Violence
Sermon Notes 4th October on Matthew 21:33-46
by Desiree Snyman
Violence: A reflection on Matthew 21:33–46
Introductory comments
Interpreting Scripture is much like peeling an onion: there are multiple layers. The difficulty comes when we mistake one layer for the whole story. Parables invite us to explore different meanings and hold them in tension, even when they seem to contradict one another. Each interpretation is also tested against the text and its context.
One familiar reading of this parable is allegorical: the owner represents God, the messengers represent the prophets, and the son represents Jesus. Matthew also places the story within a Jewish dispute about authority, and verse 45 explicitly tells us that the chief priests and Pharisees recognise themselves in it. We need to take that seriously, while resisting the antisemitic move that turns criticism of particular leaders into condemnation of all Jews. Remember that Matthew writes in the aftermath of cataclysmic change. We can hear different factions within a Jewish setting responding to change in radically different ways.
Could we also attend to the story’s economic world: its landowner, tenants, labour and harvest? What might become visible when we hold these readings together? Could we also consider the violence in the text?
Violence
I would like to draw attention to three types of violence. I find the work of the Brazilian Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara particularly helpful here.
Violence 1: institutional or structural violence. This is the original violence built into economic, political and social arrangements. It is about systems. Exploitation, domination, poverty and exclusion can appear orderly and legal, so they are often not recognised as violence at all. Câmara calls this the violence that generates the others.
Other writers use expressions such as “the normalcy of civilisation” or “business as usual”. The way of domination becomes so ordinary that we stop seeing it as domination. Violence can be carried out through ordinary procedures and institutions. We see this in the machinery of Roman execution that crucified Jesus, and, in a very different historical setting, in the bureaucracy that helped organise the Holocaust. Today, environmental degradation is often accepted as normal and logical in the pursuit of unfettered economic growth. For Joanna Macy, “Business as Usual” is the story that our existing economic system can and should continue: keep growing, consuming and competing, while treating ecological destruction and social unrest as temporary problems that require no fundamental change.
Violence 2: revolutionary or reactive violence. Those suffering under the first violence resist, and their resistance may become violent. Society tends to notice this violence because it disrupts the established order, while forgetting the structural violence that preceded it. This is the difficulty when keeping the peace means preserving the status quo, rather than making peace through justice. We may maintain an apparent “peace” even when the status quo is destroying lives.
Violence 3: repressive violence. Authorities then use force to suppress the uprising, usually presenting that repression as restoring peace and order. Câmara argues that this effectively protects the original unjust structure.
Let us now step into the parable and attempt to pay attention to context and text.
Violence 2 and 3
If we look at the violence in the parable before us today, it is easy to notice violence 2 and 3. The tenants’ killing of the messengers and the son of the vineyard owner is clear. The repressive response imagined by Jesus’ listeners is also clear. Jesus asks the ominous question: “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” His listeners reply, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death.” For Matthew’s readers, this might have recalled the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Roman army destroyed the city and its Temple. They knew what a brutal response to an uprising against Rome could look like. The destruction proposed by the listeners illustrates Câmara’s third type of violence.
The danger is that we begin our reading where the violence becomes visible. Câmara warns that violence rarely begins there. Before the violence of revolt comes the quieter violence of systems that dispossess, exploit and impoverish. What he wants us to notice is that violence 2 and 3 are visible, but we could look deeper and notice violence 1: the systemic political and economic violence that can give birth to revolt. Câmara asks us to recognise the violence hidden within apparently peaceful social structures.
Violence 1
Matthew 21:33–46 alludes to Isaiah 5:1–7, often called “A song of God’s vineyard”:
“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard:My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill…he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes…For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”
Reading on to verse 8 is important: “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land!”
What does it mean to add house to house and field to field until there is room for no one else? Isaiah confronts the accumulation of land at the expense of others. This helps us attend to the economic pressures of the world in which Jesus tells his parable. Farming households in the first century could face multiple demands: Roman taxation, religious obligations, rent and debt. Such burdens could leach life out of people already struggling to survive. Jesus’ confrontation in the Temple belongs within this wider concern about authority and justice. In Matthew 21:12–13, we read: “Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” but you make it a den of robbers.’” When people could no longer pay their taxes and debts, they might take out a loan. When the loan could not be repaid, land could be forfeited to a wealthy creditor. You might then hire yourself out as a labourer on the very land you used to own. The parable does not give us the tenants’ history, but imagine hearing it within this world of debt and dispossession.
Imagine now that the land you owned and loved, the land that supported your family for generations, is cleared and replanted with a vineyard. A new vineyard takes time to yield a reliable harvest. Its owner needs enough resources to wait for an income. Your family needs food now. Imagine being in near poverty, working on this farm. Perhaps, as part of your work agreement, you are allowed to plant vegetables between the vines to feed your family, as long as you give some of this harvest to your already wealthy property owner. Step into the scene. You are hungry and tired. You have been working in the sun. Your children are suffering and hungry. Some of the small amount of food you grow to feed your family is taken as payment for using the land, land that once belonged to you.
Such labourers might have longed for a Messiah to come and destroy those who generated wealth at their expense, to overturn the tables of history so that the poor would be rich and the rich, poor. Perhaps we can begin to understand the desperation from which violent revolt can emerge, especially where people hope for a Messiah who will destroy their oppressors and support their uprising. Yet the story complicates this sympathy. The tenants seek the inheritance for themselves. Their first victims are enslaved messengers; people also subject to the owner’s power. Resistance can reproduce the domination it opposes.
Some concluding thoughts
I imagine that one point the parable could be making is that responding to violence with violence deepens the spiral of violence further. Jesus asks us to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves, while warning us that we are sent with the mission of love as sheep among wolves.
The passage remains difficult. Jesus’ words about judgement, breaking and crushing cannot simply be brushed aside. We need to hold that difficulty alongside the wider picture of his life and teaching.
Jesus does not intend to be the sort of Messiah who leads a violent uprising against corrupt leadership. Many will reject his Messiahship. The unusual Messiahship Jesus offers becomes a cornerstone for the new community he inaugurates, a community that adopts the Beatitudes as its constitution. When we choose domination and retaliation, we stumble against the character of Christ. The cornerstone becomes, for some, a stumbling stone.
So, what can we do? The invitation is to notice, to think and to ask questions about the systems we find ourselves in. Câmara appeals to young people to challenge arguments, provoke discussion and refuse indifference. These questions can lead us towards action. What are we prepared to change in how we use our money, exercise our authority and respond to those whose suffering sustains our comfort? Câmara’s governing conviction is that lasting peace depends on justice. Breaking the spiral requires confronting the original injustice through determined action grounded in truth and love, including confronting the arrangements from which we benefit.
Sources and further reading:
Dom Hélder Cậmara “The Spiral of Violence.” Sheed and Ward London, 1971
William R Hertzog II “Parables as subversive speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed.” Westminster John Knox Press 1994.
Other authors such as Marcus Borg, John Crossan and Joanna Macy.