27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Isaiah 5:1-7 · Psalm 80 · Philippians 4:6-9 · Matthew 21:33-43
The first reading begins like a love song. Let me sing of my friend, my beloved's song about his vineyard. The friend dug the ground, cleared away the stones, planted choice vines, built a watchtower in the middle and hewed out a wine press. He hoped the vineyard would bring grapes, and it brought only rotten ones.
What more was there to do for my vineyard that I had not done, he asks. In that sentence I hear the disappointment of someone who has built something, a business, a department, a family, and in the end what he hoped for did not come. Here the song turns, and disappointed love becomes destruction: he tears out the hedge, breaks down the wall and leaves the vineyard to run wild.
The song is sung by a prophet who belongs himself to the people he is singing about. At the end he resolves the image: the vineyard is the house of Israel, and the grapes that were hoped for were justice and righteousness. What came instead was bloodshed and the outcry of those who suffer wrong.
The gospel takes the same vineyard, with hedge, wine press and tower. An owner leases it out and goes away. When he sends for his share, his servants are beaten, killed, stoned. He sends more, and they fare the same. Finally he sends his son, and the tenants say: this is the heir, let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours. Jesus asks his listeners what the owner will do to those tenants. They answer: he will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease the vineyard to others. With that they have passed judgment on themselves, because the tenants in the story are them.
The parable is told by Jesus, a Jew, before the chief priests and elders of his own people. Later Christian readers made of it a verdict on the Jews: the vineyard had been taken from them and given to others. For centuries the text was read and preached that way, with consequences that are known. The self-criticism became an accusation once someone took it over from outside.
That is the third hardness of this Sunday, alongside the violence in the parable and the lover who tears down his own vineyard. And it has a shape you know on a smaller scale too. A team sits down and writes down honestly what went wrong: we missed this, we overlooked that. The paper is meant to make everyone wiser next time. A few weeks later another team quotes from it in the big meeting, one that still had a score to settle with them, and the we has become a you. The wording is the same, and it is a different text.
Whether a hard sentence helps or only wounds depends on where it is spoken from. Isaiah passes judgment on a vineyard he cares about, and he is still hoping while he judges, otherwise he would not have made a song of it.
This is a reading aid, not a second full version. Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. The texts are given; I listen for what comes across.