This morning’s Gospel reading is Matthew 21:33–43:

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people:

“Hear another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey. When vintage time drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to obtain his produce. But the tenants seized the servants and one they beat, another they killed, and a third they stoned. Again he sent other servants, more numerous than the first ones, but they treated them in the same way. Finally, he sent his son to them, thinking, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.’ They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?”

They answered him, “He will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times.” Jesus said to them, “Did you never read in the Scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes? Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”

We read from the Gospels that even the disciples sometimes had trouble deciphering Jesus’ parables. No one has any trouble at all with this passage, not even at the time, as Jesus’ point was clear. Jesus spoke to the people at the Temple, including the chief priests and the Pharisees, who took this as a threat — as indeed it was intended. Two verses later, Matthew relates that the temple authorities “knew he was talking about them,” and wanted to arrest him at that time but feared the reaction of the crowd.

In fact, we will probably get to the next passages a week from now, but it matters to today’s understanding of the Gospel as well. Jesus went on to the parable of the wedding banquet, another warning about a lack of respect and love for God, while the Pharisees plotted to trap Jesus into speaking rebellion against Caesar. By doing so, they hoped to have Jesus killed without getting their fingerprints on the deed and avoid angering the crowds that had come to listen to Him preach.

What was this but another way of killing the Heir and seizing His inheritance?

One has to ask why Jesus chose this particular time to become so explicit in this parable. Jesus knew His time had come for the Passion, and knew that the Pharisees would make their move very soon. Jesus meant this as a call to repentance for the Pharisees, a last chance to repent of their theft of the Lord’s vineyard and to welcome the Heir’s return.

In fact, Jesus spent nearly the whole week in Jerusalem offering warning after warning to the temple authorities. In Matthew 22, both the Pharisees and Sadducees conspire to catch Jesus in heresy, only to be confounded by the Word. In Matthew 23, Jesus declares the Woes, a kind of counterpoint to the Beatitudes, but almost entirely aimed at the scribes and Pharisees for their arrogance and hypocrisies. And in Matthew 24, Jesus offers a warning about temple idolatry — assuming that possession means ownership — that directly parallels the prophecies of Jeremiah before the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem and Judah.

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus said about the temple, “not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” In Jeremiah 7, the Lord warns that He would rather destroy His temple than let it be used as some sort of idol for those who “steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known” — and that He had already done so in Shiloh. In the passage from Matthew 24, Jesus offers the same warning — and meets the same response: rejection.

Just as Jeremiah did, Jesus keeps offering a warning and a chance to repent to the leadership of Jerusalem. Knowing that they will reject it and continue toward their own destruction, Jesus offers a warning about the unrepentant temple authorities that parallels the prophecies of Jeremiah:

“So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand—  then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”

All of this proceeds from the same issue, one raised time and again in the course of salvation history — the confusion between stewardship and ownership. Jesus’ parable speaks directly to this, attempting to speak as plainly as possible through His parable about the history of the Israelites. The Lord chose them as His people to be stewards of the Word and His presence, not owners of His land. They were given the task of becoming a nation of priests to the world, bringing all nations to Jerusalem to share His Word and the Law so that all may be saved. Instead, the Israelites chose over and over again to act as though the land and kingdom belonged to them for their own purposes, which led to their repeated destruction.

One can even draw a parallel between that and the Garden of Eden, no?

However, the specific image of the vineyard in both this parable and in the first reading from Isaiah has a purpose as well. In John 15, Jesus calls Himself “the True Vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.” The vineyard that the temple authorities have tended in Jesus’ parable is meant to produce the fruit of salvation, but that cannot thrive under the leadership in Jerusalem. The Lord will set it to ruin, as Isaiah prophecies and Jesus repeatedly warns in these chapters from Matthew, but the Lord will provide salvation through the True Vine instead, which He has cultivated,

So who owns the vineyard, both temporally and eternally? The Father, and it comes to us through Christ. To partake in salvation, we must “abide[] in the vine,” as Jesus teaches in John, to bear the fruit of salvation. Abiding in the vine means to accept the subordinate role to which stewards belong and not arrogate the authority of ownership.

But it means something else as well. “I am the vine, and you are the branches,” Jesus says. That paints a picture not of a slave, but as the offspring of Christ. We become the children of God when we recognize the authority of the Lord and work to do His will. We bear fruit by cooperating with His grace as part of the vine rather than rebelling against it and losing all nourishment. The fruit we produce is for the benefit of the entire vineyard rather than the other way around — seizing the vineyard for the benefit of our own appetites and ambitions.

The Pharisees and temple authorities were as blind to this as were those in Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s time. The question for us is whether we will fall into that same blindness through sin and covetousness, or whether we will abide in the True Vine.

The front-page image is “Christus, der wahre Weinstock” (Christ the True Vine), early 17h century. Artist unknown, on display at St. Castor Collegiate Church in Karden on the Moselle. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.