Tempting as it is to read the parable of the vineyard as comment on society and the rural economy of Judea and Galilee in the 1st Century AD. The truth is that if there is a background of social unrest exacerbated by absentee landlords and violently dissatisfied peasants, Luke at least, is not interested in it, and of all the evangelists, Luke is the one who might take such an interest. The tenant’s motivation is unexplained by anything other than simple greed.
Nevertheless, the social and legal background does have something to tell us. The motivation for their final outrage in killing the owner’s son is the desire to claim for themselves his “inheritance”. The Greek word, kleronomia, used for inheritance is ambiguous.
It can mean inheritance as in that which one expects to receive from a parent’s estate. That is clearly the sense when the word is used in the parable of the Prodigal Son who, imprudently, anticipates his father’s death taking his “share”. In this meaning there is a clear sense of expectation and entitlement. In most legal systems, notably in Civil Law and Sharia, children have a right to share in their parents’ estate; Anglo Saxon law is peculiar in not giving any such entitlement.
The root of kleronomia is however chance; kleros means a lot or chance. When the Greeks of crowded cities in Greece proper went off to colonise Italy or Crimea the parcels of new land were handed out by lot. Instead of entitlement there was chance or the luck of the draw.
Do the tenants are not the vineyard owner’s children, but do they feel somehow entitled entitled to the vineyard as its labourers? Or are they just seizing the lucky chance brought about by their misdeeds?
This little lecture on the etymology of “inheritance” is not as irrelevant as you may be thinking. The parable of the vineyard owes a good deal to the similar story we heard in the reading from Isaiah in which the vineyard planted by God is seen, expressly, as the “the house of Israel” from which God expected justice and righteousness but found only bloodshed. And I suggest we can look further back to the planting of the Garden in Eden where again man’s greed or pride spoil the perfection he has been given. Should that gift be seen as a true gift- given without any entitlement on the part of the recipient- or is it something we, like the ancient Israelites- can expect? Is it a matter of Grace or Covenant?
Creation itself is necessarily an act of grace; God’s love bursting into tangible form, gratuitously ordering chaos and setting up the enormously intricate systems that maintain the universe and our life in it. Yet his promises to mankind, to Noah and to Abraham and Moses are conditional. This may seem to be reading a great deal of significance into one word, and not an unusual one at that. This is, however, justified in that Jesus is clearly putting his story in the tradition expressed in Isaiah and Genesis. That I suggest is deeper context for this parable.
There is however a more immediate and -superficially, at least, precise background.
In all three gospel versions it follows closely on Jesus’ altercation with the “chief priests, the scribes and the elders” who ask what Jesus’ authority is for his acts and teaching. Jesus responds with one of his trick questions “Tell me who gave John the Baptist authority, and I will tell you who authorises me” John’s teaching was rejected by the religious authorities and he was executed King Herod and yet he was immensely popular and the Scribes etc feared for their own lives if they answered that John’s authority was merely human. So the Scribes answer that they do not know by whose authority John acted. Jesus responds that in that case he will not tell them who gave him authority. I suggest this parable of the wicked tenants is intended as rather more serious answer Jesus’ overt and scarcely logical reply.
The immediately obvious interpretation of the parable is that the tenants are the people of Israel or perhaps their leaders and the servants sent by the owner are the various prophets whom Israel rejected, culminating in the owner’s son, whom they killed. In the context in which the story is told, it is most obviously John who was that last prophet, but of course, Luke, and we, can see a wider picture in which it is Jesus, who has authority as the son of God to whom the story refers. And as the story predicts, in the passage immediately following the parable, we see the scribes and chief priests understanding the parable as told against them and trying to seize Jesus to have him put to death.
That is the role of the story in the simple narrative starting Holy Week, but I want to suggest the parable has greater significance than being a simple first step in the plot. As I have said it seems to me to introduce a more fundamental, indeed universal and eternal theme concerned with God’s relation to his world and his human creatures.
The tenants see the vineyard as their inheritance into which we can read an ambiguity which they may not have seen- they simply wish to grab the vineyard. The owner sees it as property which he can take away and give to others destroying the wicked tenants.
Who are these others to whom the vineyard will be given? It must be those who can accept the grace of God and observe a new covenant. In the bigger story we see this parable as preparing the ground for the new order to be sealed by Jesus’ death and resurrection. In his death on the cross Jesus makes a final all embracing act of grace and his resurrection establishes a new world no longer subject to a contract between God and Man , no longer like landlord and tenant, or master and servant, no longer confined in a walled vineyard overseen by a watchtower, but free to fulfil our divinely inspired humanity. That I suggest is the deeper message of this very pointed parable.
Amen