“Below or Above” (World Communion Sunday)
Rick Olson, October 5, 2008
The parable of the tenants, which Frank read a few minutes ago, is pretty harsh. In its normal interpretation, it’s taken as a warning to the religious authorities of the day. The tenants represent religious authorities of the state of Israel, who are pictured as stewards of God’s good creation, represented by a vineyard. When the time for harvest came, the landowner God sends slaves to collect the produce, minus the cut the tenant-farmers get for their labor Israel. The slaves represent the prophets, and the Israelite religious authorities—who are the ones listening to Jesus preach the parables—the religious authorities are depicted killing the prophets God has sent to collect the harvest. They beat one, kill another, and stone a third. The God-slash-landowner sends some more slaves-slash-prophets, and the religious-authorities-slash-tenants kill those as well. Then God-slash-landowner sends his son, saying “They’ll respect my son,” and you only get one guess as to who the son might represent, and when the landowner sends his son, the tenant-slash-religious-authorities kill him too, which upsets the landowner, and when Jesus asks the religious authorities what the landowner does, the religious-authorities to whom he is speaking say: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
And you’d think it would be like “Oh! Snap!” Gotcha! But no: the chief priests and scribes don’t tumble immediately that he’s talking about them, not until he spells it out: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” They finally figure out that Jesus is talking to them, according to Matthew, and so plot to kill him.
But look at how we’ve been talking about this parable: we’ve been calling the overlord both God and landowner, the chief priests and scribes both religious-authorities and tenants and etc. And this indicates that there are at least a couple of ways to read this story . . . and to see what they might be, consider: what if this parable were to be preached to real, live tenant farmers? How would they interpret the parable? And tenant farming being as widespread even today, you can bet that it happens a lot. How might an Apartheid-era sharecropper in South Africa hear this? Or a campesino in Latin America, or a migrant worker on the Great Plains? Who would they identify with and, more importantly, who would they identify God as? Remember: these folks know about being sharecroppers, they know about having to come up with the required amount for the landowners whether the harvest is plentiful or not.
And in fact, that’s the way a lot of them become tenants on their own land … it happened in Apartheid-era South Africa, as foreign came in and began charging the native landowners for goods and services, and in a good year, they could pay for their seed and implements but in a bad year—and there are a lot in South Africa—in a bad year, they couldn’t pay their bills, and so they’d put up their land for collateral, but there’d come along another bad year, and pretty soon they couldn’t make the nut on their loan and the lender owned the land . . . that happened in the American mid-West, and it’s why theirs so few independent family farmers left, they are tenants or workers on the land they once owned, and corporate farming is the rule . . .
And so any tenant farmers listening to Jesus would know about the rich land owner—who left the tenants in charge and went to another country, the classic absentee land-owner—they were the ones who drove their grand-fathers and great-grandfathers off their land, they were the people who made their ancestors tenants on their own land . . .
And so there are at least two ways to read any scripture passage: from the above and from below, from the vantage point of the landowner and from that of the tenants, the point of view of the haves and the have nots. And—hold your cards and letters, I’m not advocating tenants murdering their landlords or anything but you can surely see that depending on where you sat you might have more sympathy with one side or another in this parable. And Matthew—writing for a upper-class Jewish crowd—most naturally slanted this story so that we’d think of God as the landowner, so it was quite a shock when the religious leaders realized that far from being identified with the landowner, far from being identified with God, they’re just tenants in the story . . . but any tenant farmers in Matthew’s readership wouldn’t think of it that way, they’d know exactly who they were in the parable, and exactly what the absentee landowner was . . .
Everybody hears the scripture from their own social location, according to their own context. Each of the people here in this sanctuary does, but so do all who hear it around the world. And each culture that hears it draws different lessons from the scripture than another would. That’s the nature of hearing, the nature of stories, the nature of context. And that’s the nature of World Communion Sunday . . . it was illustrated beautifully by the poly-lingual reading of the Ten Commandments . . . each of those languages represents a different way of hearing the scripture . . . a Mexican camposino will not hear it the same as a Parisian dressmaker who won’t hear it the same as a Korean postman. A Nigerian bricklayer will draw different lessons from a Greek bookseller who will look at it differently from a baby-boomer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
We all have different perspectives, different needs, different expectations, and yet . . . we are united in Christ. We are one in the spirit, as the song goes, and as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a few minutes we should remember this, and think about all our brothers and sisters around the globe who are doing the same. Amen.
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