The Parable of the Wicked Tenants: An Exposition of Matthew 21:33-46
The parables of Jesus were often spoken to hide the truth from His enemies and reveal it to the disciples and those who held to Jesus teaching. It is true that He often had to take them aside to explain what the parable meant because they were hard of hearing. But sometimes Jesus makes the meaning of His parables explicit to those who opposed Him. This parable is one of them.
Jesus’ parable here of the wicked tenant farmers has obvious overtones from Isaiah 5:1-7 which the Pharisees and Scribes would have recognized. Isaiah compared Israel and Judah to a choice vineyard in which God had given a great deal of care. Nothing was spared to make it fruitful. As many vineyards were planted in rocky and hilly soil, the exertion to gather up the stones and to terrace the vineyard with them demonstrated how hard God had worked with Israel. The tasks involved with the pruning of such a vineyard added to this. The Isaiah passage says that after God had done the toil of establishing the vineyard that He had hired laborers to care for the lesser tasks while He went away on a journey. He had expected upon His return to find fruit. But instead of finding sweet grapes which were choice in making wine, He found sour grapes. God told Isaiah to tell Israel and Judah that He was going to remove the wall of protection from them. He would also stop caring for them. What was once a beautiful vineyard would return to its wild uncivilized and uncultivated state. It would become a place of thorns and briars. Within the lifetime of Isaiah, Israel would go into captivity and become the abode of wild beasts, so much so that the King of Assyrian sent people there to occupy it and keep it safe from wild animals. Judah would come within a hairbreadth of the same fate. Only the LORD’s hearkening to the prayer of Hezekiah saved it, for a season. But soon it would suffer the same fate and be taken into Babylonian captivity.
Jesus adds to what Isaiah said. He mentions that He sent people to collect His share of the fruit. This represented the profit of the vineyard. This was sharecropping. The vinedressers were fairly paid according to their work. One thinks of paying tithes to the LORD. The Lord labored for six days to create the heavens and the earth. He sustains the universe by the word of His power. He sends the rain. He causes the sun to shine. He protects His people from harm. Surely He is entitled for a tithe of our increase, seeing that He has more than earned it. We should be thankful to serve Him. Israel should have cheerfully rendered their increase to the LORD. Instead, they beat one servant, killed a second and stoned a third. It was bad enough that they were unthankful, but they assaulted the LORD’s servants as well. This was the way many of the LORD’s prophets had suffered.
Yet the LORD was longsuffering. He gave them one more chance. He did not send a prophet this time. He sent His Son. Surely they would respect. The text does not explicitly say this, but the fact their was no other heir tells us that this was the vineyard owner’s only son. But the vinedressers did not respect Him. Instead they took counsel to kill Him because they would then become the owners of the vineyard. It is plain that the vineyard owner is the Father and Jesus is His only Son. Jesus is telling the Jews, particularly its leaders that they were plotting to kill Him. They wanted to own their own religion without respect to God. As long as God was held afar off, this was acceptable. But they were not interested in a God who made any demands of them. They would give Him some lip service but wanted Him to stay out of their affairs.
Jesus asks the hearers to respond to the question of how the owner of the vineyard should react to this insult. The listeners responded that the owner shall miserably destroy these tenants and lease out his vineyard to tenants who will render their due from the harvest. In this, they gave the conventional response. The owner had the right to avenge himself on these wicked and murderous tenants. The King James uses the words “miserably destroy” which I feel fits the idea of eternal judgment. The Greek uses both the adjective and adverb form of “evil” in the text. Literally he will inflict utter evil unto these people. This does not mean the LORD is evil. Rather it is the idea that they have brought catastrophic judgment upon themselves for their actions.
