A Sermon preached on Sunday October 4 Harvest Festival at St. Augustine’s, WI
Isaiah 5:1-7, (Philippians 3:4b-14,) Matthew 21:33-46
Today we celebrate Harvest Festival, a special day when we give thanks to God for the harvest. We’re not farmers and I doubt that any of the produce on display was grown by you. But we all still live off real harvests, both local and global! And so, we too give thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season. However, today’s gospel reading describes a rather strange harvest in which such gratitude is sorely lacking! “When the harvest time had come, (the landlord) sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce,” we heard (Matthew 21:34) But all they collect is violence and murder. The tenants are not willing to share their produce nor pay any rent and want to take over the vineyard!
Isn’t it a little odd that the absentee landowner is painted as the good guy, and the tenants as the bad guys? In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, it was often the other way round, and not just then. This summer we spent a week in Dublin and while I was there, I bought a book about Irish history (reading history is something I enjoy, weird, I know). The book was called “Land Is All That Matters: The Struggle That Shaped Irish History”[1] and is all about the struggle, often violent, between impoverished and exploited Irish tenant farmers (mostly Catholic) and their rich absentee Anglo-Irish landlords (mostly Protestant). Just as in Jesus’ parable, the landlord’s agents were targeted: occasionally ostracised (most famously Captain Charles Boycott whose fate introduced the word to boycott into the English language), but also attacked, beaten and sometimes killed, something that also happened to any tenants who did not join the cause. Reading the book, I learned about a host of secret tenant defence societies with wonderful names such as the Whiteboys, Rightboys, Oakboys, Steelboys, Ribbonmen ….
The tenants in Jesus’ parable have no such name. And their struggle is not presented as anything positive. Jesus was in Jerusalem when he told this parable, and that is a place where you were more likely to find a landowner than a peasant, tenant farmer. Perhaps he wanted them to be drawn into the story. The chief priests and elders would have been able to own land, and to have others manage it for them while they were busy in Jerusalem. And so, they might well have seen themselves in the role of the landowner, and they would be ready and even eager to pronounce judgment on the wicked tenants. Of course, this is not the only time that a landowner plays a positive role in one of Jesus’ parables. Just two weeks ago we had a just and generous landlord in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. And when Jesus started telling this parable, they would have been reminded of that other parable about a vineyard, in Isaiah (5:1-7) that we heard this morning. The scene is the same: a landlord plants a vineyard, with a watchtower and a wine press. In the Isaiah story the landlord is clearly God and the vineyard Israel, but there are no tenants, just a bad harvest of wild or sour grapes and drastic consequences!
But if the Jerusalem elite did identify themselves with the good landowner, they soon discover they are wrong as the story goes on. Once again God is the landowner, the vineyard is Israel and the tenants are the religious and political leaders entrusted with Israel’s care and nurture. The produce, just like in Isaiah’s parable is justice and righteousness, and that is still sorely lacking. Over time the landowner sends slaves or servants to collect that good harvest, but they, clearly standing for the prophets in Israel’s past, were rejected, beaten and even killed. A fate that finally even the landowner’s son and heir suffers: this is Jesus. In Matthew’s telling of the parable (we find it in Mark and Luke too) the connection between the son and Jesus is even clearer, with him first being thrown out of the vineyard, and then killed, just as Jesus was first taken out of the city and then crucified.
What will happen to the tenants when the landowner returns, Jesus asks? The chief priests and Pharisees answer: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” (21:41) Yes, Jesus confirms – but you are those tenants and “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” (21:43) Once again Jesus turns things upside down and reverses expectations. We interpret this parable to be an allegory of salvation history with the Church as the new, “other tenants” to whom the “vineyard” will be given after it is taken from those who have not managed it well. It is certainly a call for a change in the spiritual and moral leadership. Earlier in his Gospel (16:19; 18:18) Matthew has already made clear to whom the keys of the kingdom will be given and who will receive the power to bind and loose with divine authority: Peter and the disciples. What would be wrong, and what sadly also fuelled the Christian Church’s antisemitism, would be to interpret this story as about Christianity displacing Judaism as the sole source of salvation, for which the technical term is Supersessionism. God is and remains faithful to God’s chosen people; as followers of Christ we now share in the renewed Covenant and in God’s mission to transform the world.
But before we relax and say this has nothing to do with us, and that’s all in the past. Look at how the focus shifts in the middle of the parable. Initially, especially with Isaiah 5:1-7 as a reference, it clearly refers to the land and people of Israel and to the question of who has the responsibility to care for and nurture them. But then Jesus shifts the focus to the kingdom of God, that is much more than one country or region in time. The kingdom is not a single, physical place, but refers to the realm of God, where justice and righteousness rule, something that Jesus inaugurated but is still not complete. The kingdom of God will be given to a people who produce the fruits of the kingdom, and as we know from the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (5:1-12) those fruits are love, humility, justice, peace, righteousness, mercy and faith in a loving God. These fruits are both a sign that people are living their lives according to kingdom values, and the means by which that kingdom will grow. This parable is not just about some past event; it is an ongoing calling and warning. We are now the tenants of the vineyard that is both this world and the kingdom of God that Jesus called us to transform it into. An so, if the landowner were to send messengers today to receive the fruits of the kingdom, “what would we have to offer? How defensive would we feel when they asked?”[2]
I pray therefore that the produce we offer today at our Harvest Festival in gratitude for God’s providence may be a symbol for the true harvest that comes from living a life dedicated to the love of God and to the love of our neighbour.
Amen.
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