The Power of God Is Not All Right
Scripture Reading: Matt. 21:33-46
During my six years of preaching in Korea, this passage came up in the lectionary twice, but I never preached from it. I imagine that many pastors today as well are preaching from other options in the lectionary. That’s because they don’t want to run the risk of sounding antisemitic. This passage can easily be misconstrued or manipulated as condemning all of Judaism, which of course is ridiculous because Jesus himself was a Jew. But in this reading Jesus is sharply critical of the Jewish religious authorities—the chief priests and elders of the temple—and issues a prophecy of judgment against them.
As we continue to make our way through the Gospel of Matthew, drawing ever closer to the shadow of the cross, the tension between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders is growing. That’s even more so the case now that he has reached Jerusalem and is being challenged by the chief priests and elders who oversee the temple. Last week we heard Jesus tell them that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of heaven ahead of them.
Now in this passage Jesus turns up the heat even further with another provocative parable that is about to set the chief priests and elders boiling over. This is the second of three parables that Jesus addresses to the religious leaders in the temple. Like so many of his parables, the theme is agricultural. A landowner leases his property to tenants, who in exchange for cultivating the land will be allowed to keep a portion of the crop that it yields. But that doesn’t satisfy the tenants, because when the landowner sends his servants to collect the crops the tenants brutally attack them, even killing one.
Undeterred, the landowner sends a second group of servants, larger than the first. Perhaps their greater number will deter further violence. But the same thing happens again. The tenants beat, capture, and kill the servants.
Now, a third time the landowner sends a party to collect the fruit of his fields, that which is rightly his, but this time rather than sending more servants he sends his son, his own flesh and blood. “Surely they will respect my son,” he says to himself. But when the tenants see the son, they are filled with greed and bloodlust, thinking that if they kill the son, all of the landowner’s fields will be theirs. And so they seize him and kill him.
The first thing to say about this parable is that it’s absurd.
The first thing to say about this parable is that it’s absurd. The landowner seems naive at best. It should be instantly clear to him after the first group of servants is killed that the tenants don’t respect his authority. But what does he do? He sends still more servants, and when they are killed, he even sends his son! Imagine being the son. What must he think about the mission that his father sends him on? Hey, Dad, are you sure about this? Maybe it would be better to send a company of soldiers armed with swords instead of little ol' me?
Second, the rationale of the tenants for killing the son doesn’t make sense either. With the landowner still living, there would be no inheritance for them to collect, unless they planned on being patient enough to wait until the landowner himself died or they planned to somehow kill him as well. Not to mention, there’s no reason that tenant farmers, as opposed to, say, next of kin, would stand to inherit anything at all!
Third, these tenant farmers act with utter impunity, as if there are no consequences to their actions. The whole parable is absurd.
Now, let me tell you why none of that matters. Jesus, as you may well know, is no fool. And he tells this parable the way he does because of the audience he’s addressing—namely, the temple leaders. The parable is an allegory, i.e., a story in which characters, places, and events can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning. Each element in the parable is a stand-in for something in the real world. The landowner is God, the vineyard is the kingdom of God, the servants who are sent to collect the fruit of the fields are the prophets, and the tenants who beat and kill the servants are the Jewish religious leaders. Oh, and one guess who the son represents!
When it comes to interpreting this parable, we stand in a favorable position compared with the religious leaders. We have the key that unlocks the parable. We know what happens to Jesus, who of course is the son in the parable. We know that he will be arrested by these very same religious leaders and condemned to death, then handed over to the Romans to be crucified.
But the religious leaders don’t yet know this. They listen to the parable with a kind of naïveté and a genuine interest. Therefore, when Jesus asks them what the landowner will do to the tenants who have beaten his servants and murdered his son, they want to see justice done. “He will put those wretches to a miserable death,” they exclaim, “and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
That is when Jesus confronts them by holding a mirror up to their own guilt, for it was the religious leaders who time and again had mistreated the prophets whom God had sent. It was the religious leaders who were hostile to the prophets’ call for repentance. And it is the religious leaders who are now hostile to Jesus, who stand ready to arrest him, the one who is not only God’s prophet but God’s own Son. “Therefore I tell you,” Jesus says to them, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits.”
Consider that the judgment that’s leveled against the religious leaders they pronounce upon themselves.
This sounds harsh, I know, and if we interpret what Jesus says to mean that God is replacing Israel with the church, we do a great violence to the passage and make it much harsher than it actually is. Consider that the judgment that’s leveled against the religious leaders they pronounce upon themselves. “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants.” These are their own words. It is they who forfeit what God has entrusted to them and who demand that God entrust it to others who will give him the produce at the harvest time.
There is another factor that might soften our understanding of what God is up to in this passage. Yet another peculiar aspect of the parable is that the landowner is absent for most of it. We read in the first verse that after preparing the vineyard for cultivation, “he leased it to tenants and went away.” We’re not told where he goes or why he leaves, only that he goes away. The fact that the owner goes away may explain to some extent why the tenants believe that they can harass his servants and kill his son with no consequences. But it also suggests two interesting things theologically.
First, far from a God who is quick to anger and eager to punish, it suggests a God who is remarkably patient with his wayward people.
First, far from a God who is quick to anger and eager to punish, it suggests a God who is remarkably patient with his wayward people. It suggests a God who is slow to anger, a God who sends prophet after prophet after prophet, giving the people repeated opportunities to repent so that they may yet produce a harvest of righteousness.
Second, like the servants whom the owner sends into the field to collect the harvest, it suggests to us that when the servants of God suffer—as we all do—it can seem as though God is absent. That’s because we equate suffering with God’s absence. When the tumor has spread, when the bills pile up, when the 4:00 AM phone call brings unwelcome news, it sure seems that God, like the landowner, has gone away and forgotten all about us. Or even worse, we may think that God is actively punishing us.
I don’t mean to diminish or disregard such feelings. They’re honest. They’re raw. But I can say with all sincerity and seriousness that nothing could be further from the truth, because the truth—and I do not say this lightly—is that suffering in fact brings us closer to God. This is the wonder of the cross. This is the confounding miracle of God’s power as revealed on the cross.
In his book on the parables of Jesus, which I’ve been turning to of late in my sermon preparation, Robert Capon contrasts what he calls the right-handed power of God with the left-handed power of God. It’s sort of like the human brain. The right and left sides of the brain handle different tasks. The left side of the brain is associated with logic and language processing, while the right side is linked with creativity and intuition.
In terms of the power of God, right-handed power is direct, straight-line, intervening power. It’s power that’s easily recognized as power. Think of God parting the Red Sea. Hebrew and Egyptian alike witnessed the right hand of God holding back and then releasing the waters.
But God’s power is not all right. In contrast with the direct forcefulness of right-handed power, left-handed power is paradoxical power. It’s power that seems an awful lot like weakness.
But God’s power is not all right. In contrast with the direct forcefulness of right-handed power, left-handed power is paradoxical power. It’s power that seems an awful lot like weakness. Think of those Civil Rights—era lunch-counter sit-ins against segregation, where protestors sat peaceably while mockers dumped containers of condiments on their heads. Their pacifism was easily mistaken for weakness by those who couldn’t recognize the left-handed power of God.
Or think of the cross. On the cross Jesus demonstrates God’s left-handed power—the power not of the clenched fist but the open hand. And so God sends his Son into the world, not to conquer his enemies but to die for them and to die for a world that utterly despised and rejected him, Jew and Gentile alike. Such is the power of his death that it yields an abundant harvest of grace for all who trust in him.