First Parish Unitarian UniversalistThe Clueless Landlord
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
November 11, 2007
So, in the parable of Jesus we heard in the Reading this morning (Luke 20:9-15a), there was a landlord who rented his vineyard to some farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its produce from them. He sent his servant there to collect his share of the produce from the farmers. They seized the servant, beat him, and almost killed him. The servant returned and told his master. His landlord said, “Perhaps he did not know them.” He sent another servant, and the farmers beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said, “Perhaps they will show my son some respect.” Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they seized the son, too, and killed him. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.
Parables, simple stories from which a moral may be drawn or an analogy made, were one of Jesus’ best teaching tools. The version of the story I read before the Offertory is from the Gospel of Luke. It appears also, very similarly, in the two other gospels that parallel Luke, Mark and Matthew.
But, when I told it just now, I used the simpler version that appears in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. As you may know, the Gospel of Thomas is not one of the accepted books of the Bible. It is one of the texts found in 1945 in Upper Egypt which we refer to as the Nag Hammadi library, after the location of their discovery. It was an exciting discovery because these texts from the Gnostic tradition were thought to have been completely destroyed by the early Christian church for being unorthodox. Instead, it turns out, the Gnostic believers were successful in hiding away some of their sacred texts—for more than a thousand years!
Since the translation of the Gospel of Thomas was completed in the 1970’s, scholars have been debating whether the sayings of Jesus in it are earlier, more original than what appear in Matthew, Mark and Luke. They’ve been asking the question: Did the latter three add interpretations to the simpler story told in the Gospel of Thomas for the benefit of the early church? Or, did Thomas delete those references because they didn’t fit the Gnostic beliefs?
Those of you who participated last year in the Adult Religious Exploration class “Saving Jesus” may be interested to know that the Christian scholars featured in that dvd-based curriculum are of the opinion that the Gospel of Thomas was earlier and, therefore, likely to be closer to what Jesus actually said than what is in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
In Luke and in the other two, but not Thomas, the story doesn’t end where I stopped telling it. It goes on to tell what will happen next after the landlord finds out his beloved son is dead. Matthew, Mark and Luke all say the landlord will go to his vineyard and “destroy those tenants” and give the vineyard to other tenants (who presumably will pay up when the harvest comes in). And then, in conclusion according to Matthew, Mark and Luke, words are given to Jesus to say that also do not appear in Thomas as part of the parable: “Haven’t you heard this scripture?” and then he quotes a line from Psalm 118 “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.”
In other words, for Matthew, Mark and Luke, the whole point of the parable
is that it foretells the death of Jesus, who though rejected by man will
become the Lord’s cornerstone. I even looked in the textbook for the
New Testament course I took at Harvard Divinity School, and all it says about
Mark’s version of this parable is that it is “a parable interpreting
the fate of Jesus.”
But there is no reason to believe that Jesus could have foretold his own story
any more than any of us can. Besides, most of his parables are clearly told
because the story itself holds a meaning he wants his followers to hear. Why
wouldn’t that be the case with this one, even if it’s difficult
to understand? But precisely because it is so ambiguous, I think the early
Church writers decided to help their followers out by adding to it their own,
church-serving, doctrinal interpretation: The landlord stands for God, we sinful
people are the tenants, and the landlord’s son is Jesus, come to save
us but killed by us.
It’s really too bad. By adding a moral to the story that isn’t there, the early church fathers paved the way for Christians to miss the parable’s life-saving message.
But, we unorthodox readers of the scriptures are left to puzzle out what the story means. And, in doing so, I’m indebted to my colleague, Rev. Richard Trudeau, our UU minister in Weymouth, for pointing me in the direction I’ll be taking you today. He in turn credits Richard Q. Ford’s book The Parables of Jesus: Recovering the Art of Listening for the way in which he gets inside the characters portrayed so sparingly in this tale. Ford is a PhD psychologist with a Masters of Divinity, long-time student of biblical studies, former psychology professor at Williams College, and a practicing psychotherapist in Williamstown.
This parable is usually called the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. Certainly, the tenants are in the wrong, aren’t they? Refusing to pay the landlord his rightful portion of the harvest according to their contract? Wounding his emissaries and then killing his son? Why would mere tenants think they could get away with such insurrection, or weren’t they thinking? Wasn’t it tantamount to suicide?
