This week’s realigning is not a pretty parable Matthew 21: 3346. It is ominous, violent, and threatening. And it was all too familiar to Jesus’ audience. Absentee landlords were not uncommon. Someone buying a field, improving it, leasing it to tenants, and then departing to live in another region was part and parcel of the ancient world where a very few people often held much of the land and agricultural wealth.
Nor would it have been terribly uncommon to imagine tenants resisting the landlord’s assertion of authority and demand for a return on investment. We don’t know how long the landlord lived away. It could have been years. The tenants may have assumed by this time that the landlord had died, or forgotten about them, and may have similarly assumed the land was now theirs by right of possession and labor.
None of this is uncommon. What is uncommon is the repeated entreaties of the landlord. Once, sure. But several times? More likely, a landlord wealthy enough to buy and improve land while living abroad and who employed multiple servant well, this kind of landlord likely would have sent not just servants but soldiers to collect his due.
There are two things that don’t make a lot of sense about this parable. The first is the tenants’ assumption that if they kill the heir they will now be inheritors, an assumption that the crowds listening to Jesus’ parable intuitively contradict. It is, in short, a little crazy.
The second is the landlord sending his son and heir, alone and unaccompanied, to plead for a sensible response from these tenants after all this violence. That’s even crazier. It is, quite frankly, the act of a landlord so desperate to restore relationship with these wayward and wicked tenants that he is willing to try anything, do anything to repair the breach between them. Or maybe it’s the act of a desperate parent who will try anything, do anything to draw back a wayward child into a loving embrace. Or the act of a desperate God who will try anything, do anything to win back a wayward people.
It’s not just crazy; it’s crazy love. The kind of love that brooks no reason, that will listen to no counter argument, and that will never, ever give up, risking even violence, rejection, and death in order to testify to God’s commitment to these tenants and to us.
Matthew tells this parable in order to indict those who rejected Jesus and to assure his community that justice, in time, will be served. But I don’t think this parable is only about Jesus’ opponents. I think that ultimately this parable tells the truth both about how often we get caught up in our own devices and demands to the point of absolutely rejecting God’s just claim on our allegiance and just how far God will go to win us back.
Like I said, this isn’t a pretty parable.
Solomzi