Wicked Tenants?

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 500^th 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.