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Looking up content for: Matthew 21:33-46 (posted on 09/26/2005)

Comments and Observations

• The Parable of the Tenants does not rank as one of the more famous of Jesus’ parables. Outside the church (and maybe inside, too) few people would tumble to this particular passage if asked to list three or four of the well-known parables of Jesus. The Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the Pearl of Great Price would surely come to most people’s minds more readily than this parable.
• Curiously, however, along with the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Mustard Seed, this parable in Matthew 21 is one of only three that is included in all three of the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Apparently each of the evangelists concluded that you couldn’t have a complete gospel account of Jesus without including this parable.
• The reason for this may be that this story spells out so very well that Jesus represented a key turning point in salvation history. Hereafter a person’s spiritual standing would be determined by their reaction to Jesus as God’s Christ.
• It should also be noted that this parable demonstrates quite decisively that in their original context, parables were not the homey, heartwarming stories that we often find them to be today. Just about every one of Jesus’ parables provided a certain pinch to those who heard the story. But the Parable of the Tenants shows where parable-telling ultimately gets you: it gets you dead! The parables contained no small amount of polemics, as the religious leaders in Matthew 21 rightly discerned in this particular story when they realized (vs. 45) that Jesus had spoken this parable against them.
• As most commentators note, the vineyard owner in this story is patient to an extreme degree—so much so that we cannot imagine a real-life vintner/owner who would have put up with so much abuse of his underlings. Perhaps our shock at witnessing this inordinate, inexplicable patience is meant to drive home the wonder of God’s mercy. To all those who think God is fundamentally an angry being intent on punishing and hacking away at his enemies in this world, take a look at this parabolic owner and then make the connection! Maybe no real person would ever be this patient and longsuffering, but God has been and is.
• But perhaps this is how God must behave if, as a matter of fact, his ultimate goal is salvation and restoration (not a pillaging and plowing under of the world he loved enough to save).
• Indeed, isn’t it striking that in this parable the tenants never do get their comeuppance? Jesus asks what would happen to any tenants who behaved this way, and the people listening to Jesus say exactly what you would expect: those tenants will be wiped out! But Jesus himself never quite says that. Instead he goes on to invoke the Psalm 118 image of the rejected stone, pointing to the fact that God’s ultimate response to this world’s abusive treatment of God and his servants will not be a full-frontal assault of revenge but an immense sacrifice of God’s own Son. True, that rejected one will become the key in all salvation and those who oppose that Christ will find themselves on the losing end of things (vss. 43-44) but that is still a different divine response than what we might have expected. Long about the time you expect Jesus to say, “Yes, the owner will come and rough them up,” he instead says in essence, “I will lie down and die for them as the rejected stone!”

Questions to Ponder/Issues to Address

• Most commentators point out that the logic of the tenants was faulty: killing the heir would by no means (and in no known legal way) cede the vineyard to them—at least not so long as the owner himself still lived. Verse 38, therefore, seems to represent the height of folly. Why did Jesus frame it just this way?
• Why and how did Jesus move from agricultural imagery to the sudden (and somewhat surprising) image of a rejected stone at a construction site? Some think that the abruptness of that transition means this was a later addition to the text. But how and why might it actually fit very well as an original part of this particular parable?
• In preaching on this parable, what lessons can we present to modern-day listeners who might be tempted to understand the “bottom line” of this parable to be no more than “Well, at least we are not like those rotten tenants!”? But that tempts us to take on the role of the Pharisee in another parable: “I thank, you, O God, that I am not like other people . . .” Is there an application or lesson for us in the church even today?
• Some notes from Calvin Theological Seminary Professor or New Testament, Dr. Dean Deppe:
• Notice that Psalm 118 is placed at the beginning, middle, and end of the larger section of Matthew chapters 21-23. In 21:9 Jesus fulfils Ps. 118:26 by demonstrating he is the triumphant Davidic Messiah expected by Israel. Then in the middle, at Mt. 21:42, Jesus shows that he is the rejected stone of Ps. 118:22-23 as well so that the expected Messiah needs to be seen as a suffering rejected Son of David. The next verse is a crucial addition of Matthew to Mark that shows his purpose, "The kingdom will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit." The people who produce fruit are the tax collectors and prostitutes who recognized God's servants, the Baptist and Jesus. Finally, in 23:39 this one whom Jerusalem rejects (23:37) will be the coming one all Israel will see, the Blessed One who comes in the name of the Lord (Ps. 118:26).
• The structure of these chapters is important too. The section begins with three prophetic actions by God (triumphal entry, cleansing of the temple, cursing of the fig tree). The blind and the lame (21:14) go ahead of the chief priests and teachers of the law (21:14) in understanding. Then there are three parables which become for Matthew history of redemption parables. In the parable of the two Sons, the Jewish leaders reject John the Baptist. In the Parable of the Tenants, the Jewish leaders reject Jesus. In the parable of the Wedding Banquet the Jewish leaders reject the apostles and prophets or disciples of Jesus so that finally the city Jerusalem is burned and destroyed (22:7). (See John Timmer's book, The Kingdom Equation, p. 60 for an explanation). God has not rejected his people. They have rejected his salvation messengers.
• Then there are three debates with three different groups of Jewish leaders (Pharisees 22:15; Sadducees 22:23; Lawyers or scribes 22:35) and each are rebuffed by Jesus and his wisdom so that they cannot answer his questions (22:41-45) and dare not ask any more questions (22:46). Jesus is superior to the Jewish leaders.
• Finally after Mt's three 3's, he has the seven woes of chapter 23. This is a scathing rebuke of the Jewish leaders who kill and stone the prophets, ending with Jesus' longing to gather them (23:37) but they would not (23:38) so he turns to others in his ministry. God still longs for his people and has not rejected them, but they are left behind. The lost sheep of Israel go first (Mt. 10:6; 15:24).

