Tenant Behavior

I grew up the son of a tenant farmer.  So I identify first with those tenants in the parable.  When I was four, we moved to the farm where I grew up.  We had an outdoor toilet and an indoor chamber pot. We had a pump on the back porch and a furnace that burned wood and coal.

The house needed what a realtor might generously call “updating.”

My parents went to work.  First it was running water indoors.  An indoor toilet took ten years, but that’s another story.  Dad farmed on the contour and rotated the crops.  The landowner was morally opposed to soybeans, so Dad relied on alfalfa and clover to rebuild the soil.  We repaired buildings and fences.  We moved dirt and cleaned out brush.

Twenty years later, Mom and Dad moved to town.  Dad certainly shed a few tears when they left.  He felt more like the owner than the owners did.  And who could blame him?

But he wasn't the owner.  He was more of a steward.  He owned nothing and managed everything. And he left the place better than he found it.

I guess that’s not surprising.  Dad was a natural as a theologian.  He had a love/hate relationship with the church.  But he had a love/love relationship with God.  Dad never liked the things we sang in church after the offering.  So when everyone else stood up and sang, “Create in me a clean heart, O God…” Dad would hum to himself.

That was a small victory for everyone else, because my dad couldn't carry a tune in a tin pail.  But he would hum the tune to a great old hymn:

“We give thee but Thine own,

Whate’er the gift may be.

All that we have is thine alone,

A trust, O Lord, from thee.”

Dad understood.  It all belongs to God—and that’s the Good News.

I sympathize with those tenants.  But they had an ownership problem.  They had invested heavily in the vineyard.  The owner was nowhere to be seen.  What sort of owner abandons his property and takes an extended vacation!  They convinced themselves that they care more about the vineyard than the owner did.

So when the slave agents of the owner came, the tenants defended “their” property.  They beat and killed the owner’s surrogates.  Then they assassinated the son to protect their investment.

Jesus’ listeners knew this was no fairy tale.  The religious authorities in Jerusalem could read the subtitles.  Jesus was talking about them.  He started by singing a song everyone knew.  It was Isaiah’s “Song of the Vineyard.”  There is no doubt about the nature of the vineyard.  “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the House of Israel,” Isaiah sings, “and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting…”

The tenants want to be the owners.  But that cannot be.  It all belongs to God—and that’s the good news.

It is no great challenge to transpose this tune into a contemporary key.  “What if the church’s job,” asks Barbara Brown Taylor, “were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?” (Leaving Church, page 222).

That would be steward behavior rather than tenant behavior.  But for those of us trained to act like owners, it can be a frightening prospect.