Friday of the Second Week of Lent
Today's gospel reading (Matthew 21:33-43, 45-46) has some similarity to the show "Undercover Boss." The CEO or manager of a company goes undercover and does several of the grunt jobs available in his or her company. At the end of the show, the CEOs reveal themselves to the workers they've met, and either reward them (in really big ways) for their good work, or fire them for the poor work they did. The CEO is a bit like the vineyard owner, granting rewards or punishments for the tenants and laborers. Audiences find the show compelling, and sometimes even funny. After all, they're in on the joke: they know who the boss is!
Maybe the big difference in the scripture is that everyone concerned knows who the boss is. Like the workers in Undercover Boss, they also know what they're supposed to be doing (harvesting the grapes and giving the owner the wine) - but they don't do it. Who knows why? Perhaps they want to sell the wine and profit from it themselves - perhaps their daily lives would be too disrupted by filling the owner's orders, and they just don't want to be bothered.
Their response to the owner is to thumb their noses at him. The owner may want his wine, but they've got the upper hand. They kill everyone the vineyard owner sends to collect his fair dues. They even kill the son and heir, and they know they're doing it. They're sending a message: might wins, brawns win, violence wins over everything else.
The ending of the story Jesus tells is not exactly satisfying: the bad tenants are still there and the vineyard owner is musing on what to do next, now that his only son and heir is dead. The owner hasn't yet won.
Jesus' listeners presume that the owner will win, though. They respond to Jesus' questions saying that the owner will bring in new tenants. But we readers might well wonder: "How is that owner going to bring in new tenants?" The owner's already lost a lot of people and has kept upping the ante and getting no where. What's he going to do now? Raise up an army? Many armies? What will it take to put an end to the violence that the tenants are now doing, that hasn't already been done?
Maybe Jesus thinks that we're not getting the point. Certainly he thinks his hearers are not getting the point. The vineyard owner will not simply send more and more people' Jesus is not talking about some simple change of hands in the vineyard. After all, the tenants themselves made it complicated by killing everyone they thought got in their way. The rejected son and heir is actually the answer here. So he asks, "Did you NEVER read in the scriptures, 'The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone?" The stone that appears weak and unworthy becomes the base for the whole building. The weak person that no one thinks will come of anything becomes the most important.
During Lent and Holy Week, we are reminded often of the fact that Jesus is the cornerstone for the Church. We also know that Jesus will not win by bringing in armies, more power, more might. He will certainly not win by doing violence to his enemies. Quite the opposite, in fact. Jesus' acceptance of the cross becomes the way that Love retakes the vineyard and restores its produce to the vineyard owner.
In Lent, we are especially asked to embrace the things that appear (but only appear weak), and remember that we are strong in Christ. Today, let us reflect on all the (apparently) weak people that we have rejected or overlooked in our lives, and let us embrace them just as the vineyard owner hoped the tenants would embrace his own son.
- Jana M. Bennett