Read this! Matthew 21:33-46
There are problems with this parable. The whole economic and social structure that is the landowner/tenant farmer/ slave/ day worker system is severely problematic, especially to our individualistic, upward mobility, freedom-loving minds. In First Century Palestine, you were born into a place in life, and that’s where you stayed, that was your lot in life, you played the cards you were dealt as best you could, but there really weren’t a lot of choices to be had. You were what your father or your mother was before you. You had to decide, would you have bread and fish for dinner, or fish and bread? You were stuck where you started. The landowners certainly benefited from this unjust social structure. They had good reasons to keep this social structure in tact. Because it didn’t matter how hard you worked, if you weren’t incredibly, ridiculously, overwhelmingly rich, you survived hand-to-mouth, if you survived at all. The closest thing they had to a “middle class” was the tenant farmer — the one put in charge of tending to the landowner’s land, responsible for its fruitful success, responsible for its fruitless failures, at the mercy of floods and droughts and locusts and weeds. After tending the land, paying the landlord rent, giving the landlord a section of the profits, after buying seed for next year, feeding the animals, paying the taxes, and donating to the temple, there was very little to survive on, if the weather cooperated, maybe just enough to feed your family, maybe enough for a new pair of shoes that the little one keeps outgrowing. This whole parable is based upon an unequal, unfair, unjust social and economic system. In fact, this whole parable is based upon…real life, how things are for most people, even in our modern world. If Jesus were telling this story to a group of real tenant farmers, or a gaggle of slaves, or a crowd of day workers, if he had been telling this story to a collection of people who were victims of this societal structure, what we’d have here is an absentee landlord, an unjust system, and a set of reasonable, or at least understandable actions on the part of the tenant farmers. They’ve had it. It’s a revolt. It’s the American Revolution. They’re throwing tea into the harbor and refusing to pay taxes and practicing guerrilla warfare, and finally saying we have had enough. It’s the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the Rebellion.
But Jesus isn’t talking to the oppressed. This story is not for them. This story is directed towards the Temple priests and scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees, the guys who are tasked with creating and maintaining this social structure. This story is told to the gatekeepers, the ones who are in charge of drawing the line between who is in and who is out. And this makes all the difference. Jesus tells this story to a people who just assume that this societal structure is how things should be, they don’t question the system at all. It’s just a matter of course that the landlord leaves, that the tenants care for the land, that the landlord comes back, usually by proxy, to collect what is due.
I listened to this wonderful podcast yesterday. I highly recommend it. Brene Brown was interviewing Sonia Renee Taylor. Sonia Renee Taylor is an author, civil rights activist, poet and mental health advocate who wrote a book called, “The Body Is Not an Apology.” She argues that we have built an entire system based upon the bodies, and worthiness of those bodies, of others. This system externalizes our values: the ones on “top” are the ones who are best able to support the structure. She calls it “the ladder” - this hierarchy of value which rewards people who fit into the societal mold, and punishes those who don’t quite fit. Our aim, in this structure, is to get to the “top” - to accumulate the most stuff, to be determined as the most successful, the be the smartest and richest and most revered. But the system is rigged against most of us, she says. For most of us, because of our gender, our race, our socioeconomic status, our education, or our genes, and all of those things that are actually out of our control, we simply can’t get to the top, we can’t win the game. But it’s the only game in town, so we play it. And if we can’t win the game, then at least we can beat the pants off the poor guy beneath us. None of us can be at the top, so we create structures, rules, hierarchies, and values so that we can at least be better than whomever is below us. It’s a ladder, she says, and each person climbs the ladder by stepping on the backs of someone else. It’s a ladder that says that the vineyard is ours, that we earned the vineyard, and that we deserve what we have. Even if that’s not at all true. But we don’t have any other way to measure our worth. The ladder is our chosen measuring stick, even when the ladder is always telling us that somebody is “better” and “worthier” than we are. It’s a ladder based upon scarcity, and we will commit violence to anyone who tries to disrupt this ladder. This is the heart of systemic injustice.
She argues that for the sake of the world, for the sake of ourselves and those we love, for the sake of humanity in general, we need to divest from the ladder, or, if nothing else, we need to stop worshipping it, stop polishing it, stop passing it on to our children as if it is the only way to live. In fact, she argues, the ladder is imaginary. The ladder is a construct. Once we divest from the ladder, this system of saying who is in and who is out, this way of discrediting each other so that we can at least be one rung ahead, the structure itself falls apart, it’s no longer structurally sound, it all falls down. Once we divest from the ladder, we’re free, free to write our own stories, free to live by a different set of codes, free to embrace the things that our soul loves.
Jesus is talking to the guys at the top of the ladder. “God put you in charge of all the things,” he says. And God expected you to take care of it. To be stewards of it. To nurture it and grow it and love it into its truest self. And when God sent God’s prophets to “collect” on God’s investment, you beat and tortured and killed them. When God sent God’s own Son to reset the societal structure, you killed him, too. What the landowner, what God, is doing in this parable is upending the societal structure that the tenants have created for themselves. God reminds them that none of this is theirs, none of this belongs to them. They are just stewards, caretakers, inviters and supporters of what God is doing in the world. God has sent God’s people to remind the tenants that the ladder they have constructed is a construct, it’s imaginary, it’s not real, or helpful, or just. And the prophets and their message of dismantling the ladder is met with violence. It rarely ends well for a prophet. Rejection, exile, assassination is usually how it goes for them.
