Introduction
Before we do anything else with this parable, we need to say what it is not saying. Jesus is not announcing that God has taken the covenant away from Israel and given it to Gentiles. Christians have preached this passage that way for centuries, and that reading has done real harm.
Traditionally, throughout scripture, the vineyard represents God’s people, whom God loves and tends. The tenants are those entrusted with caring for the vineyard. When Jesus finishes speaking, Matthew tells us that the chief priests and Pharisees realize he is speaking about them (v. 45). His accusation is directed at these leaders and what they do with the authority given to them. The vineyard itself is not rejected.
We also need to feel how severe the accusation is. Jesus does not tell a mild story about leaders who failed to meet expectations. He tells a story in which servants are beaten, killed, and stoned, and a son is murdered. Why tell this story to the leaders standing before him in the temple?
Narrative Context
We are still in the confrontation that began last week. The chief priests and elders asked Jesus who gave him authority. Jesus asked whether John the Baptist’s baptism came from heaven or from human beings. They would not answer. If they said John spoke for God, they would have to explain why they had not believed him. If they denied John’s authority, they feared the crowd, who regarded him as a prophet. Jesus then told them about two sons, asking who actually did the father’s will.
Now he says, “Listen to another parable.” He has not changed his audience or his subject.
John’s story should still be in our minds. Earlier in Matthew, Herod arrested John and had him killed. Matthew tells us that Herod, too, feared the crowd because they regarded John as a prophet (14:5). Here, the temple leaders fear that same crowd when Jesus asks them about John (21:26). At the end of this week’s passage, they want to arrest Jesus but again fear the crowds, who regard him as a prophet (21:46). Matthew repeats that detail for a reason.
The leaders did not kill John; Herod did. But Jesus has just confronted them with their refusal to believe John or publicly acknowledge what God was doing through him. With that exchange still hanging in the air, Jesus tells a story about messengers sent to those in charge of a vineyard.
Isaiah’s Vineyard
This is our first reading for this week, and that’s great because Jesus seems to be calling back to this image. Isaiah tells us what God hoped to find in the vineyard: justice and righteousness. The vineyard is God’s people, and that is the fruit God seeks from them. In Isaiah’s song, God looks for that fruit and finds bloodshed and cries of distress instead (Isaiah 5:7).
Jesus tells a different vineyard story. When the landowner sends servants to collect his produce, there is a harvest to collect. The vineyard has borne fruit. The tenants’ problem is that they refuse to hand it over to the owner. They attack the servants who come for it, and when the son arrives, they kill him too.
What might that fruit be in Matthew? John the Baptist called people to “bear fruit worthy of repentance” (3:8). Just last week, Jesus told these leaders that tax collectors and prostitutes believed John. They heard his call and responded, while the leaders refused to change their minds even after seeing it happen (21:32).
Jesus has also shown what that response can look like. When he ate with tax collectors and was questioned about it, he answered, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (9:13). Later in this same temple confrontation, he will name “justice and mercy and faith” as the weightier matters of the law (23:23). Matthew does not ask us to choose between Isaiah’s justice and John’s repentance or Jesus’ mercy. Together, they help us see the life growing in God’s vineyard.
That makes the tenants’ violence even more disturbing. They are entrusted with caring for a vineyard in which people are responding to God. Yet when messengers come to claim its fruit, the tenants treat them as enemies. They would rather beat and kill those messengers than surrender control of a harvest that belongs to God.
This is where the parable speaks so directly to the confrontation in the temple. Jesus has just pointed the leaders to people they looked down upon (tax collectors and prostitutes) who believed John when they did not. In them, John showed fruit growing where they did not expect it. Jesus shows fruit growing in the fishermen and tax collectors that follow him. Instead of rejoicing or changing their minds, the religious leaders demand credentials from Jesus and protect their authority. This parable pushes that response to its horrifying conclusion: the tenants come to see even the son as someone they must destroy to keep the vineyard for themselves.
Jesus asks what should happen to such tenants. The leaders condemn them before realizing that he is speaking about them. Then Matthew tells us they want to arrest Jesus. They have heard the story, recognized themselves, and still move toward seizing the one who told it.
Matthew’s Community: Seeing Ourselves
The challenge for Matthew’s later readers (and for us) is that they know what happens to Jesus. They also know that the temple was destroyed before Matthew’s Gospel was written.
It has been far too easy for Christian readers to connect those events and announce that God punished Israel and handed everything over to the Christian church. But the parable does not support that claim. Jesus addresses particular leaders, and Matthew tells us that they recognize themselves in the story. And, as we heard last week, the tax collectors and prostitutes who believed John are among God’s people too. The division in this scene is not between Jews and Gentiles. It’s among the people of God’s vineyard.
But Matthew, as usual, wants his community to hear the accusation as well. If the story asks what happens when leaders refuse the messengers God sends, no church leader gets to say, “Fortunately, those tenants were someone else.” Those who step in to care for the vineyard become its tenants. Matthew is not simply offering a historical account of why one group of leaders lost its place. He is telling a cautionary tale for anyone entrusted with caring for God’s people. Are we serving God and seeking the fruit of justice, repentance, and mercy? Or are we cultivating our own power?
I wonder if Matthew is asking that question of leaders in his own congregation. We cannot know exactly what was happening there, but perhaps some were reluctant to welcome Gentiles fully into the community. Perhaps people with gifts for leadership were being kept from stepping forward because those already in charge were afraid of what might change. Matthew’s Gospel makes room for Gentiles, while the place they held in his community remains a matter of scholarly debate.
If so, the parable’s warning becomes painfully close. God may already be bringing forth fruit through the very people the leaders are trying to hold back. The question is whether those entrusted with the vineyard can recognize and nurture that fruit, or whether protecting their own place has become more important than the work God is doing.
The question is close to us, too. Denominations around the United States and the world are still arguing over who is allowed to speak, preach, teach, and pastor. Are these conversations helping us tend God’s vineyard? Or might we be silencing messengers of God to protect the authority we already hold?
And lest we think this is only about pastors, the question reaches into all the ways we lead in the church. We can guard the way we have always done things so closely that we push back against anyone who asks whether we are living into our Christian calling. We can honor prophets after they are gone while dismissing what they said when it might change our decisions. When someone challenges us now, are we listening for what we might need to hear, or are we calculating what it would cost us to change?
Matthew does not let the leaders’ recognition of the parable count as repentance. They know Jesus is speaking about them. Can we hear that Jesus is speaking about us? And if we can, what will we do next?
Preaching Possibility
We are the Tenants
There is more than one place to enter this parable. A preacher might follow the messengers and ask what happens when those entrusted with caring for a community refuse to hear a word from God. Or we might follow the fruit: the vineyard is producing, and Jesus has just named tax collectors and prostitutes who responded to John. What happens when leaders cannot recognize God’s work because it is growing through people they have learned to dismiss?
I think the most difficult place to stay is at the end. The leaders understand that Jesus is speaking about them. That recognition could have become repentance. Instead, they want to arrest him. We should be careful about comparing ordinary resistance to change with the violence of this parable. But we can ask what we do when a challenge to our leadership turns out to be true. Do we make room for the person who spoke, and for the fruit we had failed to see? Or do we look for a way to make the challenge go away?
That question belongs to those of us who preach, as well as to our congregations. We stand among the tenants whenever we are entrusted with the care of God’s people. Perhaps the sermon can leave room for us to hear Jesus’ question before we are too quick to decide who else it describes.
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