The Surprising Meaning of the Parable of the Tenants

Life is about more than accepting the right religion

33 “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. 34 When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.

35 “The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. 36 Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. 37 Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said.

38 “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ 39 So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

40 “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

The above parable is told in all three synoptic Gospels and takes place in the Temple. Here in Matthew 21:33, it is spoken to the temple priests and Pharisees. After they respond to his question above, and after Jesus quotes from Psalm 118, Jesus moves from his parables and metaphors to saying plainly:

43 “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit."

Based on this statement, it can appear that there's only one main point of the parable: the Son (Jesus) is sent to the land of the tenants (the Pharisees), but because they reject the Son they are not offered the Kingdom of God. Instead, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you” and they are broken to pieces (see verse 44).

Don't reject the Son. That's the point of the parable, right? Yes, absolutely! But there’s more to the story.

I worry many of us are like the Pharisees. We know we’re in the right religious category. We know we’re supposed to accept Jesus. But we fail to live up to the call of Jesus because we fail in gratitude and we fail in worship.

With a close reading of the text, we see that the parable's main character is not the Son but rather the landowner — the one who Jesus is concerned about in his question in 21:40. Further, a narrow interpretation like don't reject the Son doesn't make sense of verse 42 which says:

42 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:

“‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

The surprising aspect of the parable here is two-fold:

1) The landowner offers lavish provision and loving pursuit to the tenants (the religious leaders).

This should not be missed. The landowner goes to great effort creating the vineyard (21:33) and never gives up on it (21:34-37, 41-42).

Jesus is not thinking of some vacation winery in Tuscany here — he's thinking of the vineyard-maker in Isaiah 5. Read Isaiah 5 and you'll see the many connections.

What more could have been done for my vineyard
than I have done for it? (Isaiah 5:4a)

The application then is more than simply, don't reject the Son — but rather, don't reject the Son as the Pharisees did; don't take for granted how much God has lavishly provided and lovingly pursued.

2) The Son is not merely sent to die but is raised to become the cornerstone of a new and better vineyard.

Jesus' quotation from Psalm 118 can be interpreted in this way: The Son of the Landowner is the stone. The builders are the tenants. And while the builders reject the Son – even kill the son – and treat him like a piece of rubbish thrown out of the vineyard – this dead stone is going to spring up with new life! It will "become the cornerstone" of some sort of newly managed vineyard.

And so this is not a mere denouncement of the Pharisees but is rather a proclamation of the gospel! It's so clear in fact that some secular commentators think it must have been a later addition to the text rather than authentic to Jesus (they have no evidence for this).

It is in this passage that we see the Kingdom of God is fundamentally connected to — and cannot exist without — the death and resurrection of Christ. And perhaps this is one of the clearest parables in that regard.

Applying the parable should include all these truths together. It’s good if you have not rejected the Son, but have you considered how you may sometimes fail to give thanks for the work of the landowner? Thank God for his lavish provision and loving pursuit.

Further, do you have more than a mere acceptance of the Son — do you place your hope in God’s plan for establishing a new Kingdom through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ? And does that bring you, like the psalmist, into worship?

Let’s move beyond patting our backs for asking Jesus into our hearts. Let’s live in light of the resurrected Savior — he is marvelous in our eyes.

Image credit: Tim Mossholder at unsplash.com

I posted an earlier version of this article was posted to /r/reddit/reformed last year.