Because there is so much at stake for these tenants. They want the inheritance. They want all the goods and all the power and all the prestige and all the things for themselves. They want the vineyard for themselves. They’re willing to commit repeated acts of violence in order to make this so. They’ll do anything to keep their place on the ladder, and to make sure that there are plenty of people hanging on for dear life below them.
See, after stealing a donkey, sneaking in to Jerusalem, turning the tables and inviting outcasts into the temple, after physically dismantling the ladder and causing an uproar in the city, Jesus knows he can’t just make a mess on the outside. Jesus knows that he has to scramble us up on the inside. To dismantle the ladder inside of ourselves is the only way to dismantle the ladder as a whole. Now, Jesus is telling the ones at the top rungs of the ladder that the ladder isn’t real. Jesus has come to tear down the ladder. To tear down the temple. And to rebuild it into something new.
Jesus is that cornerstone to what will be rebuilt.
And the builders reject him. Just like the tenants reject the landowner’s son.
“They said to themselves, ‘This is the heir!’ - do you hear it? This is the guy at the top of the ladder. If we overtake him, then we can take over his place in the hierarchy. If we get rid of him, then we’re the top dog, we get all the things, we will have the power, we’ll be number one. ‘Come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ If we get rid of the guy above us, we will move on up, we will get what he has, we will get “where” he “is.”
And here is the turning point of the whole parable. For us, and for the leaders of the Temple. Jesus asks them, and he asks us, a question. And how we answer that question will determine our fates. “Now, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” Do you hear it? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Jesus is asking them, “by what construct are you going to live?” What’s your cornerstone? What’s that thing that you are going to stake your life upon? Is it the ladder? Or is it something else, something that maybe hasn’t even been built yet, but something that is distinctively-not-the-ladder? And without even thinking, without even questioning it, because it is simply the air that they breathe, the guys with power choose the ladder. They choose the hierarchy. They choose to end the story with a framework that they are comfortable and familiar with, even if it means their own destruction. Even if it means that they will trip over and lose their own freedom, their own well being, their own beloved-ness, even if it means that they will be crushed by their own hypocrisy and greed and by the very structure upon which they have based their whole lives, they can’t let go of the ladder. They can’t let go of the construct. They can’t lose it all, because the ladder is all they have.
So they answer him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at harvest time.” Those tenants will get what is coming to them. They will get justice. They will be forced to pay for what they’ve done. Because that’s what we would do. Because that is the structure that we live by. That’s the story that we know. That’s the ladder that we climb.
And how does Jesus respond? He doesn’t tell them that they’re exactly right. He doesn’t tell them that they’ve chosen wisely. He doesn’t say, “yup, this is exactly what God is going to do to you, you wicked tenants of the temple!” Instead, he asks them another question. He points them back to their own narrative. And he places himself in their story. “Haven’t you read the scriptures? How “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone?” Haven’t you read that the thing upon which you should build your lives is the thing that has been rejected, the thing that disrupts the hierarchy, the thing that dismantles the ladder and builds something new in its place? This dismantling and rebuilding, this redefining and restructuring, this tearing down and building back up is the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.
And they get it. They understand exactly what he is telling them. But the ironic thing is that these chief priests and Pharisees are so ingrained in their structure, they’ve so much at stake in its rising or falling, they have their identities wrapped so completely around the formation and survival of this ladder, they do the exact thing the parable warns them not to do. They realize that he is speaking about them, that Jesus is requiring a complete transformation of the foundations upon which they have built their lives, and they can’t handle it.
Because they actually get the answer wrong. This isn’t what God does at all. God doesn’t come down to us to smite us and give us our just desserts for supporting the status quo. God sends God’s son. And we kill him. But God doesn’t put us to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give God the produce at harvest time.” We kill God’s son, and what does God do? God raises him on the third day. And then God keeps sending him back to the vineyard, again and again and again, and even gets killed again and again and again, in all the tiny and major ways that we betray each other and trash our earth and reject our stories and fortify that gosh darn ladder. But God doesn’t do what the Pharisees and the scribes and the church leaders think God will do. The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. And the people who reject that cornerstone are given opportunity after opportunity to dismantle that ladder. They’re given the opportunity to try again. They’re given chance after chance to produce the fruits of the kingdom. God is dismantling the ladder simply by giving us chance after chance after chance. God is destroying our constructs with grace. You don’t have to live this way. You can choose to end the parable differently. You can choose to reject the ladder. You don’t have to live with all the rules and the imaginary constructs and the societal structures that have been built for you. You can go a different way. You can choose a different path.
As we at Peters Creek think about what we want to be, about who we want to be, about what the church should be, as we struggle to redefine our purpose and transform our ministry and foster the kingdom of God in what little ways we can, let’s think about that ladder. Let’s think about how we don’t have to live according to that paradigm anymore. Let’s think about how we can be a place where all people can get a break from the pressures and the falseness and the distractions of the ladder. We have a different cornerstone. We can choose to end the parable differently.
How will we choose to end the parable?
Thanks be to God.
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