What Kind of Authority?

Luke 20:1-19

I.

            A few weeks ago we looked at Jesus’ parable of the pounds, which he gave while staying in Jericho in the house of a reformed former tax-collector named Zacchaeus.  I suggested that, as he was about to make his way up to Jerusalem, Jesus wants his disciples to consider very carefully what kind of king they are expecting him to be.  Will he be a ruthless tyrant like the king in the parable?  Or will his power be more profound and subtle, evident not in dead enemies bleeding on the pavement, but in changed lives like that of Zacchaeus?

            Between that reading and this one a lot has happened.  Jesus has entered Jerusalem, riding pointedly on a humble, yet messianic, donkey.  And when he got there he proceeded to cause a disturbance in the Temple because the leaders had managed to turn it into a market.  (Yet another example of Jesus’ rejection, or at least very deep suspicion, of markets.)

            The people are abuzz with anticipation of what Jesus might do next.  The important and dangerous Passover festival is coming up in a few days.  And the establishment, the priests, scribes, and lawyers who control the Temple, are becoming nervous.

            So they insist that he tell them by what authority he is doing the things he is doing.  Mainly that riot he caused in the Temple.  They want to know what his authority is for doing this and who gave it to him.

            Jesus declines to answer directly.  He knows it’s a trick question that can get him into trouble with somebody no matter how he answers.  If he says, “My authority comes from God,” they can get him on blasphemy.  If he says, “My authority comes from the people,” he is a revolutionary. 

            So he responds to their question with another question.  “Well, where did John the Baptizer get his authority to do what he did, do you think?  If you can tell me where he got his authority then maybe I can tell you where I get mine.”

            Jesus knows that they will not be able to answer this.  He puts them in the same political bind that they wanted to catch him in.  And that political bind has to do with the attitude and role of the people.  The priests, scribes, and elders fear the people, who revere John as a prophet.  So, even though they don’t believe John’s authority came from God, as evidenced by the fact that they did not follow him, they can’t say that out loud without alienating the people.  So, just as Jesus refused to answer their trick question, they refuse to answer his.

            The question of authority remains, then, so far unanswered.

II.

            Then the Lord tells a parable.  It is a bit of an inversion of the parable he told back in Jericho.  In that case, there was a nobleman who had to go away to get the authority to become king.  In this one, there is a figure who already owns a vineyard, and leaves it in the stewardship of some tenants when he goes on a long journey.

             “Vineyard” was a well-known symbol for Israel from the Hebrew Scriptures.  We just heard this in Isaiah 5.  The authority of the tenants over the vineyard comes from the owner.  Unlike the money given to the servants in the previous parable, with which they are to make as large a profit as possible by any means necessary, here the tenants are given charge over a vineyard.  A vineyard is an agricultural enterprise that naturally produces grapes, which then have to be harvested and turned into wine.  Which takes some work.  A vineyard is a partnership between humans and nature.

            So, in the parable, the “vineyard” is Israel, and the “tenants” represent the leaders of Israel, who manage the vineyard on behalf of the “owner” who is God.  But what is the “produce”?  A vineyard produces grapes and then wine; what is Israel supposed to produce?  If Isaiah 5:7 is any indication, the vineyard is supposed to produce “justice” and “righteousness.”  And, in case you are wondering what “justice” and “righteousness” are, Isaiah helpfully clarifies that in the remainder of chapter 5.

            Actually, the prophet does this by saying what justice and righteousness are not: He says, “Doom to those who acquire house after house, who annex field to field,” obviously referring to the wealthy.  He goes on to pronounce doom on those who overindulge in strong drink, as well as those who doubt God’s justice, and “who call evil good and good evil,” who think of themselves as wise and clever, and who take bribes to “rob the innocent of their rights.”

            So, instead of producing justice and righteousness, the vineyard – Israel – produces inequality, greed, gluttony, moral relativism, conceit, and unfairness: in other words, injustice and self-righteousness; a regime in which the rich and powerful abuse their wealth and authority.

            In the parable, the owner sends servants to collect the owner’s share of the vineyard’s produce.  That is, God sends prophets to Israel as reminders of who owns this vineyard and what it is supposed to produce… and they are abused and sent away empty-handed.  There was no justice and righteousness for them to collect. 

            The owner’s final entreaty is to send his beloved son, which is to say that God’s final offer is to send Jesus Christ.  God refers to Jesus as “my son, whom I love dearly” when Jesus is baptized and at the Transfiguration.  He is also to remind the tenants whose vineyard this is and what the vineyard is for.

III.

            The tenants mistake the owner’s patience for weakness.  They have decided to take vineyard and its produce for themselves, not returning to the owner his rightful share, but basically consuming, wasting, depleting, and destroying the vineyard.  If the image of Isaiah 5 holds, they set up an extractive, exploitative regime based on selfishness, greed, gluttony, injustice, and fraud.  They steal the produce of the garden for themselves, refusing to share and distribute it fairly according to the owner’s wishes.  They don’t want to give anything back to the owner at all. 

            Remember what Jesus has just done before being confronted by the scribes and priests.  The whole reason they ask him about his authority in the first place is because he has the audacity to throw the merchants out of the Temple.  He calls them crooks and robbers. 

