The parables in St Matthew’s Gospel are eschatological in their message.
As the liturgical year draws to a close, our attention is always turned towards the judgement that is coming. This is especially the case in the present year in which we are reading St Matthew, and it is a notable feature of the first two Sundays in October.
On the first Sunday of the month we read Matthew’s version of the parable of the Wicked Tenants, which most scholars believe Matthew has taken over from Mark. While in the latter Gospel this is one of just two big “set-piece” parables, balancing the Parable of the Sower towards the beg-inning of the Gospel, Matthew has already added a great many others, and many of them with a clear message: the Wheat and the Tares, the Dragnet and the Unforgiving Servant, all unique to Matthew, have already come, each with their strong overtones of judgement, and the Foolish and Wise Virgins and the Sheep and Goats will follow, intensifying the theme of Christ as a preacher of divine judgement.
When it comes to the Wicked Tenants, Matthew makes few changes to the Marcan version, which is already strongly judgemental in its message. The parable obviously appeals to the passage in Isaiah 5 known as the Song of the Vineyard, which is our first reading on this Sunday, and invites an allegorical interpretation: the vineyard is Israel, the tenants are her rulers, the messengers are the prophets and the owner is God. But the parable introduces some new elements: the Son is obviously Christ, and it would have been impossible, I suggest, for the original hearers of this parable not to infer that Christ is making the claim the he is uniquely God’s Son and that his ministry is ushering in a moment of judgement.
The other big difference between the Song of the Vineyard and our parable is that the vineyard is not destroyed at the end, but handed over to other tenants, and Matthew adds to the Marcan version the note that the owner will “lease the vineyard to other tenants who will deliver the produce to him when the season arrives” (21:41). We may all too readily imagine the outrage of the chief priests and elders, to whom this parable was addressed, at the suggestion that Jesus’s followers were to replace them as the tenants of God’s vineyard – an outrage that brought Jesus’s own death ever closer.
The outrage results, ultimately, from Jesus’s claim to an authority that massively exceeds theirs, an authority that is his birthright, and the implication is that our own judgement will depend upon our willingness to accept that authority, to accept that Jesus is who he claims to be.
Reading this parable in the context of Matthew’s Gospel also means that we will have already heard the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. I did not mention this one above because of itself it is not so obviously about judgement, apart from its concluding line that the first shall be last and the last first, a conclusion which in fact does not obviously connect with the content of the parable, which seems more to be about how the generosity of God’s mercy overwhelms any claims of human justice. But reading these two parables together, we are surely invited to recognise that the labourers in the vineyard are participating in an eschatological harvest – the harvest is the end of the world, put simply – and to be resentful of the inclusion of those who were hitherto outsiders in this final ingathering is to put oneself at odds with God’s providential plan and thereby exclude oneself from the joy experienced by the latecomers. It is interesting that this conclusion is so similar to the denouement of the parable of the Prodigal Son, which is unique to Luke.
The parable of the Wedding Banquet follows this parable on the next Sunday, and has a similar theme about the ingathering of the people and the divine joy of welcoming all-comers, a joy we should not fail to share in. But it adds that worrying note at the end about the man who is thrown out for not being properly dressed; this notion that, while it is God’s will to gather all people to himself, yet there may be those excluded by their own unpreparedness, comes to the fore in parables that are yet to come, such as the Wise and Foolish Virgins – but more on that next month.
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