Textual Points

• Notice that verse 33 is pretty detailed when it comes to describing the vineyard (the verbs really pile up). Jesus could have said simply no more than, "Once upon a time a certain man owned a vineyard," and then gone from there. But in this case Jesus is elaborate in mentioning the planting of the vineyard, the building of the wall, the installation of the winepress, the construction of the watchtower. What's up with all this detail?
• Most parables have an economy of words and a minimum of detail. The extra details in Matthew 21:33 was intentional: this is an overt allusion to Isaiah 5. Isaiah 5 contains its own kind of parable in which Israel is compared to a vineyard. In that story a vintner who clearly stood for Yahweh invested lavish amounts of labor and money into his vineyard, anticipating that the end-result of all his fine and hard work would be a rich harvest of lusciously sweet grapes. But when the harvest came, the farmer found that every single vine contained sour grapes, bitter and vile and inedible! So in a fury he plowed the whole thing under.
• Isaiah 5 was a prophetic parable pointing forward to the time when God's vineyard of Israel would be "plowed under" by the Babylonians on account of Israel's repeated bitter failings to produce the kind of spiritual fruit God was looking for in his chosen people. In other words, the image of Israel as vineyard was used in Isaiah 5 to point forward to a key turning point in God's dealings with this world. Now in Matthew 21, by so deliberately invoking this same image, Jesus likewise is as much as saying that in the grand scheme of things, a new and significant turning-point would soon be reached.
• The gospel writers seemed to savor the delicious irony of salvation emerging from the least likely location. They enjoyed this irony so much, in fact, that the once-obscure text of Psalm 118:22 went on to become the single most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament. Out of all the thousands of verses in the Old Testament, this little nugget about the rejected stone becoming the head of the corner wins the prize for most frequent New Testament citation. In a quirky way, the verse itself does the very thing it is talking about: the little verse that seemed least among many other verses in the Hebrew Bible emerges on top in the gospels and epistles! You would have expected a different verse to get this kind of attention--perhaps something from the covenant with Abraham, a snippet of a sermon from Moses, one of those soaring prophetic passages from Isaiah, or even Psalm 23. But no, Psalm 118:22 manages best to convey the gospel's great reversal of expectations. From lowly and humble beginnings, Jesus would end up being the rejected one whom God would raise up to be the most impressive of all biblical figures. The carpenter's son from the backwaters of the Roman Empire would turn out to be the cosmic King.

Illustration Idea

The story is told that one evening a man in a Dearborn, Michigan, restaurant bumped into no less than the famous Chrysler chairman, Lee Iacocca. "Oh, Mr. Iacocca," the man exclaimed, "what an honor to meet you! Say, my name is Jack and I'm having a business dinner with some colleagues over there at that corner table. It would really impress my friends if you could come over in a few minutes and say, 'Hi, Jack,' like you know me!" Iacocca good-naturedly agreed and so some minutes later went over to the table and said, "Hello, Jack! How are you?" Jack then looked up and said, "Not now, Lee. We're busy!"

This perhaps apocryphal story underscores the core of pride: we always want to look more powerful and impressive than we really are. Or at very least we want to take what we already have in life and use it as a pedestal from which to look down on as many people as we can (while also hoping, of course, that all of those people will return the favor and so look up to us). It is no accident that the images typically associated with pride have to do with height: the proud are said to look down their noses at others, are said to always be riding their high horse, are said to have a lofty opinion of themselves and a soaring ego.

The great irony and beauty of the Christian faith is the gospel truth that the one Being in the universe who really is more exalted, more lofty, and more powerful than anyone is the same Being who, far from using his lofty position as a platform for pride, once upon a time stooped lower than low so as humbly to save us from our sinful pride.

Indeed, it appears that already in the earliest days of the Christian church, believers were captivated by the spectacle of God's Son becoming a human being. We Americans have long been inspired by Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches stories of the common man making it big. America, we say with great pride, is the place where you really can rise up from the poverty of a log cabin to become an Abraham Lincoln, where two guys who used to make little bars of soap in their basement can end up founding Amway, where one guy with a computer idea can turn into Bill Gates the multi-billionaire.

But the earliest Christians knew that the greatest story ever told is not a rags-to-riches tale but the universe's premiere riches-to-rags story. For the tale of Jesus the Christ being born into this world represents our only hope of salvation. Jesus is the stone that the builders rejected—the modest, almost ridiculous-looking one who ended up being the key to what the whole cosmic story has been about from the very beginning.