Bringing it Home
The sermon begins at minute 21:30 into the service above.
Sermon preached by the Rev. John Elliott Lein at St. Thomas à Becket Episcopal Church on October 4th 2020, on the following texts: Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20, Psalm 19, Philippians 3:4b-14, and Matthew 21:33-46.
Good morning!
The last few weeks, we’ve been looking at how the Gospel is more than heavenly—it’s deeply earthly in all ways including speaking to political, economic, and social realities. Today is no exception.
I have a phrase out of Biblical scholarship to teach you today. The next time you’re on a Zoom call, you can impress your friends by inserting a cryptic German phrase into the conversation: “Oh yeah, the Sitz im Leben of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is obviously counter-cultural-era British comedy using a parody of Arthurian legend to poke at conventional yet out-of-touch norms”.
“Sitz im Leben” (pronounced “Zits...) is not, as some might think, an awkward and embarrassing element of becoming a teenager, but rather a German phrase coined in 1918 by Herr. Gunkel that translates to “setting in life”. The basic idea is that every story is created or told in a specific context and can only be properly understood if we learn more about that where, why, and whom.
The simplest level is genre; if we get satire mixed up with history, we’re lost. For example, many conservative American Christians in the last century have missed that the genre of the first chapter of Genesis is clearly poetry, leading to much confusion by putting it up directly against Darwin’s science.
But it can get both more concrete and complicated than that, and it’s an important aspect of looking at our Gospel reading today.
* * *
Today we heard another of Jesus’ parables—traditionally labeled “The Wicked Tenants”. As church insiders, many of us “know” exactly what it means. Yet if we look more closely, borrowing the eyes of different eras and texts rather than assuming it was spoken and written just for us today, we might find some surprises.
This story in Matthew is found in three other Gospels: Mark, Luke, and Thomas; and a related form appears in one far-earlier source in the Hebrew Bible as well. But the starting “Sitz”, or setting, for most of us, is that of traditional church interpretation.
In this telling, the parable is entirely an allegory of Jesus vs. the Jews, of Christianity replacing Judaism. Until the horror of the holocaust prompted theological rethinking, most commentators saw the “wicked tenants” as “the evil Jews who killed Jesus” as the son and themselves as the good Gentiles that God replaced them with in the Vineyard of the kingdom. But if you actually look closely, this easy and comforting “we’re God’s champions” allegorical reading doesn’t hold up well.
Matthew’s version is agreed by most to be the closest to allegory of all the written versions, building on Mark’s more concise account, and yet the author not only neglects some obvious ways to tie this parable to Jesus’ own trials and death, but actually removes details that could be understood as such.(1) But more importantly, in Matthew’s “Sitz” (setting) a decade after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, there was no established Christian Church separate from Judaism! Instead, Matthew’s allegory may be best understood as a rebuttal to the claims of the rival sect of the Pharisees to be the rightful leaders post-temple, and a claim that Jesus’ way would eventually win out through a still-future intervention of God. That is, Matthew is involved in a inter-Jewish squabble over which faction should be in charge! It’s like the Methodists and Episcopalians arguing over whose method of continuing the Anglican tradition after the American Revolution is most legitimate (yes, I obviously have an opinion :).
* * *
But if Matthew’s Sitz could not have allowed him to tell Jesus’ parable as an allegory of Jews vs. Christians, neither could Jesus’ own Sitz fifty years earlier have made any sense of a still-far-distant debate. After all, it was not either the Pharisees nor Jesus’ followers who were in religious or political power, but the chief priests of the Sadducees and their legal scholars (“scribes”).
Getting confused yet? Sorry, I’m trying to distill down my seminary training and the 221 pages I read this week into less than 15 minutes. Here’s where we’re at so far: the parable of the Vineyard Tenants has been read as: a supercessionist anti-Judaism allegory by much of Christian history, but in Matthew’s time would have been an allegory of inter-Jewish struggle for leadership after the First Jewish War, yet in Jesus’ time would have to be about something else entirely!
