DAILY BYTEWhereas many of Jesus’ parables are difficult to understand – with many different layers and levels of meaning – this one seems so blatantly obvious. The Landowner is God, the messengers are various prophets through the ages, the Son is Jesus, and the wicked tenants are the religious leaders and other power authorities of the day.
Except to settle on such an overtly simplistic understanding misses a very important point. Parables always, I repeat ALWAYS, apply to whoever may be listening to them.
Yes, that includes us thousands of years later. So sure, this parable definitely applied to the religious leaders making up Jesus’ audience – that is how they heard it and they were so angered they began intensifying their plots to kill him. But that does not mean the parable’s meaning is somehow locked up in time and its message no longer applies.
One of the greatest mistakes we make with parables is to listen to them on behalf of others – a friend or family member – never thinking that their hard truth may apply to us in some way. It’s almost like we are not meant to question parables, rather they question us. We don’t get answers from parables but they get answers from us. We don’t interpret parables rather they interpret us.
If we carefully listen to what this parable may be saying to us, its message can become as clear as it was thousands of years ago:
That all too often, we the people of God, SILENCE the messengers of God in order that we may lives our lives the way we want to; in order to pretend that the vineyard is ours to run as we wish.
So often we silence God’s messengers, including the voice of his Son, in order to maintain the lie that it is MY vineyard and that MY vineyard belongs to me.
Above all, this parable calls us to remember who and whose we are!
PRAY AS YOU GO
Gracious God, forgive me for how I may silence your messengers in my life. Give me ears to hear, and humility of heart to obey. Amen.
FOCUS READING
Matthew 21. 34-36 NRSV
When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way.
