Amazing Grace: SALT's Commentary for Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A): Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 and Matthew 21:33-46
Big Picture:
1) As we saw last week, Jesus has just arrived via the Palm Sunday march, and is now in the second day of a disruptive occupation of the Jerusalem Temple, where he has been driving out vendors, healing people in need, teaching crowds, and rhetorically wrestling with temple officials. Those officials have demanded to know “by what authority” Jesus is doing all this, hoping to draw him into public blasphemy. Jesus sidesteps the snare with some counter-snares of his own, including three parables — and this week’s reading is the second of those parabolic traps.
2) The idea of a “parabolic trap” has an ancient pedigree, the classic example being Nathan’s famous indictment of King David — or rather, David’s unwitting self-indictment, facilitated by Nathan’s artful tale. David has just done a terrible thing (had an affair with Bathsheba, and then engineered her husband’s death in battle), but rather than simply rebuke him directly, the court prophet, Nathan, tells him a story of a “rich man” with many flocks and herds who nevertheless steals and slaughters a poor man’s lamb. Outraged, David promptly denounces such pitiless, self-centered behavior, declaring that the rich man “deserves to die” — to which Nathan responds, “You are the man!” Caught in the trap, the scales fall from the king’s eyes, and he sees his actual situation: “I have sinned against God” (2 Sam 12:1-13).
3) This kind of ploy is designed to overcome our tendency to make excuses and exceptions for ourselves, even as we hold others to higher standards. We’re lured into judging someone else, only to discover — lo and behold! — that we ourselves are the ones we have judged. It’s a powerful form of accountability: being taken to task not by someone else’s sense of right and wrong, but by our own.
4) Another example of this moral jujitsu can be found in Isaiah 5, a passage that directly inspires Jesus’ parable in this week’s reading. A vineyard is unfruitful, and Isaiah invites the people of Israel to “judge” the vineyard and what should be done with it. By the end of the passage, however, it’s clear that the vineyard (lo and behold!) represents the people of Israel themselves — and so whatever judgment they pronounce is self-applied (Isa 5:1-7). Jesus draws on this basic choreography in his debate with the temple authorities.
5) Over the centuries, Christian interpreters have often read this passage as justifying a “supersessionist” relationship between Christianity and Judaism (the abhorrent idea that Christians have superseded and replaced Jews as inheritors of God’s covenant and salvation), sometimes to the point of justifying Christian violence against Jews. As we’ll see, this is a grotesque distortion of the parable — and indeed, not just a distortion, but also a pathetic example of falling into the very sin the parable warns us against.
6) And finally, speaking of covenant, this week’s passage from Exodus is the story of a key step in Israel’s covenantal journey, the law given at Sinai, iconically represented by the Ten Commandments (literally “ten words”; see Ex 34:28). Understanding the law as essentially covenantal — that is, as a framework for Israel’s relationship with God — may transform how we hear it: these commandments aren’t arbitrary prohibitions, but rather loving limits that guide human beings toward living with justice, grace, and dignity vis-a-vis God and neighbor. Indeed, through the gift of the law, Israel's relationship with God becomes a tangible, everyday form of listening (the root of the word “obedience” is the Latin audire, “to listen”). In effect, the law transforms "doing the right thing" into a calling, a vocation, something done not only for its own sake but also as a responsive act of attentive, devoted companionship with God.
Scripture:
1) Jesus has just told a parable suggesting that the temple authorities aren’t genuinely following God’s instruction; they promise to “go and work in the vineyard,” but in practice, they don’t (Matthew 21:28-30). Now he tells them a second parable, drawing on Isaiah 5:1-7 and ratcheting up the critique. This time the charge isn’t simply that the parable’s protagonists haven’t worked in the vineyard, but rather that they are hoarding the vineyard’s produce, and ignoring — indeed, killing! — the householder’s servants who come to collect it.
2) The underlying vice here seems to be self-centered, murderous greed — a gruesome posture that takes its most extreme form when the householder sends his son to the vineyard. The tenants, far from seeing the son as someone worthy of “respect,” instead see him as the ultimate target, “the heir” whose “inheritance” they can steal — if they get rid of him (Matthew 21:37-38). At bottom, their thinking echoes Cain’s logic: God has shown regard for Abel, but if I kill him, I will stand alone; the inheritance will be mine (Gen 4:1-8).
3) The tale told, Jesus asks the temple authorities, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” Their answer — like David’s in 2 Samuel 12, and like the Israelites’ in Isaiah 5 — is swift and clear: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants” (Matthew 21:40-41).
4) And now, following the ancient pattern, comes the prophetic “You are the wretches!” in the tradition of Nathan and Isaiah. You have pronounced your own sentence, Jesus declares: “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” (Matthew 21:43). If and when you reject and kill me — and remember, Matthew is on the verge of descending into the story of Jesus’ passion and death — you thereby fulfill that ancient song, “rejecting” the very stone that will, in the end, become “the cornerstone” (Matthew 21:42; Ps 118:22-23). In effect, God is about to pull off the most remarkable “trap” of all: coopting and repurposing what appears to be “rejection” into a crucial step in building a whole new architecture, a whole new chapter in the story of redemption, a whole new wonder that will be “amazing in our eyes” (Matthew 21:42; Ps 118:23). The rejected stone will become the cornerstone!
