Blood Soaked Fields or a Harvest of Righteousness

Exodus 20: 1-4,7-9,12-20 and Mathew 21: 33-46

Rev. Loren McGrail

Northlake Lutheran Church

October 2,2011

A harvest of righteousness is sown in peace

for those who make peace.       James 3:18

“Blood soaked fields will never be fertile

and blood reforms will never bear fruit.”

Archbishop Oscar Romero

The Wicked Tenants, The Story of the Greedy Farmers, or the Peasant Revolt and the Spiral of Violence.  These are some of the names given to this Sunday’s Gospel lectionary, Mathew 21:33-46. 

This parable is obviously important as it appears also in Mark (12:1-11) and Luke 20:9-18. Yet as popular as it is it seems to be one of those problematic parables that most pastors and their congregations would rather avoid for it seems to be both prohibiting and condoning violence at the same time.

 It helps and doesn’t help that the parable makes a clear reference to Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard

View from Daher's vineyard, Tent of Nations

(Is 5:1-7)

                Let me sing for my beloved

                My love-song concerning his vineyard;

                My beloved had a vineyard

                on a very fertile hill.

                He dug it and cleared it of stones,

                and planted it with choice vines…

               For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts

               is the house of Israel,

               and the people of Judah

               are his planting;

               He expected justice, but saw bloodshed;

               righteousness, but heard a cry

It hinders us because it says that the vineyard is in the house of Israel and that the people of Judah are his planting thus re-enforcing the idea that this text and the parable that quotes it are for Jews only.  It helps because it reminds us that the vineyard is not ours alone and that we are expected not to make the fields bloody but bear the fruit of righteousness.  On top, the Beloved will hear every cry.

This parable, like other parables, is often interpreted from a moral and spiritual perspective making God the vineyard owner, the tenants, the religious leaders (chief priests or scribes) and the slave/servants the prophets. Some even see Jesus as the son who was killed thus making the tenants killers of Christ, which leads to the land then taken away from them and given to the good Gentiles.  This version, which has been preached for decades doesn’t take into account the economic and historical time period or the terrible violence that God commits in rectifying injustice.

So with fear and trembling of how to preach this text and with images of burnt and uprooted olive trees fresh in my mind, I came to this text wondering what I could say about this image of a violent punishing God and what is happening in Palestine and Israel today.  Where is righteousness to be found in Palestine’s bloody vineyards?  Who is listening to the cries?

I was deeply troubled by the commentaries.  They didn’t square with what I know and think about God’s love and mercy or Jesus’ call to nonviolence.  They did not square with what I know about empires and dominating systems of oppression.  So I sat with the texts and even asked for help from some my trusted colleagues. Many of them responded and engaged with this and the Exodus passage on the Ten Commandments.  Like you, and me they wrestled with the parable and how to make sense of it and what it means today.

Here are some of their responses. You will note that all of them assume directly or indirectly that God is the owner of the vineyard and that the tenants, whether Jewish Pharisees or Zionist leaders or all of us, have betrayed God’s trust in us to be faithful and just stewards.

John Volkering My fellow liturgist at Wellington Ave UCC Church sees the vineyard, as “a garden rich with resources that were meant to supply the needs of all and the landowner as creator God, benevolent, loving and forgiving, faithful and expecting faithfulness.  For him “the tenants like much of humankind are full of greed and want. Instead of being good tenants, these entitled people engage in hoarding. They set up borders meant to keep others shut out, fight and wage wars over resources, and establish oppressive systems of domination.”  In addition, “the landowner’s slaves are the teachers, prophets, preachers and leaders that have come to show humankind the way to life, to love, to justice and faithfulness, calling us to repent, to change our hearts and our ways.  The landowner’s son - Jesus our nonviolent Christ, is sent to teach us the way of love, the way of God, the way of nonviolence, the way to life, where all are included, where loving, caring and sharing are the norm.”

woman and destroyed olive tree

For John then, the tenants or humankind perpetrates all the violence in this parable.  He sees the landowner / God not punishing but continuing to send teachers, prophets and finally the son with the hope of positive change.  The question Jesus asks his listeners; “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” remains open for him.

For professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Christian Palestinian living in Palestine and working with the Palestine Center for Rapproachment, the focus is on the “slaves” who are, as he reminds us in Aramaic, “the servants.”  These servants are the “Pharisees and their ‘Zionist political heirs’ who have abused the trust that God has given them in letting them administer His land. They have long ceased and abandoned any legitimacy”, he says.

