October 4, 2026
Pentecost 19 / Proper 22, Year A
The Rev. Deacon Lee Febos
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 ~ Psalm 19 ~ Philippians 3:4b-14 ~ Matthew 21:33-46
Listen to another parable. It is the third parable about vineyards in as many weeks. Jesus is interested in the allegorical power of the vineyard, especially in this moment of his entry into Jerusalem. At least, that is the consensus of commentaries for these past three weeks: The vineyard is an allusion to the prophet Isaiah, and Isaiah has said that the vineyard is Israel. We see the deepening of the connection between Jesus’s parables and Isaiah with today’s passage that quotes a portion of the psalms about the cornerstone, embedding this story in Scripture. This parable and its context are really difficult to understand without the background that the vineyard is an understanding of the promise of God to the people of Israel. God chose the Israelites, loves the Israelites. That is what we have experienced in our recent passages from Exodus. And since the time of Moses, in the historical imagination of the contemporaries of Jesus, first the kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians. Then, the kingdom of Judah, with Jerusalem, fell to the Babylonians. Under the Babylonians, there was an exile followed by a return under the Emperor Cyrus of Persia. When Isaiah writes of the vineyard, he is writing from an experience of displacement, the Israelites of Moses searching for signs of God’s love and favor across fathoms of time. The vineyard is outside of history, a hope of grounded nourishment in a deep relationship with God, and the vineyard is a place to look back to, to say, “That was the Kingdom of God that still is.” There is longing in that, and here is Jesus, the fulfilment of prophecy, here to break that open, and he uses the vineyard to speak a criticism and prophecy.
The owner of a vineyard this time built some amenities. There’s a fence and a wine press and a watch tower. He has leased this property to some tenants, and when the harvest time comes, he sends his slaves to collect the work of the tenants. The tenants then kill the slaves of the vineyard owner. We do not get an insight into the motivations of the tenants or the experience of the slaves as the next line tells us that the owner sends more slaves, who also are killed by the tenants.
One might imagine that the tenants feel entitled to the land and their labor on that land. They are claiming ownership over the land. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, they say. In response, the owner wants to assert his claim to the vineyard he built. He has sent two groups of slaves who were murdered, and he comes up with an alternative plan: He will send his son for certainly, they will respect him.
Turning back to the commentaries, and perhaps using a little intuition, we can make claims on who the players are in this parable. The owner is God, claiming ownership over the vineyard as God’s creation. The owner’s “absence” and “leasing” move between allegory and literary license, but in the context of the current Roman occupation, the fear of displacement and being apart from God are very relevant themes for Jesus’s audience.
The slaves the owner sends are the prophets, who are rejected in the actions of the tenants. The image of these people being seized and killed adds an apocalyptic image onto the prophets. Even the most boring prophets, not naming names, Obadiah, even those who were embedded in power, become tragic figures.
Then, there is the son. To say “They will respect my son.” Doesn’t seem to match the reality of the danger in the vineyard. In a parable that is as literary of this one, this moment builds the character of the landowner. He is, in one reading, a huge fan of his son, to the point that he believes his presence will solve the issues presented by these wicked tenants. In another reading, the father is willing to sacrifice his son while working in a deficit of information of what outcome his son’s presence may have. A third reading is that the landowner is aware that these tenants will kill his son and sends him anyway.
These positions might sound familiar to us. It is the same question sometimes asked about the crucifixion. Jesus is letting us in on a prophetic knowledge of what fate he will face. Knowing this does not give us access to the meaning of God’s actions, and that is a difficult mystery. The question then is how we internalize this parable and how it affects how we treat others as we consider who are the tenants in this parable.
Today, we see Jesus tell this parable of the “Wicked Tenants” to a crowd that includes the chief priests and Pharisees. Jesus seeks out this audience for this parable, and we are asked to pay attention to the reaction: “They realized he was speaking about them.” This is a unique reaction. How many times has Jesus had to pick up his disciples and say, “This is you,” or, more often, “This is me?” The chief priests and Pharisees felt called out by a part of the parable. Their reaction is to desire to arrest Jesus.
The chief priests and Pharisees were working under empire, their choices constrained by empire and human impulses, and Jesus’s criticism is that they were not following the prophets or God’s will, and he is there as the son to bring reconciliation. We hope, in God’s kingdom, in that vineyard just outside of history, that there is respect and reconciliation. We hope, despite our awareness of human folly, that we remove ourselves from the weapons we have used to not hear God’s instructions in God’s faithful.
When we take a moment to look back at these three weeks, we have a milieu of fearful audiences, and I would be remiss to ignore that some of these parables left me fearful. They ask a lot of us and of our relationship with God. We can otherize ourselves to say that we are not the chief priests and Pharisees who are the target of this story, but by entering into this story, we have to meaningfully engage with how we can be the tenants, how we can turn away the servants of God in pursuit of our own desires. We might realize that Jesus is talking about us when we believe we are entitled to the vineyard in a way that leads us to violence.
When we confront our impulses of injustice, we turn to Truth.
Jesus is the cornerstone. We learn to place Jesus in a central position in our lives through the instruction of the faithful, the saints. The instructive influence of St. Francis of Assissi cannot be overstated. He was a man who understood the violence of the world and met it with a certainty of God’s goodness and challenged us to rise to that goodness. It is his feast day, so as many times as I can repeat this text, I think it’s worth it. I want to lead us from this space of the Word to St. Francis’s prayer.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.