profit. But baptism itself isn’t some magical ticket to heaven: it is what sets us on the way as workers in the vineyard. We have no right to stay in the vineyard unless we remain faithful to the work.
So, letting go of anxiety, we “keep on doing what we have learned and received and heard and seen” (Phil. 4:9). We press on, as Paul says, “straining forward to what lies ahead” (3:13). To the resurrection of the dead. To the consummation of all things in Christ. The Christian life is movement: “further up and further in,” as C.S. Lewis writes in The Last Battle.
That may seem contrary to the cultivating work of keeping a vineyard, but here it’s worth saying that, like any agricultural work, keeping a vineyard involves the constant movement through the cycles and the processes of growth and rest, of pruning and grafting and planting and harvesting. To stay where we are, to produce fruit where we are, we have to keep moving.
And so doing, in God’s providence, we will produce fruit. It may not be the fruit that we always wanted, but Scripture suggests that the “fruits of the Spirit” are many: love, joy, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. There are also the more visible fruits of health, growth, healing.
Whether it’s the individual vineyard of the soul or the corporate vineyard of the Church, we all have work to do in tending the vines, encouraging the fruit. And so the kinds of questions that should guide our work are not “What makes me happy?” or “What makes this church look good?” or even “How can I be a relatively good person?” Those are the questions of self-interest, the questions that lead to the sour, wild grapes in Isaiah and, in the end, even to the violent tenants of Matthew. Instead, we should always be asking: What habits can I develop to “think about” what is true, honorable, just, and pure? How can I better receive and cultivate the gifts that God has given me? And finally: When the Lord comes again, will I be ready? Will we, his tenants, be ready?
I hope so. I pray so. But the parable is a sobering reminder that there is no guarantee. Let us not, therefore, be confident in our own ability, our own security and location, but in the faithfulness and merits of Christ. In his power, God is working in us to bring us to perfection, to form us into the glorious, productive vineyard of his eternal kingdom.