Luminescence, Volume 1. C. K. Barrett
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government forces who might act against rebellious tenants in a thoroughly uninhibited way. All this is interesting and very well worth knowing. But it doesn’t cover everything and we shall not get away without using the word allegory. In any case we have to. The opening description of the preparation of the vineyard is plainly borrowed from the song of the vineyard in Isaiah 5 and there you have the plain identification; the vineyard is Israel. So it is here, and the rest fits in; the servants are prophets, and the son is the Son. And we know what kind of fate befell them all.
Let me say here that I know quite well that some try to dig out of the parable a primitive un-allegorical form, allegorized by editors. Maybe; I’m doubtful, and in any case I am talking about the parable that Matthew gives us. This sort of consideration will lead us in a different direction. If we are talking about editorial activity, you will see how neatly verse 41 links with verse 43. He will bring an evil fate upon these evil men and destroy them, and will let the vineyard out to other tenants, persons who will render him its fruits in the proper season. . . . Therefore, I tell you that the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that produces its fruits. All neat and consequential. But in between stands verse 42 which produces an Old Testament quotation which seems to have little to do with its context. “Did you never read in the Scriptures, the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; this comes from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” The parable leads up to a climax in the death of the owner’s son; the consequence is the displacement of the tenants. The inserted quotation leads up to the rejection of a stone, and the consequence has nothing to do with the builders but with the fact that the stone turns up in the most prominent and important place. Here of course you can begin to talk about interpolation, but I am dealing with the parable as we read it in Matthew.
And at this point, I for one have had enough of literary criticism and interesting bits of historical information. I have reached the point at which I can simply work with what the parable has to say to Matthew’s readers, whether in the first century or in the twentieth. Here are two themes lying side by side; the rejection of God’s unprofitable servants who do not give him what they owe; and the vindication of God’s Son, who has laid down his life in doing his Father’s work. The life and work, the obedience and disobedience of the people of God, Christology, the rejection, suffering and vindication of the Son of God must be left together; you cannot understand the one without the other.
This is the first thing we are to learn from this parable and it will take some thinking about. What do you mean by the vindication of Jesus after his passion? Of course you mean the resurrection, the discovery that the newly filled grave is now empty, the encounters between Jesus and his disciples, first to Peter, then to the Twelve and so on, as the familiar list runs. And this is quite correct and it is fundamental and nothing I shall say is intended to diminish its importance. But it does not take you to the end of the story. God wants people who will work his vineyard for him. In the parable it is easy; you sack a lot of tenants and take on new staff. There are plenty about waiting to be hired. But in theology, that is in real life, it is not so easy. For we all belong to the old gang, we have all withheld God’s due from him, so that God will only find new tenants if he can change the old ones. This is how the vindication of Jesus goes on. God doesn’t simply bring Jesus back to life. “If you then were risen with Christ . . .” says the New Testament stating its basic presupposition. The vindication of Christ means the renewal of humanity. If it means anything less, you don’t have even the happy ending of a story. His vineyard, neglected and running to weeds, is made by God to be worked. There must be a new a renewed people of God who will do God’s will.
That leads to a second point. It involves mixing metaphors but we didn’t start the practice, the mix up is there in the Gospel text and that is surely a good enough justification for it. That which constitutes the new group of tenants, that which makes the new obedient people is that Christ, the rejected stone, becomes the head of the corner. Even after reading a number of commentaries, I am not wholly clear what architecturally “the head of the corner” means. It doesn’t worry me. It means the outstanding stone, outstanding in appearance and in importance. Take it away and the wall will look wrong, take it away and the wall will fall down. Maybe that is clear enough, but if there is ambiguity in the picture, there is more in the meaning. The one thing that is indispensable to the renewed people, to the renewed individual is Christ. He must be the foundation of our life; our trust must be in him. He must be that which is preached to the world by the way we live. Again Paul has the epigram for us—“for me to live is Christ. I live no longer, Christ lives in me.” This must be so and it must appear to be so, for us as man and woman, for us as the people of God.
This in turn leads to a third and last point. Where do we find the new tenants? Matthew uses a surprising word for them, not λαός, the word that is often used for the people of God, but the bare ἔθνος. There is no label, not the word Church, not any adjective, simply a people, a folk who produce the fruit of the Kingdom. We talk and sometimes we dispute about the marks of the Church. Sure we are content to speak of a community where the word of God is preached in its purity, and the sacraments are duly administered. Some look for subscription to creeds and articles, some for a particular form of ministry. I shall not for a moment dispute the importance of these matters. But the question that matters is, does this church, this man, this woman show the fruits of the Kingdom of God and offer them back to God? There is no other test of the authenticity of our faith.
“THE MARRIAGE FEAST”—Matthew 22.1–10
[Preached twenty-nine times from 10/27/57 at Bishop Auckland to 6/29/03 at Howden-le-Wear]11
If the Christian belief about Jesus Christ is true, his ministry, life, death, and resurrection constituted the supreme crisis of human history, inaugurating a new age of such a kind that it could be consummated only by him who set it in motion. Christ is the end, for he is the beginning. Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ. But this supreme vision of human affairs was worked out not as natural products of international catastrophes, but in a series of events which are capable of being written up in terms of the biography of a Jewish rabbi who, like others, Johanan b. Zakkai, found time to take a hand also in the public affairs of his people’s life. So that if we want to understand the meaning of history, and the purpose for which our world was created, and to which it moves, we must look not to some colossal canvas like the one with which Arnold Toynbee has instructed and delighted us (and not even to its abridgment which many of us have found so very convenient) but to a miniature, to the scanty records, hopelessly inadequate as they must appear to a biographer, of the life of Jesus. This is perhaps not impressive, but it has the advantage that it can be understood not only by the professional historian and philosopher, but equally well or better by the plain person who can understand a plain tale, written in terms of sea and soil, love and blood, life and death. There is hardly any snippet of the Gospel story that sheds more light on the crisis of Jesus of Nazareth than the parable of the Great Feast. It is too well known to require more than a minute’s retelling and too straight forward to require more than two minutes of interpretation.
A King made a marriage feast and inevitably there were some who invited themselves. Of course they must come. When the preparations were complete, they were summoned. But they were too busy with this and that—buying land or oxen, getting married, Luke tells us, to be bothered with a mere wedding. So the wedding failed of guests, but only for a moment. The King was not to be beaten by presumption, bad manners, and insolence. “Go out,” he commands his servants, “and bring in anyone, yes anyone, all the parasites and scum. Some kind of wedding feast we will have!”
The place where the story fits is plain. The ministry of Jesus, his announcement of God’s Kingdom, necessarily found a place for the pious groups of Israel, for the religious authorities, and teachers of the people. But it is plain that these pious and religious authorities had no intention of accepting the invitation of a totally unauthorized messenger. This was the case for Jesus’ mission to the outcasts of Israel, publicans and sinners, as the Gospel call them. The folk who for good reasons had been left out of the religious structure