12 - Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII THE WICKED VINEDRESSERS Mat 21:33-46; Mark 12:1-12; Luk 20:9-19 This parable deals with yet another aspect of the problem of the rejection of Jesus. If Jesus was the embodiment of Jewish ideals and the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy, then the men who were officially responsible for preserving these ideals and treasuring these prophecies should surely have recognized him when he came. On the contrary it was they who had secured his condemnation. In dealing with this disconcerting situation, the Christian evangelists had the advantage of Jesus’ own verdict on it, the parable of the Vinedressers.

It is not surprising that it is one of the four told by all the Synoptists. In all three it comes near the end of the Gospel story when the Jewish leaders had made up their minds. In Matthew the “Vinedressers” comes immediately before the Great Supper, with which it has many features in common, including, in his account, the reference to the Son. Read in the light of the stories that precede, we can see what the parable meant to the Synoptists, what undoubtedly it meant to Jesus. No attempt to deny this parable to Jesus has succeeded. Are we to reject it because it is an allegory? He who gave a broader reach and a deeper depth to the Law of Moses would not have hesitated to ignore the dictates of a modern grammarian. Is it suggested that Jesus could not have foreseen his death? No divine penetration was needed to know that the storm which had long been gathering was about to break on his head. He knew whether he meant to flee that storm. As has been pointed out, if the parable had been the work of Christian preachers, there would have been a reference to the resurrection as well as to the death of the Son. Could Jesus have referred to himself as the Lord of the Vineyard’s only son, the Beloved? These are the very terms used of him in the story of the Baptism and the Transfiguration. The Temptation story, which must have come from himself, is based on his unique sonship. The authenticity of this parable can be seriously questioned only by those for whom it is impossible that Jesus should have spoken of himself in the words ascribed to him in Mat 11:28. The parable gives us a most vivid glimpse into Jesus’ thought of the infinite and loving patience with which God had watched over Israel, the almost incredible perversity with which Israel had scorned that patience and that love. The stern words which announce the doom of the vinedressers and the transference of their privileges to others Matthew puts into the mouth of the bystanders. If they ever suggest to us a tone of gloating revenge, let us read the lament of Jesus over Jerusalem and see there the real feelings with which Jesus saw the nation he loved, at the end of a career of glorious possibilities, voluntarily choosing the path that led to destruction. Whatever the tone in which Jesus pronounced sentence on the nation, no prophecy in history has been more abundantly fulfilled.

Unerringly Jesus put his finger on the sore spot. The vinedressers were God’s agents, but they did not recognize any responsibility to God. They regarded the vineyard as their own, and Jesus was threatening to displace them from their position of authority. They claimed to sit on Moses’ seat: Jesus claimed an authority above that of Moses. They expounded the Law: Jesus taught not as the Scribes. They were self-appointed guardians of the tradition: for Jesus the tradition was a yoke that crushed the life out of religion. On points to which the Pharisees attached enormous importance Jesus strenuously attacked Pharisaic practice. The parable must be read in the context of the whole preceding section. This parable, perhaps alone of all the parables, is not a call to action, but a parable of judgment.

“ Too late! Too late! Te cannot enter now?’

Jesus depicts the vinedressers as recognizing the heir. In any case the parable graphically portrays the danger that besets a Church when it becomes an institution, with the full apparatus of creed, organisation and officials. Henceforth the institution becomes a citadel to be defended; henceforth the discovery, the preservation, the propagation of truth may be an aim; at best, it is only one aim and may cease to be an aim at all. Not truth but the creed; not the welfare of the world, but the prosperity of the Church; not the glory of God but the honour and prestige of the officials: if the Jewish Church did not escape the danger of making these aims paramount, who will claim that the Christian Churches have always escaped them? It is easy to recognize in other Churches the counterpart of the Vinedressers; it is always more profitable to find it in ourselves and our colleagues.

There must have been honest men among the Pharisees, the Scribes and the Priests. Here and there there must have been a Gamaliel, a Nicodemus, a Joseph of Arimathaea, not utterly blinded. In the early days of the Church we hear of the conversion of ’ a great crowd of priests ’ (Acts 6:7): but the machine was against them as it has so often been in the history of the Church. Institutionalize the Church, and immediately an immense weight is thrown on the side of conservatism, alike in belief and practice; a weight so immense that the institution, when it moves at all, moves with infinite leisure and with uncertain aim. We are so anxious to preserve the ark of God from falling that often we do not let it move at all. No Church with a developed organisation seems really to have solved this problem, and to be able to offer a hospitable welcome to new truth and to new claims upon us however just. Well may Jesus have spoken the parable of the Darnel.

Sometimes the greatest danger in uprooting the darnel is that the darnel may after all turn out to be wheat, its true nature revealed only at the harvest. But in this parable our Lord had something more in view than the conservatism of the institution. He clearly points to the special temptation of the Church dignitaries. Strongly entrenched as they often are in positions of power, influence and prestige, their temptation is to feel resentment against any person, plan, organisation or idea that threatens to dethrone them. It has sometimes been suggested that the interference by Jesus with a profitable monopoly of the priests in the sale of animals for sacrifice and the work of money-changing added the final touch of exasperation that made them resolve on his death. There may well be some truth in this; yet the whole impression left on our minds by the story of the opposition to Jesus is that financial considerations played a minor part if any. The degenerate Churchman has often been too fond of money, as Luke, with whatever justification, says the Pharisees were (Luk 16:14); yet the special temptation of the ecclesiastic is not greed but worldly ambition. In its coarsest form, this ambition takes shape in as a love of power, of splendour, of adulation; in a less vulgar manifestation it is a craving for leadership; in its most sublimated form it becomes the desire, not only that good should be done but that we should do it, a desire to be first in the service of men. It has been true in the Christian Church, as it was true in the Jewish Church, that infinitely more harm has been wrought by some form of worldly ambition than by any kind of self-indulgence. He who to-day holds the allegiance of more men and women than any other, during his lifetime held no official position; had no servants and no subordinates; had no promotion to offer save more intimate fellowship with himself, especially in his sufferings, and no weapon of discipline save the loving appeal. The only one of the twelve who did not continue in the fellowship left of his own accord. In the foreign enterprise of the Church, no small part of the work of the missionary to-day is the gradual devolution on Christian nationals of duties and responsibilities formerly wielded by the missionaries from the West. The formation in all the more advanced mission fields of indigenous Churches responsible for their own administration, and the gradual transference to these Churches of the task and privilege of evangelising the country to which they belong, is an indication that in this department of our Church work the lesson of the Vinedressers has been taken to heart. Nor is it only in the sphere of the Christian Church that the temptation is present and the warning needed. For thousands of years the higher castes of India, by the exercise of much ingenuity and with wonderful pertinacity, have clung to their exalted position. Even to-day we are witnessing hardly more than the beginning of the breakdown of the system, if indeed it is to be broken down at all. In this these castes are typical of aristocracies almost everywhere, whether they be aristocracies of birth or colour of wealth or privilege. “ Noblesse oblige; “but we prefer to help our weaker neighbour from the eminence of our own exalted position; we are seldom eager to help him to climb up beside us.