A Particularly Pointed Parable - Reflections on Mt. 21:33-46, 19th Sunday After Pentecost, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Wednesday, July 8, 2026
It is often the case in the Gospels that Jesus’s use of parables serves complex purposes; they are far more than “earthly stories with heavenly meanings,” as one overly romantic interpreter once said. They are rather more like mysterious incendiary devices, tossed into the community to “tease hearers into active thought,” as another has surmised. They are rich tales, and can be read in multiple ways, as any good stories can be. However, here in Mt.21:33-46 it appears that Matthew has a clear target for his employment of this familiar parable of the vineyard, borrowing liberally both from Isaiah 5:1-7, and from Mark 12, while adding his own unique qualities to the telling. The listeners to the story are “the chief priests and Pharisees,” who upon hearing the parable “knew that he spoke about them” (Mt.21:45). Thus this parable becomes part of the controversy theme that dominates chapters 21-23. Matthew is pointing his readers toward the climax of his story, namely the death and resurrection of the Messiah of Israel, Jesus, and the deepening division between Jesus and his religious adversaries lead inexorably to that terrible ending.
However, we should be very careful as we assess this parable. It is too often been used as the source of that odious idea of supersessionism, that is the notion that Christians claim that they have become the new people of God, replacing Israel as God’s chosen. Such ideas have led to an appalling and repulsive anti-Judaism among Christians, moving toward an equally repulsive anti-Semitism, and finally to the horrors of the Holocaust of WWII. That conclusion, based on this parable, focuses around the proper reading of Mt.21:43. After Jesus asks the Jewish religious leaders, “Have you never read the Scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner,’” thus applying his own coming death as the final fulfillment of Ps.118:22-23 (from the Greek Septuagint translation). The rejected stone, according to Matthew, is Jesus, who though rejected by these very leaders has now become the “cornerstone,” that stone that keeps the building’s walls together, or the “capstone,” that supports an arch or a gate (either understanding is possible. Then Matthew has Jesus say, “I say to you that the kingdom (or “reign” or “rule”) of God will be taken away from them and be given to a nation bearing fruit” (Mt.21:44). The issue revolves around the translation of the Greek ethnos, here translated “nation.”
The immediate context of this translation and understanding is crucial if we are to avoid that dangerous problem of Christian supersessionism. Matthew places Jesus in conflict with the Jewish religious leaders of his time. In earlier essays on this Gospel, I have tried to say again and again that Matthew, the Jew, a major figure in the early community of Jewish-Christians, is struggling with the question of why these antagonistic Jewish leaders, here named the chief priests and the Pharisees, cannot see that Jesus is the Messiah of their own scriptures. Instead, they are standing against him and his teaching in every way that they can. And it will lead, as Matthew will describe, to their anger and hatred of him, and to his murder and death on a Roman cross, instigated in part by these very leaders. But, the Greek ethnos, the “nation” that bears fruit, is not a reference to the “Gentile Church, “or even some Church understood as some “third race” besides Jews and Gentiles. In Matthew’s context, he plainly means the most basic sense of ethnos, namely a "group of people,” in this case the leaders of the emerging Jewish Christian community. The dispute that controls Matthew’s meaning of the parable is that struggle between the Christian community and Israel’s current religious leaders, not the entire nation of Israel.
In the parable of the vineyard, it is the tenant farmers, those who abuse the messengers of the vineyard owner and finally murder his son, who will be replaced; the vineyard will remain, just as Is.5:1-7, that tale that underlies Matthew’s story, makes plain. There are obvious allegorical elements in the narrative: the vineyard is Israel; the tenant farmers are the religious leaders of Israel; the vineyard owner is God; the earlier messengers who are attacked are the prophets; the murdered son is Jesus. That much is clear. Matthew uses the pointed story as a warning that Jesus has come to announce the rule of God, and he urges the recalcitrant religious Jews of the day to join the movement of that inbreaking divine rule. Their response? “They sought to arrest him but feared the crowds, since they thought him to be a prophet” (Mt.21:46). The parable has little effect on those who are its audience; the die is cast, and Jesus will soon bear the full weight of the Jewish leaders’ unwillingness to join the coming rule of God, as proclaimed by Jesus.
There are, of course, numerous reasons why Jesus was not found acceptable as the Messiah of the Jews by many of the leading Jews of the time. Perhaps the most prominent of those reasons is the fact in many Jewish hearts, when the Messiah comes the world will change radically and immediately: the Romans will be defeated, and the greatness of Judaism will be restored. But with the coming of Jesus, nothing appeared to change at all; the Romans still controlled the promised land, and the Jews remained oppressed. Indeed, Matthew writes his Gospel in the shadow of the Jewish expulsion from Jerusalem at the hands of those very Romans after the Jewish wars of 70-73 CE. How could Jesus possibly be Messiah in the face of that cataclysmic event? If the early church communities were to convince Jewish leaders of that basic claim of Jesus’ Messiahship, the struggle to win them over would be ongoing and only partially successful. Still, Matthew’s goal of convincing them never ended, right to the end of his Gospel. Yet, even Matthew knew the difficulties he faced in this regard. Even when he relates Jesus’s resurrection account, and has Jesus stand on the mountain of Galilee in full glory, he will say that some of those who witnessed this astonishing event “doubted”! (Mt.28:17). If doubt and hesitation accompanied that scene, one can only imagine how many people witnessing the ministry of Jesus might still wonder whether or not he really was the one whom Matthew claimed him to be. We 21st-century followers of this Jesus should perhaps not be so hard on those who struggled 20 centuries ago to find in that mysterious prophet their Messiah, the savior of the world.