But, what about the landlord? Why did he put his servants in danger more than once? Why didn’t he change his course after the first servant came back wounded? Why didn’t he go to the vineyard himself and find out what the tenants’ issue was? Why didn’t he assemble more force and assert his authority? (after all, he had the lease agreement, he was in the right, legally). He could have easily overpowered them. How could he have been so blind to the reality of the situation that he sent his beloved son into the fray?
So, my colleague [Richard Trudeau] dubbed this the Parable of the Clueless Landlord.
What was Jesus trying to say?
If we step back and think of his messages in general, perhaps they will clue us in to where to look for the meaning of this parable. Many of Jesus’ sayings and parables instruct his followers in regard to differences and inequalities—“the last shall be first and the first shall be last,” “blessed are the poor,” “it’s harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel through the eye of a needle”… and look at who his disciples were—among them the despised and disparaged, and he even had some women in prominent roles…and think about the Good Samaritan—he wasn’t who you expected him to be…not the teacher or the preacher—people from Samaria were generally thought ill of by Jesus’ audience, so that’s who Jesus made the hero—the equivalent of a black man in white communities or a gay person almost anywhere.
Clearly, the Parable of the Tenants and the Landlord is also about inequity. The landlord has the power of wealth and the law. The tenants have the power of their anger and, initially at least, of their numbers. But they only have that power as long as the landlord doesn’t use his greater power to crush them. But he doesn’t do that. He disowns his full power, persisting in believing that the tenants will welcome his servants and then even his son and pay him what he is due. It doesn’t occur to the landlord, as Richard Q. Ford so aptly puts it, that “others less fortunate than he might perceive a difference between what is lawful and what is just.”
And the tenants, how do they understand themselves? Probably, they believed their contract with the landlord was unfair. So, they beat up the landlord’s servant come to collect his portion of the crop. Now, let’s think about it, by not reacting to that, by not showing up at the vineyard to find out for himself what’s going on after the first servant is beaten up, by not sending a larger force to back up his demand that the contract be honored…It’s as if the tenants hardly exist. Ford imagines the tenants explain themselves like this : “we… have become so convinced we are unrecognizable that we… imagine murder as the only means available to gain recognition.”
What was Jesus trying to teach?
I think he was saying that the person with the upper-hand, usually the one with wealth, ought to make a real effort to understand the lives of those whose cooperation he expects, and to negotiate contracts that recognize them as human beings, contracts that are enforceable without violence because they are perceived to be just.
And, I think this parable might also serve as a warning: that some of those who are convinced they are unrecognizable will imagine not just murder, but suicidal slaughter, as the means for gaining the highest recognition.
How might things in Iraq have been different if the Bush administration made a real effort to understand the situation there before invading? If only he was more interested in the social teachings of Jesus than in Christian doctrine about Jesus.
In this teaching of Jesus, as I read the parable, the United States has, or had, a responsibility to understand the dynamics in the Muslim world so that we could achieve our goals without resorting to violence. When we elect the next administration, may it be led by people whose desire and ability to understand is greater than its desire to dominate, whose method is to collaborate intelligently for world peace, for environmental protection, and for an equitable sharing of the earth’s resources.
This teaching of Jesus might also want to speak to us closer to home than Iraq. For the past year or more, the local media has been reporting so many deaths in Boston among young adults. Are they, like the vineyard tenants, so convinced they are unrecognizable that they imagine murder as the only means available to gain recognition? How did we get to this sorry place? Living in the safer suburbs, what is our responsibility to understand, and to collaborate with forces for good to end this violence?
This teaching of Jesus might want to speak even closer to home than Boston. I find myself pondering. What does this parable say to us in our own lives—family, workplace, congregation, community, nation?
Do we ever act as if we are powerless, forsaking our own values? Do we ever act like a clueless landlord, ignoring someone else’s experience to get what we want?
When there’s a “crop” to “harvest” in our lives, who does the work, who gets the credit? How is the harvest shared? Do we recognize with thanks all those hands, seen and unseen, paid and unpaid, worker and owner, leader and follower, who bring the harvest home?
A simple parable, so many questions! So many questions…
With no explanation of the parable’s meaning, its last line as told in the Gospel of Thomas is “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear!” It even has an exclamation point at the end…
Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear!
Amen.