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[Preached ten times from 2/24/87 at St. John’s College Durham to 2/10/00 at Bede College, Durham]

At first sight, this is an easy parable; a plain, straightforward story, and an equally plain straightforward lesson to be learned from it. The story? Here is a piece of land, laid out as a vineyard. The owner does not live on it, doesn’t work it. He has leased it to tenants with a straightforward contrast—no fault to find here, unless you object on principle to the private ownership of land and the means of production. The terms of the contract are clear; a certain percentage of the produce of the vineyard, possibly in grapes, possibly in wine, is to be paid by way of rent to the owner. The leasers break the terms of the contract, failing to pay the due percentage of the product, and in the end seek to gain not only the whole of the product but the estate itself. Naturally, the owner is displeased, gets rid of his tenants, and looks for new workers.

And the interpretation is easy. God expects obedience. God expects his workers to fulfill their contract; he looks for obedience and he means to have it. If those to whom he has at first entrusted the opportunity and privilege of working with him, fail to take up the opportunity and privilege they will be removed from their position and he will find others who will do better. God, you might say with some misgiving, gives nothing away. From those to whom much has been entrusted, much will be expected. There is no security of tenure in the service of God. Fail to produce the goods and you are out. Perhaps it is at this uncomfortable point that we ask whether the parable is quite so simple.

There are problems in the story. Don’t people seem to over-react? One can understand that the tenants would rather keep all the produce of the vineyard to themselves than send some of it off to the landlord but was it necessary to hurt, kill, stone the messengers, including in the end the owner’s son? No one likes seeing the small brown envelopes in which the income taxman sends us his demands, but you don’t go and murder the taxman who sent them. And could the tenants reasonably hope that murdering the intended heir was the best way to take his place and get hold of the inheritance? It does not seem to be the best way to wheedle your way into the father’s will. On the other hand, provoked as the owner must have been, would he take the law into his own hands, and seek revenge by killing off the tenants? Putting it all together do we have to say that the realism of Jesus’ parables breaks down here?

Not completely if you look in C. H. Dodd’s Parables of the Kingdom you will find a good deal about absentee landlords and the real and supposed rights of tenants, the way in which economic motives could be mixed and reinforced with nationalistic and revolutionary motives and interests, and the violence that sometimes resulted. Also you learn about the way a landlord could seek and sometimes get the aid of government forces who might act against rebellious tenants in a thoroughly uninhibited way. All this is interesting and very well worth knowing. But it doesn’t cover everything and we shall not get away without using the word allegory. In any case we have to. The opening description of the preparation of the vineyard is plainly borrowed from the song of the vineyard in Isaiah 5 and there you have the plain identification; the vineyard is Israel. So it is here, and the rest fits in; the servants are prophets, and the son is the Son. And we know what kind of fate befell them all.

Let me say here that I know quite well that some try to dig out of the parable a primitive un-allegorical form, allegorized by editors. Maybe; I’m doubtful, and in any case I am talking about the parable that Matthew gives us. This sort of consideration will lead us in a different direction. If we are talking about editorial activity, you will see how neatly verse 41 links with verse 43. He will bring an evil fate upon these evil men and destroy them, and will let the vineyard out to other tenants, persons who will render him its fruits in the proper season. . . . Therefore, I tell you that the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that produces its fruits. All neat and consequential. But in between stands verse 42 which produces an Old Testament quotation which seems to have little to do with its context. “Did you never read in the Scriptures, the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; this comes from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” The parable leads up to a climax in the death of the owner’s son; the consequence is the displacement of the tenants. The inserted quotation leads up to the rejection of a stone, and the consequence has nothing to do with the builders but with the fact that the stone turns up in the most prominent and important place. Here of course you can begin to talk about interpolation, but I am dealing with the parable as we read it in Matthew.

And at this point, I for one have had enough of literary criticism and interesting bits of historical information. I have reached the point at which I can simply work with what the parable has to say to Matthew’s readers, whether in the first century or in the twentieth. Here are two themes lying side by side; the rejection of God’s unprofitable servants who do not give him what they owe; and the vindication of God’s Son, who has laid down his life in doing his Father’s work. The life and work, the obedience and disobedience of the people of God, Christology, the rejection, suffering and vindication of the Son of God must be left together; you cannot understand the one without the other.

This is the first thing we are to learn from this parable and it will take some thinking about. What do you mean by the vindication of Jesus after his passion? Of course you mean the resurrection, the discovery that the newly filled grave is now empty, the encounters between Jesus and his disciples, first to Peter, then to the Twelve and so on, as the familiar list runs. And this is quite correct and it is fundamental and nothing I shall say is intended to diminish its importance. But it does not take you to the end of the story. God wants people who will work his vineyard for him. In the parable it is easy; you sack a lot of tenants and take on new staff. There are plenty about waiting to be hired. But in theology, that is in real life, it is not so easy. For we all belong to the old gang, we have all withheld God’s due from him, so that God will only find new tenants if he can change the old ones. This is how the vindication of Jesus goes on. God doesn’t simply bring Jesus back to life. “If you then were risen with Christ . . .” says the New Testament stating its basic presupposition. The vindication of Christ means the renewal of humanity. If it means anything less, you don’t have even the happy ending of a story. His vineyard, neglected and running to weeds, is made by God to be worked. There must be a new a renewed people of God who will do God’s will.

That leads to a second point. It involves mixing metaphors but we didn’t start the practice, the mix up is there in the Gospel text and that is surely a good enough justification for it. That which constitutes the new group of tenants, that which makes the new obedient people is that Christ, the rejected stone, becomes the head of the corner. Even after reading a number of commentaries, I am not wholly clear what architecturally “the head of the corner” means. It doesn’t worry me. It means the outstanding stone, outstanding in appearance and in importance. Take it away and the wall will look wrong, take it away and the wall will fall down. Maybe that is clear enough, but if there is ambiguity in the picture, there is more in the meaning. The one thing that is indispensable to the renewed people, to the renewed individual is Christ. He must be the foundation of our life; our trust must be in him. He must be that which is preached to the world by the way we live. Again Paul has the epigram for us—“for me to live is Christ. I live no longer, Christ lives in me.” This must be so and it must appear to be so, for us as man and woman, for us as the people of God.

This in turn leads to a third and last point. Where do we find the new tenants? Matthew uses a surprising word for them, not λαός, the word that is often used for the people of God, but the bare ἔθνος. There is no label, not the word Church, not any adjective, simply a people, a folk who produce the fruit of the Kingdom. We talk and sometimes we dispute about the marks of the Church. Sure we are content to speak of a community where the word of God is preached in its purity, and the sacraments are duly administered. Some look for subscription to creeds and articles, some for a particular form of ministry. I shall not for a moment dispute the importance of these matters. But the question that matters is, does this church, this man, this woman show the fruits of the Kingdom of God and offer them back to God? There is no other test of the authenticity of our faith.