For my Presbyterian colleague, Peg Griffith from the Middle East Task Force of the Chicago Presbytery, “The Jewish priests are the power brokers, the tenants, who will fail because they have failed to heed the "cornerstone" --that fairness, equality, justice, and compassion are available for every living person regardless of station in life, ethnicity, gender.” Furthermore she sees that “Israel now teeters on the brink of ethical failure in the sense that its laws serve to promote the Jewish religion to the detriment of non-Jews.”  Lastly she says, “The misuse of power is rife in history and there have been and continue to be plenty of oppressors-- but it figures to be ironic that the message Jesus gave to yesterday's Jewish leaders is pertinent to the current leaders of Israel at this time when the Palestinian issue is front and center in international news.” 

All of these perspectives are interesting and helpful but they still do not help me address the nagging issue of a violent and/or punishing God or why an absentee landlord exploited tenants in the first place.  For this I needed a social-historical analysis that takes into account the economic relationships between landowners and tenants.  This is when I turned to William Herzog’s Parables as Subversive Speech.  For Herzog and now me, the issue is about the conflict of the dispossession of the real heirs of the land and how they have become dependent tenants.  The issue is about how should the dispossessed respond to this kind of economic and social violence.

Herzog asks, “What if the parables of Jesus were neither theological nor moral stories but political and economic ones? What if the scenes they presented were not stories about how God works in the world but codifications about how exploitation worked in Palestine?”  Furthermore, he says that our understanding of the parables must be “consistent with and shed light on Jesus’ murder, his execution as an enemy of the state.”  He reminds us that Jesus was not crucified for telling stories or parables about a kingdom to come but how to make it come on earth as it is in heaven, to work for the end of oppression here and now.  This is what got him into trouble with all the authorities, the powerbrokers, the rulers, and the landowners, and this is what got him eventually killed.

Given that this parable also comes after a series of parables and encounters with authorities towards the end of his life, it makes sense for us then to read this parable in this light.  So let me begin by sharing with you what I learned about vineyards and the economic situation of first century Palestine.

replanted trees into settlements

The first is that the wealthy landowners commonly converted land into vineyards because grapes could be processed into wine, which then could be exported as a commodity.  Vineyards also took four years before the vines were mature enough to produce grapes which meant that you had to be wealthy enough to be able to wait for your profit.  It meant land was purchased that did not provide sustenance.  For the tenant it meant you could not feed your family from your crops like you used to.  These landowners also often acquired their land by dispossessing the peasants.  They got this land often on the cheap because the farmers often had trouble paying the high Roman taxes or Temple tithes.  Thus, the commercialization of agriculture, the selling of grapes for wine instead of crops for food, along with high taxes and temple tithes led directly to farmers losing their land and becoming tenants of another man’s land, sometimes of even their own previously owned land.  Under such incredible stresses and oppression, armed resistance or redemptive violence was seen as a reasonable response or way out. It is what everyone hearing Jesus’ parable was thinking, especially the zealots who were in favor of an armed revolt.

In our parable then, it is unfortunate but understandable why the servants of the vineyard owner would be met with violence as they were seen as doing his unjust bidding.  They were collaborators in the oppressive system. And so the son too then.  He is not Jesus but the ‘unrightful heir’.  Sadly then, according to Herzog, they who were disinherited and the rightful heirs to the land, now become violent killers in an effort to deny the inheritance of the land to the illegitimate heir.”

Herzog says that the parable provided Jesus’ hearers with the vicarious experience of revenge and justice because killing off the son would mean that they too might re-inherit their own land again.  The parable, then, is not about God punishing the bad tenants but rather exposing the structural violence inherent in unjust economic and social relationships in first century Palestine.

The question of what the vineyard owner will do no longer hangs in the air. We know.  We have seen it a million times.  The wealthy and well armed owner, the powerful elite, will respond with yet more violence and the cycle of violence will continue and deepen. They will use force to suppress the uprising.  They will provoke an incident, incite a riot.  So the real question is whose job is it to stop this cycle of violence? The oppressor? The oppressed?  Both?  And what should resistance look like if killing only brings about more destruction?

The parable does not answer these questions but it does provoke us to question and ponder.  And some kind of answer is cryptically given in the mention of the cornerstone, the stone that the builders rejected.  This stone, discarded and flawed, exploited and repressed, will become the capstone, God’s most precious.  Those who do not respond with violence will become God’s living stones, cornerstones of God’s temple on earth.

As the Palestinian bid for statehood hangs in the balance of the international leaders at the United Nations, the question of violence and redemptive violence is very much in the air.  Israel continues to approve more and more housing units for settlers while continuing to demolish more and more Palestinian homes; the IDF continues to search and arrest young men and to tear gas and often maim and sometimes kill peaceful demonstrators.  And this on top of the ongoing siege in Gaza that continues to claim more and more lives including children.  And the vineyards and olive groves have been destroyed too not by an angry God but by settlers and soldiers who believe they have the right to the land.  The vineyards and olive groves have become graveyards of destroyed and uprooted trees.

