let us kill him
Sundays this summer, we are reading a section of the Gospel according to Matthew, in which Jesus tells "kingdom parables" meant to tell folks what the kingdom of God is like. Here is our text for the upcoming Sunday, October 8:
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’? (Psalm 118:22,23)
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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This "parable" is said to have been highly popular with Christians in the late first century A.D. and later, with Matthew having retrospectively converted Jesus' parable into an ominous allegory in which the landowner is God, the wicked tenants are the Jewish people, the slaves are the prophets, the son is Jesus who was crucified; and the vineyard was Israel, the kingdom of God on earth, which was decimated in the Jewish/Roman war and the 70 A.D. destruction of Jerusalem.
For us latter-day Christians preaching the grace, mercy, and peace of God, Matthew's report of Jesus uttering such vengeful, angry violence can be unsettling unto highly disturbing. However, the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, with sayings of Jesus not set, as the canonical gospels have them, into agenda-driven situations, and its availability to scholars for examination and comparison with canonical gospels, have enabled for us, new understandings and more balanced perspectives on what Jesus is likely to have said. Here's how the Gospel of Thomas presents this parable.
GThomas65. He said, A [...] person owned a vineyard and rented it to some farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from them. He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard's crop. They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the slave returned and told his master. His master said, "Perhaps he didn't know them." He sent another slave, and the farmers beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said, "Perhaps they'll show my son some respect." Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him and killed him. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!
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Where scholars of the Jesus Seminar would have "colored" Matthew's version of the parable as a highly doubtful "black," comparing it to the one in G.Thomas, which they colored pink or red, they have been able to color Matthew's version "gray" as likely based on what Jesus actually said even though evidently substantially revised. For me, such new understandings and "updatings" can make the gospel more credible, and what I believe, teach and preach much more appealing.
Tuesday, good morning. I think that's all I want to say this morning.
RSF&PTL
T88&c