This is the sermon I gave the day I told the First Congregational Church of Maltby that I was resigning as of the end of the year. One person called it the best sermon she ever heard me give. Others thought it was entirely inappropriate. Perhaps that will give you some idea of why I resigned.
Wicked
Tenants?
Rev.
Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October
8, 2017
Scripture:
Matthew 21:31-46; Isaiah 5:1-7
Let
us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our
hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our
redeemer. Amen.
You
all know that I see the Christian faith differently than some of you
do. For one thing, I am much more willing to look at its failings and
shortcomings than some of you are, and I’m willing to preach on
them even when some of you don’t want to hear it. Well, for better
or for worse I’m going to do that again today. Don’t worry. I
don’t intend to give many more sermons like this one; but this one
has to be said, for the passage we just heard from the Gospel of
Matthew cries out for a response. That’s what I’m going to give
it here. Now, there is good news in what I have to say, and I’ll
get to that too. But please understand first of all that I am going
to deny what this Gospel passage says. Please understand that I
consider it to be un-Christian. Please understand that I agree with
the scholars who say Jesus never spoke this parable. It comes from
the later Christian community for whom the Gospel of Matthew was
written, and they were really mad at the Jews in a way that Jesus
never was. I’m going to try to explain why I find it to be so false
and why seeing the matter it addresses differently opens up great
good news for the world and for our Christian faith. So here goes.
The
Gospel of Matthew presents this passage as a parable of Jesus. The
passage is set in the temple in Jerusalem after Jesus has entered
that city riding on a donkey. Matthew says Jesus is teaching in the
temple, and he says that this parable is one of Jesus’ teachings.
The parable posits a vineyard. A landowner develops it, then rents it
to some farmers and goes away on a journey. At harvest time he sends
his servants to collect his share of the harvest from the tenant
farmers. The tenant farmers beat up and even kill some of the owner’s
servants. So he sends another group of servants, and the tenants do
the same horrible things to them. So the owner sends his son, saying
those tenants will at least respect him. Of course they don’t. They
kill him. So the parable says that the owner will “bring those
wretches to a wretched end” and will rent to vineyard to others who
will give the owner his share of the crop at harvest time.
So
far there isn’t necessarily anything objectionable about this
parable, although the tenants killing the owner’s son is kind of a
red flag. What really makes the parable objectionable is how it ends.
Matthew ends the parable this way: “When the chief priests and the
Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about
them. They looked for a way to arrest him....” The way the Gospel
of Matthew ends this parable turns it into a piece of nasty early
Christian anti-Judaism. The Jewish leaders, the story says, knew that
Jesus was talking about them. This story is of course a parable, so
we need to consider just who the various figures in the parable
represent to see why Matthew would say those Jewish leaders thought
he was talking about them.
In
Jesus’ parables a figure like a landowner can often be seen as
representing God. That certainly seems to be who the landowner in
this parable represents. It says he planted a vineyard. Now, Hebrew
scripture sometimes portrays Israel as God’s vineyard. We saw that
way of thinking about God and the people in our passage from Isaiah.
There a landowner described as “my loved one” built a vineyard,
tended it well, but instead of getting good grapes he got only bad
fruit. The owner asks what more he could have done for his vineyard.
The implied answer is nothing, but the vineyard did not produce good
grapes; so that owner is going to destroy it. Then the text tells us
directly: “ The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of
Israel, and the men of Judah are the garden of his delight.” So a
vineyard representing Israel and its owner representing God are
images the original audience for the Gospel of Matthew would have
known well. We are on solid ground when we think of the landowner in
Matthew’s parable as representing God.
If
the landowner is God, and if the vineyard is Israel, then the tenants
to whom the landowner rented the vineyard are pretty clearly the
religious leaders of the Hebrew people. They are the ones in charge
of the Lord’s vineyard, that is, they are the ones God has chosen
to shepherd God’s people. The parable says they have done a
terrible job of it. They refuse to give the landowner, that is, God,
his due at harvest time. They kill the servants the landowner sends
to collect his crop. Matthew’s audience would immediately have
heard an echo of how the Jewish scriptures say Jerusalem kills the
prophets. Then the landowner sends his son. Now, for the author of
the Gospel of Matthew the landowner is God, and that makes his son
Jesus Christ. The parable says the wicked tenants killed the son the
landowner had sent. Matthew’s audience would have heard that the
Jews kill Jesus Christ the Son of God. Never mind that it was really
the Romans who killed Jesus not the Jews. The New Testament tries
again and again to shift the blame for Jesus’ execution from the
Romans who did it to the Jews who didn’t. This parable is part of
that effort. Matthew is saying the Jews, or at least the Jewish
leaders, killed Jesus, the Son of God.
The
parable says that God will punish the Jews for having killed Jesus.
It says “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken
away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.”
The early Christians thought that God’s anointing of a special
people had passed from the Jews to them. That’s what the text is
claiming here. The Jews have botched the job God gave them of tending
the Kingdom of God, so that task has now passed to the Christians.
Texts
like this that blame the Jews (or at least their leaders) for having
killed Jesus and having been unfaithful to God are common in the New
Testament, and they have a long and bloody history. The Holocaust
didn’t spring from a vacuum. It sprung from century upon century of
brutal Christian anti-Judaism. Christian anti-Judaism is a heritage
we must all admit the church has, and it is one of which the church
must repent in clearest and strongest terms possible. The last day of
the current month is the 500th anniversary of Martin
Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany,
and beginning the Protestant Reformation. Over the next three Sundays
I will have some very positive things to say about Martin Luther and
his theology, but there is one aspect of Luther’s thought that we
must unequivocally condemn as we praise other things about him.
