The Song of the Beloved

What was the landowner thinking? He put all this effort into planting a vineyard, building a winepress with a fence and a tower to protect it, and then he leaves. Not only does he leave the vineyard, he places it into the hands of tenants who, when the harvest time comes and the owner seeks the fruit, they kill the slaves he sends to them. Finally, the landowner sends his son, thinking that something different will happen; by this time, we aren’t surprised that the tenants have killed him. What kind of landowner is this? What kind of tenants are these?

The landowner seems like a fool.  Why would he expect different results from sending his son? It’s all well and good for us to read the parable and say, “But of course, God is the landlord, and the son is Jesus…” but then it becomes a little more complicated when we try to determine who the tenants are. The scribes and Pharisees heard the parable as having been said against them, but it seems that we ought not too easily be relieved. The way blame seems to work in the parables is that it slips out from under our reach, away from our control, bending and shifting when we’re not paying attention.

Underlying the tenants’ behavior is the belief that the landlord will never show up. Though their behavior is appalling and foreign to our ears, they figured if they killed enough slaves and then the heir, they would be left alone to tend the vineyard, essentially owning the property because the landlord never bothered to show up.  I wonder if part of why we are so quick to assign the “blame” in this parable is because we, like the tenants, don’t really expect God (or, the landowner) to show up. So we go about our business, in a world that bears the marks of the Creator, failing to recognize what is right in front of us.

The tenants, though clearly the antagonists of the story, were the ones who worked the land. The landlord, who hadn’t been there in months, demanded the produce after they had worked so hard for it; they were entitled to it. It was theirs, right? The only problem was that the vineyard wasn’t theirs. But it’s so easy to look at all the work that lays piled ahead of us, all the work we’ve already done, all the nights of too-little sleep and too-much worry, and to think that whatever successes we have are ours, hard-fought and long-won. We tend to look at God’s gifts and think of them as ours: our money, our time, our possessions, our earth, our decision. Sometimes, we fail to recognize that we are the recipients of God’s gifts: of time, of energy, of finances, of land, but more: God’s love and God’s grace.

The tenants saw the land as theirs: “Let us kill the heir and we will have the inheritance.”  The tenants, in some ways, get it right: through Christ’s death, all that is Christ’s becomes ours and all that is ours Christ takes to himself, binding himself to us and us to one another.

The crowds, among whom were perhaps some tenants with absentee landlords, among whom were perhaps some who were poor, whose daily lives were conditioned by struggle and uncertainty, along with the spectrum of others – rich and poor, slave and free, ones who were all too aware they were sinners and ones whose perceived righteousness stood in the way of them reaching out to care for those among them. When Jesus asks what the landlord will do, the crowd responds: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyards to tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

But is this what happens? Jesus – the Son – comes into the world and is not recognized by that world, is crucified by that world, and dies for that world. The cross turns the expectations of the world upside down. It meets us in our guilt and in our shame, in our failures to tend and to keep, in our failures to love our neighbors, in our failures to share, in our belief that all we have is ours and that what others have or don’t have isn’t our problem. Jesus didn’t come to hire new tenants; Jesus came to make the tenants new.

The tenants aren’t necessarily the scribes and the Pharisees; they aren’t those who fail to recognize Jesus; they aren’t even those who hide behind church traditions as they draw lines in the sand of who is in and who is out. The tenants are all of us who have failed to regard all that we have as a gift. The tenants are all of us who have clung to our possessions, time, or money as though it is our security. The tenants are those who live in fear that, no matter what we do or how hard we work, it will never be enough.

Jesus doesn’t rise from the dead and put to death those who opposed him, as did the ancient kings who eradicated the previous kings, their families and their religious leadership. Jesus didn’t go to the cross in order to wreak vengeance on the earth. Jesus’ cross was God’s NO to the tenants, the NO to forgetting that all that we have is gift.

Jesus isn’t God’s way of firing the tenants. Jesus is God’s way of stopping them in their tracks, slowing them down long enough to recognize that God’s idea of justice is far different from ours. Where we would put the tenants to a miserable death and lease the land to new tenants, God would free the tenants from their self-obsessed striving. What the tenants – and the people – didn’t expect is a God who would send the Son out of love, out of hope, out of the desire to show us a new way to live.

The cross turns everything upside down. Where the tenants would be put to a miserable death, we see Christ taking on all that they are to himself, giving them himself. Jesus, embodying the kingdom of God, was taken away from the people. Jesus was the one who took on the stone, being broken on behalf of the broken. Jesus turned the world upside down, causing everything to happen contrary to our expectations. In the cross, we receive the righteousness that is not – and could never be – ours. Whatever we have, whatever we have garnered, whatever might gain us honor, we regard as trash because of Christ. Under the shadow of the cross, we unfaithful tenants are found in Christ, contrary to all expectation. Whatever gains we might have had, whatever we might call ours, is all loss, because we have recognized that instead of being cast out of the vineyard, we have been given a new lease: the vineyard is a gift, it is the place of the Beloved, it is the place not of death and destruction, but of love and grace.

Let me sing a song of my Beloved, whose faithfulness has covered my unfaithfulness, whose righteousness has covered my unrighteousness, whose gift has covered my guilt. Let me sing a song in which the world is turned upside down to reveal the nature of the Giver in the Gift. Let me sing a song of the world as gift, a reminder that the Lover of Creation is its Creator and its Giver.