The first words of last week’s Gospel, of this week’s Gospel, and of next week’s are almost the same: Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people… . What follows these words this week is the parable of the “Violent Farm Workers,” and the figure in the story who represents God, the vineyard owner, is pretty violent, too. When the vineyard workers kill his servants and then even his son, the vineyard owner will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease his vineyard to other tenants… . During these three weeks, we are in the section of Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus is with his disciples in Jerusalem, being harassed by the Jewish religious leaders, whom Jesus is addressing. It is important to pay attention to this context. Unfortunately, today’s parable has a history of promoting anti-Semitism. Why? Because of centuries of Christian hostility toward Jews, the parable was interpreted to mean that God’s chosen people, the Jews, had been justly replaced by Christians, the new chosen people. Jesus was not saying that. He did not want that to happen — he wept over Jerusalem in another place in Scripture. This parable was aimed at the religious leaders of the Jews of Jesus’ time. Jesus was warning the religious leaders of his beloved religion that their leadership was killing the vineyard.
In the parable, God’s representatives, and even his own son, were not welcome in their vineyard by the tenants, those given charge over the vineyard. By this time in his preaching career, Jesus himself was recognized by many as a prophet. Now he was being threatened by the Jewish leaders. He rightly suspected he was going to suffer the fate of other Hebrew prophets. This is the context of this fierce parable. The vineyard is a main motif in this parable. Both Jesus and those educated Hebrews he was talking to were familiar with today’s Hebrew Scripture reading about a vineyard (Isaiah 5:1-7), and with Psalm 80, our vineyard sung Response. Vineyards are supposed to produce fruit, just as the fig tree in a previous parable was. But religions are made up of people who are flawed and sinful, and so religions always will have self-destructive tendencies in them. And it is not only the leaders who are problematic; the members are, too. A version of this Gospel was so important that it is found in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke because already, within a few years, some of the first Christians were not living their faith as the apostles taught and expected. The early Christians needed to hear this warning parable about their own new Christian religion.
Fast forward to today. Popes Benedict, Francis and now Leo have been working to reform our Church leadership. But at the same time, all three popes also have called on non-ordained Catholics to be more fruitful tenants of the vineyard, especially by becoming better witnesses or evangelists, by becoming less individualistic, and in other ways by becoming more the people of God that Vatican II called us to be. We are not called to replace the Jews but only to be our own kind of light in the world, which needs all the light it can get.
— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia
The post October 4, 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Vineyards: a Sunday Scriptures blog first appeared on Sisters of the Precious Blood.