By the time the Gospels were put into the form we roughly have them today, the parable had taken on new meaning because of its—say it with me—Sitz im Leben. What was Jesus’ original meaning? Well, it’s hard to say for sure, but we have three strong clues:
The chief priests in the audience immediately understand this parable as being told against them. Only Matthew, in his Sitz many years later, adds “Pharisees” to the group.
We know some of what first-century agricultural life was like.
And, there’s one earlier parable that every Jew of the first century would have immediately known that Jesus was riffing on—one written nearly 700 years earlier!
* * *
There is only one Parable of the Vineyard in the Hebrew Bible, and it’s found in Isaiah chapter 5. The details of constructing the vineyard are copied nearly verbatim in Matthew and Luke, but other elements are quite different.
In Isaiah, God talks in first person of lovingly developing the vineyard before being disappointed with the fruits of thorns rather than grapes and deciding to plow it under and abandon it completely. The remainder of the chapter is taken up with an expansion on exactly what this vineyard—that is, an allegory of the nation of Israel—did to disappoint the Lord, and what would happen.
God laments:
I waited for Judah to produce justice
but he produced lawlessness
Nor did he produce righteousness
but a cry!
The critique continues, naming “those who join house to house and bring field next to field so that they may take something from their neighbor” as the source of injustice. The inheritance given to Israel in the beginning was for each family to own and farm small freeholdings in perpetuity, but apparently a few had managed to take those farms away through bribes, debt-collection, and other unethical means and build them into vast holdings at the expense of their neighbors.
* * *
Documents from the first century show that this pattern of wealthy absentee elites forcing freeholders out of their ancestral land through carefully-crafted unjust laws and predatory loans had continued, and Jesus’ audience and loyal followers would have been very familiar with the scenario as it would have directly affected their lives in reducing them to impoverished day laborers.
Can you imagine who this audience would be sympathetic to as Jesus told the story? Maybe they’d be rooting for the tenants—oppressed “by the law”—to revolt and claim justice.
Most of us have been trained to see history through the eyes of colonialists and conquerers—these peasants would have had a different orientation. They may have cheered when they heard what seemed like unexpected success as the heir of the ill-gotten vineyard is killed. Yet, aside from Thomas’ telling which stops there, Jesus continues with the logical conclusion—that the owner would come with overwhelming force to crush the incipient rebellion. The system has been stacked by the powerful against these tenants no matter what they do.
* * *
We also know something about those leaders in the early first century. The chief priests and their scribes/lawyers were seen as deeply corrupt and committed to using their power to oppress and gain more. One commentator compares them to mafia families; we have contemporaneous accounts of them stealing tithes from poorer classes priests and letting them starve, of using their connections to Roman authority to kill and gain wealth, and bribing to get into and keep power.
Whether Jesus’ original story-telling associated them with the oppressive powers of the landowner against the righteous peasants, or with the evil tenants of the vineyard against the righteous servants of the owner, it’s clear they are the target of the story in line with Isaiah’s critique of the powerful centuries earlier.
* * *
So, what’s the point of all this deep dive into texts and contexts?
Well, there’s a few things that come to mind.
Seeing how each generation used the parables to address the problems of injustice of their time frees us up to do the same—
Yet we must also follow the trajectory of God’s values and be consistent in our use of the story in our time.
Making out Jesus to be proclaiming the superiority of the Christian Church over his own Judaism, justifying oppression and abuse, is wrong.
But seeing that God calls out the same unjust systems of our time is correct, such as:
condemning predatory lending that keeps victims in permanent debt, such as payday lenders or higher education loans
condemning predatory monopolies which destroy local businesses in exchange for corporate chains
condemning predatory landlords and banks who take properties from the unfortunate, raise home ownership out of reach for many, and keep millions of homes empty while millions are homeless.
These parables need new applications every generation, and it’s easy to see how the same systems Isaiah and Jesus condemned are ready for us to resist and stand against as well. The Gospel has always been political, in the sense of standing up for the poor and marginalized against the oppressive laws and structures of society built by the powerful—are we ready to add our voices to the prophets?
AMEN.
Notes:
Moving the killing to outside the city matches better, but only John and Hebrews consider this an important element of Jesus’ death. Removing last sent, “only,” and “beloved” is a step backward. Matthew also misses the chance to pair the terms “cast oat”/“handed over”.
