Who Is the Landowner Here?, Sermon October 2, 2011
Matthew 21: 33-46
PROPER 22, Year A, October 2, 2011
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Philadelphia
Who is the Landowner here?
Let’s be clear, Jesus was a Jew.
On the Sunday that falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we need to recall that Jesus was a Jew and our scripture is a conversation among Jews about God and godliness.
In recent discussions with Rabbis I was reminded of some bad habits of Christian preachers. We preachers are often guilty of reading scripture as if Jesus were a Christian and we tend to line up scripture as if our Greek testament enlightens an incomplete or obscure Hebrew testament. We also mistakenly read Jesus and St. Paul as criticizing Judaism as such rather than a small elite leadership group among the Hebrews. Often unintentionally we use modes of reading scripture that suggest Christian superiority, a position with an ugly history of giving aid and comfort to anti-Semitism.
Jesus was a Jew and I like to remind myself that I am a Gentile reading scripture as an invited guest. I am a goy who has received an invitation to join into an ancient relationship and conversation with the God of Israel. When Jesus had these discussions with his fellow Jews my ancestors were worshipping rocks and trees in mud huts somewhere in Northern Europe.
Jesus was a Jew. When we forget it we fall into the same trap as the Pharisees and the Temple authorities; we think we own this scripture when instead we are merely tenant farmers in the kingdom of God.
At the beginning of the Gospel today we land in the middle of a debate among Rabbis. Having failed in the previous exchange to get the Pharisees and Temple authorities to show their cards, Jesus tells the parable of the wicked tenants. The story – based on the well-known passage from Isaiah - is a trap…
A Land-owner…. Lease. Slaves, Servant, Son
“What will the land owner do?” With a question, Jesus springs the trap and the Pharisees and Temple authorities jump in… “What will the land owner do?”
“The landowner will massacre the tenant farmers and give their land away to others.”
The Pharisees and the Temple Authorities identify with the landowner because they are absentee landlords themselves – how else can they afford to spend so much time in study and administration. They forget that in God’s Kingdom they are not owners. Jesus is talking about them when he talks about wicked tenants – renters who pretend that they own what is not theirs. Jesus tricks them into passing judgment on themselves.
Spiritually speaking are we landowners owners or are we tenant farmers?
Did we author our own existence? Did we create the conditions that make our existence possible? Do we create our own meaning out of nothingness? Or rather, have we received everything as gift, on a time-limited lease, to cultivate, nurture and be fruitful, life-giving stewards.
This discovery that all is gift and that our spiritual life is all response to gift is what undermines, overthrows and revolutionizes Saul of Tarsus makes him Paul the Apostle. Where he had considered himself on top and dominant because of his religious position, heritage and achievement, he realizes that all of that is empty and counted as loss compared to knowing the real owner of the vineyard through Jesus the Christ. His old way of life tempted him to think that he was in control – he built the hedge, he built the watch-tower, he invented the grapes – but he forgot the real landowner and lost the real value of the land.
We suffer in a country and a world that has largely lost the notion that human beings exist for any purpose or for any compelling goal. The Greek term is ‘telos,’ which means ‘ultimate end,’ that is, the end toward which we are striving, the objective that gives life ultimate meaning, purpose and direction.
Tenant farmers take a gift and add value to it through labor and cultivation. Their life has a purpose and a goal, their life is productive of life and sustains life across generations. We need to be reminded that we are tenants, lease-holders, on this earth, recipients of gifts which find their meaning and purpose in prospering the vision of the landowner, our God.
We need to tell the story of the wicked tenants to remind ourselves not to usurp God’s greater ends and authorship with our petty and short-sighted, often compulsive, grasping for control, for credit, for status, for position, for dominance. The path of freedom is the path where we empty ourselves of privilege and prerogative so we can acknowledge the one who really sets the terms in everything that we do, the real Landowner who sent his son, the God of Jesus the Christ.