Commentary on Matthew 21:33-46

In Matthew 21, the Evangelist has crafted an electrically charged reflection on spiritual fruitfulness and divine power. It sparks in the incendiary moment when Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree and it withers where it stands (verses 18–19). Next, Jesus’s confrontation with chief priests and elders about the source of his authority (verses 23–27) wreathes the temple in a charged cloud of ambiguity; lightning threatens to strike, but the reader does not yet know where the bolt will hit.

The intensity builds, arcing across a gap in Jesus’s next parable: two sons decline and agree, respectively, to work in their father’s vineyard, but their behavior in each case contradicts the intention expressed (verses 28–32). That lacuna turns out to be the weak point in the ecology of the system, the gap between heaven and earth across which the divine lightning flashes, illuminating the landscape of sin and threatening catastrophic consequences for those who do not understand the power of God.

Jesus’s parable of the vineyard is rich in intertextual allusion. It draws on Isaiah 5:1–7, an oracle envisioning the destruction of Jerusalem due to the corruption of Israel’s leaders. Jerome of Stridon (died 420) notes the potential relevance of Psalm 80:8–13, which describes Israel as a magnificent vine left unprotected and ravaged by enemies.¹ The stakes are high.

The affective force of the parable is generated in no small part by the contrast in verbs of tending and verbs of death-dealing. The landowner plants the vines and fences them to protect them from animals. He digs a pit as the winepress; we may imagine a treading floor and a lower central pool to collect the juice. He builds a watchtower to guard against thieves and marauding enemies. These details paint a picture of judicious planning and care.

By contrast, the vineyard tenants seize, beat, kill, and stone emissaries sent to receive the harvest, then seize, throw out, and kill the landowner’s son. Their violence is startling. For the preacher who wishes to foreground the gift of grace we have in Christ, the violence of the crucifixion is ready to hand; some interpreters suggest that Matthew’s changing of the Markan sequence (Mark 12:8—beat, killed, threw out) is designed to reflect Jesus having been taken outside the walls of Jerusalem before being executed.

The chief priests and Pharisees recognize that Jesus’s critique is directed against them, as leaders who have failed to yield the fruit of the vineyard to the One to whom the harvest belongs. Matthew cherishes the Hebrew Scriptures. His witness to Jesus as the Messiah is saturated with references to Israel’s sacred texts; Matthew underscores that Jesus has been sent not to abolish but to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (5:17). Matthew is likely writing to believers who identify as Jewish Christians. His critique is not against Judaism as such but against those, entrusted with the precious fruit of the Torah and the Prophets, who have not given the fruit to God.

What might have been the intended correlates in Jesus’s vineyard analogy? Jerome and many have understood the tower to symbolize the Jerusalem temple; the messengers represent the prophets sent by God over the centuries to reform the believing community (2 Kings 17:13–14; Jeremiah 7:25; 26:5; 29:19; 35:15; 44:4; see also Isaiah 50:4-6; 53:3-9).² It is certain that John the Baptist and Jesus are depicted in Matthew as rejected prophets.

Preachers might find generative the perspective of Hilary of Poitiers (fourth century) that the vineyard’s wall stood for the protection afforded by “the nobility of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”; that the prophets were “a kind of winepress into which [God] pours the fruitfulness of the Holy Spirit”; and that “with the tower [God] has built the eminence of the Law, which takes us from the bottom to the height of heaven and enables us to fathom Christ’s advent.”³ Other readings, too, are possible.

Jesus excoriates the scribes and Pharisees as lawless “snakes” in the lineage of “those who murdered the prophets,” violent malefactors who have betrayed their community and will be sentenced to hell. Jesus’s blistering polemic concludes with a politically incendiary faux lament—“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”—and the trenchant observation, “Your house is left to you, desolate” (Matthew 23:29–38), echoing Micah’s searing oracle against the Jerusalem leadership (Micah 3:9–12, quoted in Jeremiah 26:18; see Isaiah 5:8–9).

Matthew weaves in Psalm 118:22 to undergird his Christology of a suffering Messiah: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Matthew 21:42; see Mark 12:10–11; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:7). In Christian tradition, Psalm 118:22 and Isaiah 53 have been taken as confirmation that the Messiah would experience violent affliction and execution. Matthew suggests that the religious authorities’ rejection of Jesus as prophet constitutes the grounds on which the kingdom of God will be removed from their oversight and given to others who can produce the fruits of that kingdom. Leaders in every spiritual tradition, including Christianity, would do well to heed that warning.

The question underlying Jesus’s parabolic teaching is as urgent today as it was in antiquity: How can believers produce the fruits of the kingdom? The preacher might explore this from several angles.

First, Jesus’s parable opens space for deep gratitude to God as the One who has tended the life of Israel and the life of the church: gratitude expressed in the believer’s spiritual practices, celebrated in the congregation’s public liturgy, and lived out in missional service.

Second, the preacher might lift up the unexpectedness of redemption in Christ, one rejected by systems fueled by the violence of earthly dominion. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” the risen Christ declares (Matthew 28:18). The matchless power of Christ is encountered in spiritual poverty, mercy, and peacemaking, as the Matthean beatitudes make clear—something relevant for the parable of the vineyard because of the culminating reference to persecution of the prophets (5:12).

Third, the preacher might seek to catalyze new energy for fruitfulness in their congregation’s ministries. The appalling violence of empires and malfeasance of leaders notwithstanding, the God who plants and tends every community of faith is mighty in love. Those who trust this will bear abundant fruit for the eschatological harvest.

Notes

1. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, FC 117 (Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 244.
2. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, 245.
3. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew, trans. D. H. Williams, FC 125 (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 229.