Luther was a horrible anti-Semite. He hated Jewish people with a
passion. His writings against them are among the most disturbing—and
false—writings in Christian history. Luther could use New Testament
passages like the Parable of the Wicked Tenants to justify his
condemnation of Jewish people. That’s why we must reject this
parable.
Folks,
it simply isn’t true that God abandoned the Jewish people when they
declined to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Jewish faith was
a valid, rich, and treasured way of connecting people with God before
Jesus, and it has been a valid, rich, and treasured way of connecting
people with God after Jesus. Jewish faith, worship, scholarship,
thought, and writing are as grace-filled as the best Christian faith,
worship, scholarship, thought, and writing ever were.
Let
me offer the following piece of writing by a Jewish rabbi as proof of
that statement. It is by Rabbi Will Berkovitz, Executive Director of
Jewish Family Services in Seattle. Rabbi Berkovitz sent it to Ed
Meyer, and Ed sent it to me. Ed procured the Rabbi’s consent to my
using it here. At the time of the Jewish High Holy Days this year
Rabbi Berkovitz wrote:
We
are living in an era when attention spans are assumed to be 140
characters or less — two bits as my dad would say. That’s how
much we are willing to “pay” for our attention. In Hebrew, “pay
attention” is literally translated as, “place your heart..”
Placing our hearts requires effort. It requires us to focus beyond
the chaotic white noise that fills so much of our lives.
Like
many people, I witnessed the total eclipse. With the coyotes howling
and geese taking flight, experiencing that 360-degree, midday sunset
was profound. But the awareness that millions of people were
experiencing the same thing was even more profound.
We
were doing more than merely looking up at the same time. We were
sharing a transcendent experience, a bending of the natural order. It
was extraordinary that so many people, with so many different beliefs
and perspectives, could pause, step outside and have a collective,
uniting experience. Imagine what could happen if we made that choice
again.
With
the Jewish new year and the communal season of reflection upon us, we
have an opportunity to make that choice. We can choose to start
placing our hearts with the people around us, willingly and freely.
We can choose to look up and look beyond ourselves. To have a
collective moment of reflection. To place our hearts outside our
expectations. To seek a fuller, deeper understanding of those around
us.
Placing
our hearts requires a measure of humility and an openness to
encountering something beyond our expectations. Placing our hearts
means imagining a world where we see people for who they really are,
where we seek to understand the lived experience of those around us,
from their perspective. Not with judgement (sic), but with
compassion.
And
then, rather than penciling in their lives from our assumptions about
who they are and what they believe, we pause. We place our hearts, as
individuals and as a community. We truly listen — with openness,
curiosity and vulnerability. And with those first rays of new light,
we can, if we choose, see our world and those around us, as if for
the first time. That is the hope offered with each new year, if we
are willing to choose it.
That,
folks, is a grace-filled proclamation of how God calls us to live
with one another. God calls us to “place our hearts” with the
people around us, to listen carefully, and to accept all of God’s
people as they actually are without reducing them to our own often
prejudiced understanding of what we think they should be.
Does
it matter that Rabbi Berkovitz is Jewish not Christian? Are his words
less true because he is Jewish not Christian? Certainly not. Is he a
“wicked tenant” of God’s world? Certainly not. He is a man of
faith who speaks grace-filled truth and works hard to serve people in
need in this area—all people
in need not just Jewish people in need. Are the Jewish people with
whom he serves wicked tenants of God’s world? Certainly not. They
certainly are no more wicked than most of us Christians are. Thanks
be to God!
So
when you see the New Testament heaping scorn on Jewish people, please
do not take that scorn as divine truth. It isn’t. It is rather the
centuries old anger of small communities of people who were angry at
larger Jewish communities from which they were being excluded because
of their confession of Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus never heaped scorn
on Jewish people. He was one of them. Their faith was his faith.
Their scripture was his scripture. He wanted to reform Judaism not
destroy it. Judaism and Christianity developed into separate
religions, but Judaism is still our mother faith. It always has been.
It always will be. We are grounded in it. Christianity is impossible
without it. My Hebrew
scripture professor in seminary was fond of saying “Christianity is
one way of being Jewish, but it isn’t the only way.” He was right
about that. Israel’s God is
our God, the one and only true God.
So
when you hear anyone disparaging Judaism or Jewish people (or any
other great faith tradition and its people for that matter) just say
no. No, that’s not how it is. Every religion is true to the extent
that it connects people with God. Judaism connects a great many
people with God, and it has done so a lot longer than Christianity
has. No, Jews are not wicked tenants of God’s world. They never
were despite what the author of the Gospel of Matthew thought. They
are as faithful people of God as the best Christians are.
Getting beyond the horrible history of Christian anti-Judaism let us
see how great God really is. How much God loves all people not just
Christian people. Getting beyond the horrible history of Christian
anti-Judaism opens our hearts to love all people, especially all
people whose commitment to peace, justice, and care for all people is
grounded in the love of God however they kn0w and worship God.
Folks,
Christianity isn’t about discrimination against anyone. It
certainly isn’t about hatred of anyone. So let’s not learn bad
lessons from bad parables like the one about the wicked tenants.
Let’s open our hearts and minds to all people who love God and work
for good in the world. If we can do that we be truer disciples of the
Jewish man we call Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen.
