(Note from Rowland: a theological liberal approach)

March 25, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 20: 9-19

This parable of the vineyard and its workers’ rejection of the owner’s claim to its title was told, according to Luke’s version of things, by Jesus sometime after his arrival in Jerusalem – the legendary event to be commemorated a week from today on Palm Sunday. Luke expected readers to believe that after his rough treatment of those who spread their wares, bazaar-like, in the Temple plaza, Jesus was able freely to speak in public there throughout most of the following week. That’s an interesting story, but you can see that it would not have helped him very much to have told this parable as part of his teaching because it has all the earmarks of an “if-the-shoe-fits-wear-it” story.

Jesus was not popular among the “haves” for the simple reason that he was one of the “have-nots” for whose welfare he was an advocate. Funny thing, then, that his parable would seem to come down on the side of capital rather than labor. As Luke told it, Jesus took the owner’s part against the tenants. The editors of The Wall Street Journal would love this.

I will suggest an alternative interpretation of this parable. Parables by nature are always open to new interpretations. I will propose to you that Jesus was saying that the tenants who had revolted in the owner’s vineyard represented the junior “haves” who had shut out the have-nots. Spike Lee’s documentary about the depredations of Hurricane Katrina (“When The Levees Broke”) tells a story the media managed pretty much to suppress at the time – a story of how white folk on one side of the river managed to turn back black folk seeking refuge across a bridge. The bridge was blocked by armed men: the junior “hads” against the altogether “had-nots.”

The tenants in the vineyard had it pretty good. The son’s owner may have come not only to collect his father’s due but also to let the less fortunate come in and earn a few shekels. But the junior “haves” were having nothing of that. They would kill the one who would champion the needs of the destitute over the merely poor. The parable has the owner on his way to drive out the tenants of record and to install others in their place. Maybe the destitute, after all?

This sounds like revolution. And no surprise there. The Jesus we meet in the gospels—especially According to Mark – was of a revolutionary sort. A Mohandas Gandhi; a Cesar Chavez – a champion of his people. It may be difficult to see him through the gauze of traditional piety, but Jesus as portrayed by the gospels of Mark, Thomas, Matthew and Luke in particular, was a counter-cultural figure. Those writers saw him from their half-century (and more) remove as having been a nettle in the flesh of business-as-usual, as an iconoclastic speaker of truth to power.

Thus the invisible figures in the parable of the vineyard may have been those among the extreme “have-nots” whom the son would grant some form of employment, some fundamental dignity. It was not the son of the owner the tenants may have rebuffed, but the greatest enemy of the poor: the destitute. Like the standoff at the bridge in New Orleans, the have-a-littles wanted no part of the have-not-at-alls. The lives of the former were already complicated by poverty and its attendant woes. What they didn’t want was an influx of the latter – those who were beyond poor and therefore would compromise what little they had.

Think about how this interpretation of the parable might be applied to the global economy in which people off-shore are now doing the work that Americans used to do. True they do it for a third or less as much, but it brought them into what we used to think of as middle-class prosperity. And also true, the owners get to keep more of their revenue into the bargain, while our people swell the ranks of the under- or un-employed. That’s one of the major aspects of the conflict over immigration, border control and free trade.

Those who would impose tariffs on imports or subsidize exports and who would close the borders thus keeping work and wages here, could be compared to the armed vigilantes at the New Orleans bridge and to the tenants in the vineyard of the parable. The well-meaning son who would raise the destitute to mere poverty would thereby unintentionally disenfranchise the merely poor. No wonder the teller of the parable imagined him being killed. In this country today, he could forget about being elected President.

So as you can see, parables have a way of messing with your mind. They have a way of showing all sides of an intractable argument and leaving you with no answer except the one you come up with – the one you come up with today, and the different one you come up with tomorrow, and the even different one you come up with the next day.

Gotta love that Good Book!

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.