Jesus adds a quote from the 118th Psalm. Had they not read that “the stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” He continues by emphasizing that this was the LORD’s doing which would be awesome in their eyes. The 118th Psalm is iften quoted in the New Testament. In it is also the words “Blessed be the one who comes in the name of the LORD” which had been chanted by the crowd as Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday just a couple days earlier. The One they so joyfully accepted that Sunday would die the next Friday after He had been rejected. One other verse in that Psalm states “This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. The Psalm is an odd mixture of celebration and rejection. Jesus would feel both in the same week. We sing the text “This is the day” in celebration. Oddly enough it was referring to the Day of the LORD, a day of the LORD’s judgment. For the believer, Jesus would bear our judgment on His cross on a day we call Good Friday. For us, the Day of the LORD is past because we have believed on Jesus Christ. But to the unbelieving Jews, the Day of the LORD would come in AD 70 when Jerusalem was captured and the Temple destroyed. It would become briars and thorns. Then there is the Day of Final judgment at the and of the age where the living and dead will be judged. The judgment most in focus here is the destruction of Jerusalem because the Jewish people had rejected and killed their Messiah. But all of these judgments need to be considered.
Jesus says the vineyard would be taken away. Israel was to be removed and new tenants installed. The stone the builders had rejected would fall upon them and grind them to powder. We have difficulty in modern interpretations because we do not want to be anti-Semitic in our statements, especially in light of the horrors endured by the Jewish people during the holocaust. However, this parable clearly states that the destruction of 70 AD was the direct consequences of Jewish rejection, And this is hardly the only Scripture in the New Testament to make this association. The old Israel was going to be replaced by a new Israel, the church. It would be made up by the remnant of Jews who believed in Jesus. But it would also include believing Gentiles. Matthew’s gospel is the Gospel of the New Israel. Judaism had utterly failed to give God His rightful glory. Judaism has underpinnings of the Old Testament, but it also added many human ideas as well. This composite of divine and human was a corruption of God’s idea for Israel.
The judgment of the Jewish nation in 70 AD is not the final judgment referred to at the end of time. Paul does talk about a restoration of Jews in the last times that the full number of Jews alongside believing Gentiles might complete Israel. Israel has referred to generally to a group of people of the physical descendants of Jacob. But even in the Old Testament it states in Hosea that they are not all Israel that claim to be Israel. The true Israelite believes in the Lord of the Covenant. So there will be Jews saved at the end of the age. They will not be saved because of their ethnicity but because they believe in Jesus. He will return to them when they can confess “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD.
The Jewish leaders perceived correctly that Jesus had spoken this parable against Him. They took final counsel on how to destroy Him. By doing so, they were unwittingly fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy. The only thing holding them back was the fear of the people who considered Jesus to be a prophet.
What about the Church? It is relatively easy to amen the judgment of the Jewish nation for their unbelief and killing of Jesus. But what will happen when the church is equally faithless? Perhaps this parable has a hidden teaching after all. The Church has had a very checkered history. We see some great exploits like the exploits of those in the Old Testament. Some things have gone well. But not everything in the Church is praiseworthy. Many evil deeds and great unbelief has festered in the Church as well. Many of the leaders have become corrupt. Their conception of God is hardly that of the Bible. They are for the most part Agnostic Deists. They are open to the possibility that there might be some sort of god up there. Perhaps this god got the big bang started. But they are not interested in knowing God. They are willing to hold him off at a distance. They have persecuted and mocked evangelists and reformers. They burnt many at the stake. Does the Church get a pass while the Jewish nation did not? Or is the hand of God’s judgment about to fall on the Church also. The penalty for rejecting God’s Chosen One is indeed grim. The final judgment of God is about to fall upon the entire earth. And the Church to whom the fuller oracles of God have been entrusted will suffer the greater judgment.
They are not all the Church that say they are the Church. Receiving Christ is a personal decision. The Final Judgment is not one of institutions but of individuals. The institutions will utterly perish, but true believers will be saved from this judgment. How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? The reign of Christ in its fullness draws near. The True Israel will share in this Kingdom which will never be plagues by corruption. In the meanwhile, we are called to be faithful to Jesus. Even if other church “members” disavow us and church leaders reject us and cast us out as evil, we need to remain faithful to Christ. Either we have faced the Last Judgment in the cross of Jesus Christ, or we will face Jesus whom the Father has appointed to be judge of all on the last day.
