The Cross from Jesus’ Perspective: A Reflection on Matthew 21.33-46

Today is Thanksgiving Sunday here in Canada, but as I was getting ready to write a post in honour of the holiday, I realized that today’s Gospel reading is a very important one, and one that I’ve never actually reflected on in this space. For it’s in this parable that Jesus explains how he understood his life, ministry, and, ultimately, death. It’s atonement theology from Jesus’ own lips, long before the Church Fathers, Augustine, Anselm, Luther, or Calvin got their hands on it. And so, if we’re going to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death, this is the place to begin. So, I won’t be reflecting on the holiday today — if you’d like some reading to reflect the theme of Thanksgiving, feel free check out the post I wrote last year for the holiday, or other writing I’ve previous done on the virtue of gratitude and radical gratitude as a sacred practice. Instead, I’ll be reflecting on the critically important, but often overlooked, Parable of the Vineyard, as found in Matthew 21.33-46.

Today’s passage follows right after last week’s so let’s first remind ourselves of what was happening. In the aftermath of Palm Sunday, Jesus has the religious authorities — especially the Temple leaders — terrified that he’s about to trigger an all-out revolt against the Romans. So, when he arrives at the Temple, they immediately intercept him and begin to argue with him about authority. He traps them by asking them about what they thought of John the Baptist, who had been a popular figure widely believed to be a prophet of God but rejected by those same authorities for undermining the Temple and its rituals. He then tells them the parable in which he asks them to pick which of two sons, one who first refuses to do his father’s bidding but does it anyway and one who says he’ll do what his father tells him to but lacks follow-through. This too is a trap since neither of the sons is faithful and both need to change their attitudes. As I wrote last week, this has strong resonances with Jesus’ general teaching, which renders meaningless the categories the self-declared ‘righteous’ use to put themselves above so-called ‘sinners’, as well as Paul’s application of it, which does the same thing with the categories dividing Jews and Gentiles. So that’s where the story is at when we come to day’s reading, the Parable of the Vineyard:

“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. (Matthew 21.33-46)

From the outset, this parable would have caught his hearers’ attention. For the vineyard was a common symbol for Israel, especially in the writings of Isaiah. Isaiah 5, for example, speaks of a landowner who takes great care to plant and tend to a vineyard, working the soil, clearing it of stones, and planting the best vines he could find. He builds a watchtower and a hedge to protect his vines, and digs out a vat in preparation for the harvest. As the vines grow, he lovingly prunes them to ensure the best harvest possible. And yet, when the harvest comes, the vines don’t produce the good fruit the landowner expected. Exasperated, he asks, “Judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?” It is, of course, a metaphor for the People of God, who had been given everything they could want or need to thrive and yet were not bearing the good fruit God had expected. Here Jesus not only starts his parable with a landowner and a vineyard, but repeats many of the beats from Isaiah’s oracle (the watchtower, the hedge, the press), so there is no question about the allusion he’s making here.

But he adds new characters to the drama to flesh out the story. There are tenants, whose job it is to run the vineyard; but they don’t want to hand over to their boss what is rightfully his. So, when he sends servants to collect the harvest, they abuse and kill them. Finally, he sends his son and heir, thinking they will have no choice but to respect him. But they reject him and kill him too.

Upon hearing the story, the religious leaders are rightfully indignant on the landowner’s behalf. That is, until Jesus tells them that they’re the tenants in the story. Read through Christian eyes, the meaning of the story is clear: God has created a people to bear good fruit, fruit of thanksgiving and repentance, love and grace. God has sent messengers and prophets to collect on this good fruit, but the people’s leaders consistently refuse to acknowledge God’s claim to anything. The scene repeats itself again and again, as God sends prophets to the people, only to have them rejected, scorned, and murdered. Finally, in an act of infinite vulnerability, patience, and love, God sends the Son in the vain hope that they will listen to him. Yet, of course, they don’t. In fact they treat him worst of all.

This is the clearest example of how Jesus understood his own story, how he fits into the story of his people, and ultimately, of how he will die. And it’s fascinating just how far this understanding is from the atonement theories of later Christian history. In this story, the Son’s death is not God’s action to solve the problem of sin, but is instead humanity’s greatest act of rejection and rebellion against God. It is God taking upon Godself the worst abuse and rejection — the worst sin — humanity can offer.

In the Gospels, Jesus is sent to the cross, not by an angry Father who needed blood to assuage His wrath, but through a collusion of powerful spiritual, political, economic, and social forces: First the envy, threatened privilege, and financial interest of the religious leaders and the Temple, then the obsessive desire for order and personal security of the Roman leaders, and finally, when it becomes clear he’s not going to lead a rebellion, the disappointed hope turned to anger of the masses. These forces are powerful and systemic, they are the kinds of things the Scriptures have in mind when they talk about the “Principalities and Powers,” these quasi-personal evil forces that hold sway in the world. I like to think of them as social, political, economic, and spiritual contagions or poisons that seep through cultures and relationships, that entangle us in complicated webs that seem impossible to get out of. And while they are complex, they almost always boil down to the most basic psychological impulses: things like envy, jealousy, privilege, disappointment, and essentially these are all themselves manifestations of fear. (As it happens, this is why Politics of Fear are so powerful and so successful.) The people — all of the people, all of their various parties and groups who were normally at each other’s throats — unite against Jesus, put all their pent up anger and violence on him. (Luke even includes an amazing throw away line that speaks to this point: “On this day” — the day of Jesus’ Jewish and Roman trials — “Herod and Pilate became friends; before this they had been enemies.“)

According to the New Testament, by raising Jesus from the dead, God vindicated him and showed once and for all that this way of ‘circling the wagons’ against an imagined enemy is neither righteous nor holy and is in fact far from God’s ways and God’s heart. The sad and ironic thing is that this way of doing things remains common in the world, including (and today, particularly) among Christians. In big and small ways, we are always tempted to point fingers and have someone to blame. Most of the time, this scapegoating just results in hurt feelings and impaired friendships. But, when this mechanism plays out on in higher stakes situations, things can quickly snowball out of control through entire societies. The Holocaust remains the most salient and horrific example, but it is far from the only one. But again, according to the New Testament, the Resurrection of Jesus is God saying that the fear-based, other-hating, wagon-circling way of life is a lie. And this is entirely consistent with how Jesus understands his life and death here in today’s parable. For Jesus — for the God Jesus reveals — one wrong cannot be made right by another wrong. One unjust act cannot create justice out of injustice. Surely this vision of justice must influence how we understand what happened on the Cross. And what we have in today’s Gospel reading is just this type of understanding, a way of looking at his death in which its violence is the culmination of the problem, not God’s solution to it.