Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

I don’t like to spend a lot of time on the most famous passages, because there is so much else said about them. For the commandments, you may have heard; it’s not actually “10”, take a look, they aren’t listed in the way you see them in posters or monuments. There is more than one set of “10”. If they are such a great set of values to live by, why not also say “don’t rape babies” or “slavery is not good”? There are 613 commandments in the Old Testament, why are these 10 so special?

The next chapter addresses the slavery issue, telling you how to beat them and how to sell your daughter. And after those laws are discussed, Moses orders the killing of 3,000 in chapter 32, one of the most brutal set of verses in the Bible.

So this is not a story about doing the right thing. It’s not a higher law that did not occur to human beings before it came down from the mountain. What it is, is revealed throughout the rest of history up to how it is viewed and used today.

Isaiah 5:1-7

This story, or song, sets us up for Matthew parable. We see the vineyard is a representation of Israel and the people of Judah have done a poor job of tending to it. So, he will let it go, and not even rain on it. If this is said to be a love song, it is some kind of tough love.

Matthew 21:33-46

This is the second parable in a row from Matthew, from a set of three, that challenge the leadership’s understanding of God’s activity in the world. This one is pretty gruesome. It should challenge your sense of right and wrong on a gut level. You might try pausing at verse 40 and thinking about what is going on. Try answering the question of what the owner will do. Do you see the tenants as the evil ones, not letting the landowner get his profits? Or do you see the landowner as an absentee capitalist, who sends slaves to be killed.

Just take a few minutes.

It might be interesting to know that this text has been used as proof text for anti-Semitism. The Pharisees, that is, the Jewish elite, realize this story is about them, at least that is what we are told. I’m not sure how the author could have known that. There’s no indication that he later interviewed them and there are no documents that show they went back to their office and relayed this story to their superiors. But, it’s a story. Let’s assume that we can read their minds as a writer using the 3rd person omniscient style would, or that we would have seen this in their expressions if we were there.

So, the Jews are the wicked tenants, wreaking havoc on the servants and the son. And from that we get centuries of war between two major religions. But if we reject that, then who did wreak that havoc? Was it us? The common sinners? This would be a common option of putting God in the position of whoever is the highest authority person in the parable, in this case the landowner. He’s persistent; he tries to trust the tenants no matter what. And they keep sinning. Then God comes and fixes everything. I can never quite make that work.

When the parable is being explained, in the verses after the Pharisees give the wrong answer, he says “the kingdom”. So the vineyard is the kingdom, which at this point in time is Israel, centered in Jerusalem. And it will be given to an egalitarian people, who will produce fruits. So, there is a replacement of people, like the Pharisees said, but not just a turnover of employees, it’s a different type of people. The one group, the killers and stoners, were leasing the vineyard. They took the owner’s son outside of the kingdom and killed him, probably a reference to Jesus being crucified outside of Jerusalem. Now it is to be “given to a people.”

In explaining this, Jesus also references Psalm 118, “the stone which the builders rejected”. This is a deeper meaning of the gospel story. To be a proper sacrifice that would heal the kingdom, He had to be rejected. The current evil tenants had to be the ones who carried out the deed. The stone falls, killing the evil with it, and is then put in its proper place as a cornerstone. This reference puts the story firmly in the world of mythology, not just a wag of the finger at the evil Jews.

It doesn’t really make God any nicer either. He is still in charge, and still defines righteousness. The “wretches would be put to death”, as the Pharisees said, but the result of that is corrected by putting it in its proper scriptural context. It depends at least in part on what kind of God you think you have. If you think He is just and merciful, this parable could tell you that will happen and it will continue to be that way forever. If you think of God as full of wrath, you could take this parable as verification of that too.