Wednesday Sunday School

 

Sunset from 7H last evening, generally it takes clouds to make spectacular sunrises and sunsets. There's a proverb about life there, maybe a sermon, even a funeral homily, eh? How would life be without clouds? My mother died a Sunday morning in July 2011: that evening we drove out along the Bay, stopped over just north of Hathaway Bridge, and I got a memorable picture looking west across the Bay at sunset. Leaving me there to contemplate her life with sunny times, some clouds. Maybe there are more clouds at the end, eh? IDK.

Musing, thinking, remembering. I didn't intend to go there, but the sunset across the Bay brought it back. Es tut mir leid.

Here's the gospel for the upcoming Sunday:

Matthew 21:33-46

Jesus said, “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. 

Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “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.”

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:

‘The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord’s doing,

and it is amazing in our eyes’?

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. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”

When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

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It's one parable that some NT scholars suggest is allegory: the landowner is God, the vineyard is the kingdom of God on earth, the fence shows that the kingdom is entrusted exclusively, the tenants are Israel. Working from memory, I am not going to stop and look up to see what the winepress and watchtower represent, but in a proper allegory everything in the story stands for something specific in real life. The slaves are the OT prophets. The son would be Jesus himself or the Son of Man. The point is that, lacking morals and integrity, the tenants have not dealt honorably with what has been entrusted to them, even killing the prophets and now killing the Son.

Of his parables, many scholars say Jesus just tells the parable and drops it in your lap to work out yourself if you have the wits to see, he doesn't finish up with questions, discussion, summarizing and moralizing. So, the back and forth after the parable would be Matthew's construction; and digging for things like that is part of what we do in our bible study. Does it matter? For our probing, yes. Theologically, maybe not. We don't claim that it's only Jesus' quoted words that constitute "the Gospel", but the whole thing. Good for class discussion!  

The class also would ask about the son in the parable. Writing maybe 80 to 90 AD? and knowing about the crucifixion, Matthew can reflect, read and write retrospectively, but what about the characters in the story, and even the story itself: what's with knowing ahead of time that the tenants will kill the Son (which is part of Matthew's point)? Put yourself into the picture, you are there in the temple as Jesus tells the story. Try to avoid piously rationalizing that Well, Jesus knew (which would be reading your 21st century conviction back into the story). Or is Jesus' foreknowledge itself part of Matthew's message? Does the story actually come from the mouth of Jesus himself? It seems quite vehemently against the pharisees and chief priests, even against the Jews as unfaithful people of God: how does that possibility sit with Matthew's agenda of persuading his audience, his first century Jewish-Christian church, that Jesus was the Messiah? How could it possibly help Matthew's cause of persuading Jews that Jesus is Messiah to portray the Jews as unfaithful, the bad guys who killed God's Son? Is Matthew the Jewish evangelist in fact what today we would call "antisemitic"? It's for class discussion, I'm not going to try and work it out.

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