Parable Of The Vineyard
PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD
MATTHEW 21:33-46
Every Jew knew that the Old Testament called his nation a vine.
As in Isaiah’s parable, so here “the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting” (Isaiah 5:7). The rulers of the people could not miss the point; they and their predecessors were the tenants (21:45). The “servants” (21:34-36) are the prophets (cf. 23:37), and the significance of the owner’s sending his son (21:37) as a last resort cannot be overlooked. Of all the Gospel parables, this one (exceptionally) comes nearest to being an allegory, in which there is a series of correspondences between the successive details of the narrative—the “parables” (plural) of 21:45—and the reality to which it points. The killing of the son after he is cast out of the vineyard (21:39; contrast the order in Mark 12:8) reflects Jesus’ being put to death outside Jerusalem. By the “other tenants” (21:41), ie the “nation producing the fruits” of the vineyard (21:43), the Church, the new Israel, is intended; its leaders (cf. 19:28) will replace the present rulers in Israel from whom the kingdom is to be taken away. The reference to “fruits” makes the same point as the fig-tree incident of 21:19. The “miserable death” of the tenants (21:41) may anticipate the disaster of AD 70.
The quotation in 21:42 (Psalm 118:22f.) is from the same festal psalm which provided the acclamation of 21:9; it is treated as a messianic “testimony” repeatedly in the New Testament (cf. Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:7), together with the other “stone” passages (Isaiah 8:15; Daniel 2:34f.) alluded to in the doubtful 21:44 (RSV footnote). What is said of the multitude’s assessment of Jesus in 21:46 echoes their assessment of John according to 21:26. In both places the multitudes are probably the pilgrim crowds rather than the residents in Jerusalem; at Passover the visitors might outnumber the residents by three to one.