This sermon can be listened to here: Parable Troubles
My favorite parts of telling a story are the things that point to something larger than the pure meaning of the words. When I tell a story and it begins in the night, this conveys a certain meaning, or if the characters in the story successfully climb a mountain it lets the hearer know that they have accomplished not only a great physical feat, but also a mental or emotional one as well. A good story will be layered with meaning: the setting, the characters, the actions, it all matters. And I love stories; I love the way they change and shift throughout each telling of them, I love the way a simple story can illustrate a huge point, and I even love the ways in which they can be understood on multiple levels all at the same time. Today we hear a parable from Jesus that is layered with meaning.
It begins in the vineyard, and historically, one of the brightest signs of hope for the Jewish people has been the vineyard. So much so that it comes up both in our reading from the Hebrew Bible and in our Gospel lesson from Matthew. The parable that Jesus tells in our reading from Matthew, lays out a winding and frankly confusing story about a vineyard. The vineyard owner gets tenants to tend to the land, sends his workers to collect the harvest, only to have them beaten, killed, and stoned by the tenants. After the landowner does the same thing again with the same result, he decides to send his own son, who for some reason, he is convinced the wicked tenants will not harm, only for him to be killed as well. Then Jesus pauses the story to ask the crowd what the landowner ought to do, to which the people responded, kill the tenants, and replace them. Jesus then quotes a line from the Psalms, which implies that the people listening (the chief priests and the Pharisees) are the wicked tenants in this scenario, and they went off to plot Christ’s capture and crucifixion. Jesus, at least in Matthew’s account, then goes on right into the next parable set to turn someone else’s world upside down.
Here’s the thing. I love stories, but I really, really, really struggle with the parables. I have sat with this parable of the wicked tenants all week, and it has been a struggle. On the surface, all I hear in this parable is greed and violence. There are at least 8 people killed, with the proposed solution offering more murder, and to what end? As I’ve sat with this parable, I’ve wrestled with the idea that a vineyard is a sign of hope for the folks Jesus was talking to, and for such destruction and disrespect to happen in that space feels like a violation. And I can’t quite put down the way in which the Jewish leaders who heard these teachings felt like it was an accusation upon them for not tending to God’s gift of hope with any sort of honesty. The longer I’ve sat with this parable this week, I think I finally came to understand part of my struggle with the parables.
Because actually, I didn’t want to preach this parable. I didn’t want to preach it because it is so hard for my ear to hear this story and not weave it back into the way this story was taught to me as a child. I don’t remember a specific instance or moment, and in my recollection, it feels almost ubiquitous, but somewhere along the journey of my faith, this parable from Jesus was used to hold up a violent and dangerous belief that has peppered Christianity over the last 2,000 years: that Christians are better than the Jewish people. At its worst, this line of thinking provided a religious seal of approval for the genocide of the Jewish peoples, and at its best it comes to be known as Christian Supersession, a belief that Christianity is the natural and final conclusion of the Jewish faith. This is, of course, a dangerous and inaccurate understanding of Jesus’ parable.
I love stories, but I struggle with parables, because this is the danger of them. When they are taught as if Jesus himself explained a 2,000 year old story with all sorts of hidden and veiled meanings to the preacher or teacher, there is no doubt something gone amiss. The best theologians have often called parables “ticking time bombs,” and I fully believe anyone who tells you that they fully understand a parable hasn’t spent enough time wrestling with Christ’s words. Because parables are not meant to affirm our ways of being but are rather meant to turn our world upside down and ask us to see how we are supposed to be living differently. Which is all well and good, until we realize that it’s not just the folks listening to Jesus in the temple or the Pharisees and chief priests that Jesus is offering a topsy-turvey view, but for us as well.
If I were to give a contextualized telling of this parable, I might begin by saying, “There is a town in Kentucky, about an hour from Nashville, and there you’ll find infrastructure and supplies, and all that you need to do the work God has called you to. And collectively, you’ll need to bring about hope in the community, to share God’s love to all, and to be so motivated by your faith that you cannot leave this place unchanged. And when God comes and asks you what you have done with our time here, and the response is not with the fruits of the labor, but with fear, with frustration, and with worry about things being different.”
Friends, I don’t like parables because when we let them sink in, it’s obvious that we have a lot of work to do. I am convicted that part of what this parable teaches is that God will ask us what we are doing with the gifts God has given to us in light of the work we have been given to do. I am convicted that this parable is not a comforting pat on the back for a job well done, no matter how well we are doing, it is rather a challenge laid at our feet to dig deeper into the field of hope laid out before us. It’s a challenge to not turn a blind eye to the suffering in our community, to not be afraid to share the Good News of God in Christ with those around us, and to hold our faith tenderly enough that even when Jesus challenges us to live fully into the radical nature of the cross, that we can be bold enough to ask for God’s help and that God will provide an abundance of mercy even as we get to work in the vineyard that is our community.
A sermon delivered to the people of Christ Episcopal Church in Bowling Green, KY on October 8, 2023 for Proper 22A.
Becca Kello 