Following the parable of the two sons and leading up to that of the marriage of the king’s son, the second of the high messianic parables preached in Jerusalem cannot be enjoyable to the Temple officials. They must roll their eyes as Jesus says, “Hear another parable.”
The common crowd relishes the discomfort of the sanctimonious. They do not jeer, for this is not a college debate, but you can see them grinning at the spectacle of pomposity nervously fiddling with those long tassels on which the Nazarean casts a cold eye. Those dignitaries had enjoyed the acoustics of the Temple precincts. The marble corridors gave their voices a timbre that sounded like the oracles of God, men of the stained-glass voice before there was stained glass.
Yet on this day, after their orotund oozing, Jesus flashes words of lightning, and they are left all aquiver, like overweight and overaged heavyweight prizefighters sagging on the ropes. Worse, Jesus makes his verbal sparring look effortless. He quietly says, “Hear another parable,” and they grimace.
When He speaks of a tidy vineyard, they know what He means. They have been tending the House of Israel, and they had been living very well by doing it poorly. It may have been said unfairly of the Quakers that they went to Pennsylvania to do good and instead did well, but it was much the case with these priests and elders. As tenant farmers, stewards by divine decree since the first garden was planted east of Eden, they gradually assumed proprietary airs over their legacy. Through thick moral lenses, their opinion and God’s truth were one and the same.
God’s vineyard is salvation history, and commandeering it gives a semblance of vitality to decaying religion and creates an illusion of obscurantism as light; and so the parable is of the wicked, not stubborn or selfish or misguided, husbandmen (Matthew 21:33-45). They had long rejected the sons of God (2 Chronicles 36:15-16), and now they are rejecting the very Son of Man. Christ’s awful wailing over Jerusalem that kills the prophets (Matthew 23:37) writes this parable in tears. Christ is the cornerstone of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and rejection of Him will bring its earthly symbol crashing down on the wicked tenants, canceling all access to the City not made with hands.
God has bestowed unspeakably great privileges on His people, and that is truer of us than of any generation: “Many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which you see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which you hear, and have not heard them” (Matthew 13:17). But notice how our culture rejects the palpable evidence of miracles. The existence of saints is more taxing to the cynical observer than any miracles they perform; still, it is wonderful how the inquisitive media almost completely black out news releases of the miracles approved for their canonizations. You would expect these to be mentioned in the secular press, if only out of morbid curiosity, but they are not. The lives of the saints, the most vivid personalities in the long human procession, are conspicuous by their absence from the university curriculum. Thomas More is the only saint mentioned in a sociology textbook used in a major New York university, and all the book says about him is that he was the “Father of Euthanasia.”
The parable of the wicked husbandmen does not let this kind of nonchalance with grace get off lightly. However infrequently it may be declaimed from the pulpits of happy-clappy churches, this is what the parable tells us: “The Lord shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9).
A new self-help book for business leaders proposes Jesus as the greatest model for management techniques. Its shrewd insights about human relations and motivating people do not claim to be theological. But even as helpful advice, it attains the level of magnificent grotesquery: “Jesus’ plan for transition was the most successful in history…. His associates did not want to see him go, but they were forewarned. They performed beautifully after Jesus was taken from them, pushing the program forward to unimagined success. Jesus planned well for his succession. So should you. Your company and your associates deserve it.”
Commentary like that notwithstanding, the parables are not lessons in social management. The calamity of wicked husbandry was that it functioned only in terms of unimagined success. As a result, the tenants would kill the one Man who needs no successor, for He is the eternal Son of the everlasting Father, and He dwells in His followers by sanctifying grace.