This structural violence of the occupation continues its stranglehold on the Palestinian people while the absent vineyard keepers of the world decide whether or not to accept the right of Palestinians to self-determination, to own or re-inhabit the land they were expelled from in 1948 and 1967.                                                                 
The parable reminds us that redemptive violence is a powerful form of resistance to intolerable oppression and exploitation like the one that existed in 1^st century and now 21^st century Palestine. To stop the cycle, we, Christians here in the United States, followers of the subversive and nonviolent Jesus, have a responsibility to address this structural violence and not just condemn the violence it ignites.


Our responsibility grows out of our covenantal relationship with God. This covenant is based on commands, which are expected to be obeyed.  We begin then with a sense of the living presence of God in our lives, a God who has heard our cry and freed us from all kinds of enslavement.  This is a God who hears our cries and acts in history for the deliverance of the vulnerable.  This is our God and there are no others like this one   We are thus commanded to love only this God, above and beyond any and everything else including other gods like redemptive violence, nationalism, security, or even choseness.

We are bound also to a God who has outlined for us how to act in this world. These commandments or strategies are for redirecting or reaffirming our relationship with God and God’s people.  The two great relationships or commandments are to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as our self.

This first relationship with God leads to the second which is to have “good neighbors”, to treat them like we would like to be treated, to make sure they have basic human rights like housing, clean water, education, freedom of movement.  Brother Mazin, in commenting about the 10 commandments, believes the Zionists and their heirs, have broken all the commandments in their desire for complete control of the land.

For me there are a few commandments that stand out as being of particular importance in understanding how we as Christians who live in the US should act towards God’s new vulnerable people, the Palestinians. 

Thou shall not kill.  For us here in the United States this means that we should not condone or promote killing.  However, we are complicit in killing others when we allow our tax dollars to be spent on military aid that destroys villages and homes with bulldozers, or on white phosporous bombs that kill or maim civilians.  Thou shall not kill means we should not sell tear gas or sound bombs to the Israeli military so that they can be used against peaceful demonstrators.  It means we should withdraw our over 30 billion dollars over the next 10 years of military aid and redirect it to employing teachers, building hospitals, fixing roads here or there.

The last commandment is also important for it connects us back to our parable about economic exploitation.  Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or property.  We condone coveting other people’s land by allowing Israel to illegally confiscate or annex land that belongs to the Palestinian people.  We do this by not speaking out in outrage at the multitude of ways Israel is violating international law.  We condone coveting of land when we refuse to enforce United Nations resolutions calling for the dismantling of the wall or when we veto ongoing settlement building.

Silence is complicity.  Our complicity says that these forms of violence are acceptable and that ongoing exploitation of the Palestinian people is OK.  We are like the vineyard owner then who profits off someone else’s loss when we choose to let our financial gain override our moral values.  We are like the servant doing his bidding when we participate in a corrupt system of exploiting others and don’t say no or enough or no veto.  And we are like the tenants too who in anger lash out in retaliatory violence in a desperate attempt to right the wrongs.

How do we disengage from this complicity? How do we respond to Jesus’ call for nonviolence when everything seems to point towards violence?

I believe we begin by standing with the precious ones, the vulnerable ones, the rejected cornerstone, just as God and Jesus did.  We seek their freedom like it was our own because it is. We are “all tied together in a mutual garment of destiny” as the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said.  We call out the injustices when we see them and we do not let our name or our country stand against either its own values or the values we hold as Christians; values that include honoring the dignity of all people which includes their freedom to live in their own homes and live off their own land.

So in this season of repentance, returning to our higher selves, let us turn away from the ways we have missed the mark on working for a just peace in Palestine and Israel.  Let us turn towards those things that make for peace beginning with our own government’s complicity in maintaining this occupation.  Let us work toward challenging the conditions and structures that have lead to this violence and way from peace.  Like Bishop Hanson and other faith leaders, let us support the Palestinians in their bid for recognition as a state, a promise we made over 63 years ago.  Let us challenge our government’s military aid for Israel until Israel can abide by international law.  Let us continue to support the United Nations and their programs that provide food, shelter, and education for Palestinians as they work to become a stable and sustainable country. 

Let us stop the spiral of violence in God’s holy vineyard.  Let it begin with our affirmation of the God of love, our affirmation that all life is precious and our disengagement from all the things that stand against justice and righteousness.  Let us be open to God’s tending and commandments so that all might bear fruit and share it abundantly.