5) Hearing all of this, the temple authorities rightly perceive that Jesus is critically “speaking about them” — and they set out to find a way to arrest him without provoking the crowds, who regard him as a prophet (Matthew 21:45-46). Note the intense irony here: Jesus tells the authorities a parable critiquing Cain-like, greedy violence; the authorities pronounce judgment on the parable’s Cain-like protagonists; and then, realizing that the parable is actually about them, they set out to arrest and ultimately to kill Jesus — in patently Cain-like fashion.
Takeaways:
1) Is there condemnation in this story? On one hand, yes. Jesus is standing squarely in the prophetic tradition, declaring God’s demand that we “bear fruit,” as that other prophet, John the Baptizer, puts it at the outset of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 3:8). To the extent that the temple authorities — or anyone else, for that matter — do not bear the fruit of justice, mercy, humility, and so on, we fall under God’s judgment, which is to say, we fall under the divine call to stop, to change course, to “change our minds,” to repent (Matthew 21:29, as we saw last week).
2) Is this condemnation, this call to repentance, for Jews and not for Christians? By no means! There is nothing in this story that exempts anyone. On the contrary, the prophetic “line” drawn here is not between Jews and Christians, or between Jesus-followers and non-Jesus-followers, but rather between those who “bear fruit” or “produce the fruit of the kingdom” and those who do not. Indeed, from this point of view, one of the most remarkable things about this passage is that Jesus does not draw the line in terms of what we today would call “religious affiliation.” On the contrary, like the prophets before him (including Nathan and Isaiah!), he draws the line in terms of action.
3) Is this condemnation final? Severe as God’s demand is that we act in ways that bear the fruit of justice, mercy, humility, and so on, all signs point to the idea that this demand is nevertheless penultimate, and that God’s graceful mercy always has the final word. What signs point in this merciful direction? Here are four:
4) First, the draconian judgment in this passage — “He will put those wretches to a miserable death” — is issued by the temple authorities, not Jesus; in this respect, it mirrors David’s self-indicting declaration that the rich man “deserves to die” (Matthew 21:41; 2 Sam 12:5).
5) Second, inside the parable itself, the householder could very well have responded with vengeance and violence after the tenants hoarded his produce and killed his servants; but instead, he mercifully, vulnerably sends his son. These “servants” likely represent the Hebrew prophets in Israel’s history, many of whom were ignored or killed — in response to which, Jesus seems to be saying, God gracefully and vulnerably has sent not avenging angels of wrath, but rather God’s own Child, not to condemn, but rather to save.
6) Third, the whole gist of the argument here, crystallized in the quote from Psalm 118 about the “rejected” stone become “the chief cornerstone,” is that God is turning what looks like rejection into an astounding choreography of salvation. Indeed, Psalm 118 as a whole is sung from the perspective of someone who has experienced a drastic reversal of fortune, mercifully saved from distress and “punishment” (Ps 118:18). The implication, then, is that it’s never too late — for anyone, no matter what — to change course and bear the fruit of justice, mercy, and humility; and that in any case, no-one is ever beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness.
7) And fourth, the ancient tradition of the “parabolic trap” typically doesn’t end with condemnation and destruction; on the contrary, it ends with divine mercy. David is forgiven in 2 Samuel; the Israelites are forgiven in Isaiah. Thus the pattern itself suggests that the temple authorities, too, will be mercifully embraced in the end, invited and empowered to “bear fruit,” and in any case forgiven. Indeed, the entire passion narrative itself is a version of just this kind of inclusive, merciful, dazzling reversal: human beings betray and deny and desert and bear responsibility for the murder of God’s Child — and yet God forgives us, and even gracefully, mind-bogglingly incorporates our attempts to “reject” God into the larger story of divine mercy and redemption! What can we say except “it is amazing in our eyes”? What can we do except sing the old hymn of God’s “amazing grace” that “saved a wretch like me” (compare Matthew 21:41)?
8) Finally, with all this talk of “bearing fruit,” we may well ask: What specific “fruit” does God require of us? Perhaps the oldest, most beautiful answer to this question is in this week’s passage from Exodus: God gives Israel the gift of the law as a mode of ongoing covenantal interaction, an opportunity for us to listen to God and live out that listening every day, in virtually everything we do. Once these “commandments” are heard in this loving, relational way, they become less a list of imperatives and more a collection of indicatives, descriptions of what graceful, dignified human life looks like. In this way, the famous refrain “you shall not” may ring not as an imperious injunction, but rather as a vivid portrait of a fruitful garden, as if God is saying: When you humbly walk with me in justice and kindness, you shall not murder, you shall not lie, you shall not steal…