            Then he tells a parable in which the tenants have basically done the same thing to the vineyard as the scribes and priests have done to the Temple.  Instead of producing justice and righteousness, they make it serve their own avarice.  Instead of God’s values, they embrace the values of the market by bringing in merchants.  Instead of managing the vineyard according to the will of the owner, they run it into the ground according to their own ego-centric desires.  It is not much of a stretch at all to equate the merchants corrupting the Temple with the tenants corrupting the vineyard in the parable.

            So when the son and heir shows up at the vineyard, the tenants have become so deluded that they imagine the owner will lose interest in the property if there is no one to inherit it.  So they throw the son out of the vineyard and kill him.

            The tenants resent being tenants.  They don’t want to hear about how the vineyard “is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”  They understand that “possession is 9/10ths of the law,” and figure that since they are the ones in possession of the vineyard, who are doing the work to keep it going, that therefore they should not be beholden to any stinkin’ absentee landlord. 

            Which would be something I could normally sympathize with… if nature itself were not doing most of the real work by producing grapes in the first place, and if the tenants were not, according to Isaiah 5, destroying the ability of the vineyard to produce grapes, and if they did not commit cold-blooded murder.

            What this parable teaches is that there is a way bigger “owner” or “landlord” who made the whole place to run well in a certain way, and we, especially our human landlords, leaders, kings, priests, scribes, and whatever, have messed up the whole place out of greed.  God is the ultimate landlord and all of us, including our leaders, are tenants; as God says in Leviticus 25, “the land is mine, you are just aliens and tenants to me.”

IV.

            I imagine the Lord pausing after the part about the owner’s beloved son being murdered.  Then he asks his listeners, “What will the owner of the vineyard do to [the tenants]?”

            By now they would have surely figured out that the parable is about the rulers of the nation who have, for instance by bringing merchants into the Temple, corrupted and debased the original vision and mission of Israel. 

            Jesus looks around.  No one answers his question.  They know the answer; it’s in Isaiah: God destroys the leadership and takes the people away into exile.  But that is too horrible a national memory for them to imagine could ever happen again.  So they say nothing.

            Jesus himself answers.  “[The owner] will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.”  Just like Isaiah said.

            The people respond, “May this never happen!”  They may not like their leaders, but they do not want to have to endure the consequences of their leaders’ actions like their ancestors had to.  They know it is always the people who pay the price for bad leadership.  They are also not expecting the nation to be destroyed but saved when a new king comes, whom they think they are looking at right now.  They are hoping Jesus himself will be the one to redeem Israel.

            And he is.  But not in the way they expected or desired.  Due to its own persistent injustices, epitomized by bringing merchants into the Temple, the Jewish nation had already doomed itself.  Injustice is so out of synch with God’s will that to persist in it necessarily causes a nation to bring down disaster upon itself.  40 years after Jesus says these words, the Temple would be destroyed and Jewish autonomy in Palestine ended for around 2000 years.

            But Jesus, though he is brokenhearted about that, reminds the people of the core of biblical faith.  Quoting Psalm 118, which was one of the Psalms always sung at the Passover holiday, to begin in a couple of days, he says: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”

            The faith of God’s people has always been the faith of the rejected stones, the stones that the architects and masons deemed unworthy, weak, and misfits, the stones that do not measure up to the world’s standards of success.

            It begins with a band of escaped slaves, and was ever after a gathering of misfits, outcasts, losers, oppressed, repressed, victims of bigger, stronger, more successful powers.  In their few and far between moments of worldly wealth, power, and success, that is, when they forgot their original identity as slaves in Egypt, and started acting instead like Pharaoh the oppressor, they invariably suffered dire consequences.

V.

            Jesus goes on: “Everyone who falls on that stone will be crushed; and the stone will crush the person it falls on.”  In other words, the rejected stone will come back and bite those who reject it.  The losers now will be later to win.  The last will be first, the hungry fed, the grieving comforted, and the rich and powerful will be brought down and sent away empty-handed. 

            The stone represents the Messiah who identifies with and epitomizes the people of God: the poor, the deprived, the excluded, the oppressed, the diseased, the defeated, and the suffering… whom these leaders fear so much that they are unable to lay hands on Jesus the Messiah now.  But within a week they will figure out a way to have the Romans nail Jesus to a cross and die there.  Jesus thereby identifying with the ultimate losers: the murdered, the dead.

            But then…  but then he will be resurrected!  He will reveal and fulfill the great reversal, the great overturning, in which the rejected stone does become the cornerstone of God’s Kingdom of justice, peace, and love.  That’s what Jesus has been promising since before he was even born. 

            And he will give his Spirit to the new community gathered in his name, the gathering of rejected stones cemented together in love to become the foundation of God’s future.

            We are that gathering of rejects.  We are the failures and losers to whom God gives the vineyard, having taken it away from the unworthy, successful people, who used it for their own ends.  God entrusts it to us.  The vineyard, the Kingdom, Israel, the earth….  The garden. 

            What will we do with it?  Will we also forget whose vineyard this is?  Will we forget the purpose for which the vineyard exists?  Will we forget that it is about justice, equality, righteousness, peace, and joy?  Will we try to keep the vineyard for ourselves?  Or will we manage the vineyard in such a way that God’s blessings pour and flow through us into a needy and broken world?

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