The Parable of the Wicked Vinedressers

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Jesus told this parable during the last week of His earthly ministry, in the temple courts at Jerusalem, the second of three parables addressed to the chief priests and elders who had just challenged His authority. It follows immediately upon the Parable of the Two Sons, and it draws its central image from a song Isaiah had sung eight centuries before, a song every hearer in that court would have recognized before Jesus finished the second sentence.

"Hear another parable: There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country: and when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it."¹

The Vineyard Fully Furnished

Everything the householder does in that opening sentence is done for the tenants' benefit rather than his own. Isaiah had used the same furnishings centuries earlier in a song about God's own vineyard: "My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes."² Isaiah's song asked the very question the parable would later put in the mouths of the tenants themselves: "What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?"³ Isaiah named the vineyard outright: "the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry."⁴ A hedge kept out animals and thieves, a winepress processed the harvest where it was grown, and a tower gave a watchman his post over the whole enclosure. Nothing needed for a full harvest was withheld. Absentee ownership of this kind was common in that region, where a landowner leased his ground to tenant farmers and traveled, collecting his share of the produce at harvest through servants sent for that purpose. The householder's departure was the ordinary arrangement, not neglect, and the vineyard's preparation left the husbandmen without excuse for whatever they later produced, or failed to produce.

The Servants Sent and Slain

"And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than the first: and they did unto them likewise."⁵ The pattern is not a single act of violence but a repeated one, and each time it was met with more servants rather than with force. Scripture itself records at least one such killing within the temple precincts. The prophet Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, delivered a rebuke by the Spirit of God and was stoned by order of the king in the very court of the house of the Lord.⁶ The householder's answer to violence was to send again, and the sending itself measures a patience the tenants mistook for weakness.

"But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son."⁷ The son is not sent because the householder expected a different outcome from the same men. He is sent because there was no greater messenger left to send.

The Son Cast Out of the Vineyard

"But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him."⁸ The tenants' reasoning was wicked and, on its own terms, coherent: an heir removed leaves an inheritance open to whoever holds the ground. That the ground was never theirs to inherit did not enter their calculation. The order of the two acts also carries weight. They cast him out first, and killed him after. The author of Hebrews records the same order in the death Jesus was days away from suffering: "Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate."⁹ Jesus told this parable to men who, within the week, would do to Him precisely what the story said the tenants did to the son.

The Judgment and the Cornerstone

Jesus put the next question to His hearers rather than answering it Himself. "When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen? They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons."¹⁰ The sentence came from the mouths of the chief priests and elders, not from Christ. He then confirmed what they had pronounced against themselves and turned their attention to a psalm every one of them had sung. "Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?"¹¹ "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder."¹²

What the judgment concerns, and when it fell, the passage itself supplies without requiring further comment. The kingdom is taken from those who produced no fruit and given to a nation that will render it. Within the generation of the men standing in that court, Jerusalem was besieged by the Roman armies and the temple in which Jesus was speaking was burned to the ground, and the husbandry of the vineyard passed from those tenants to others. The parable names the loss as the removal of a stewardship. It does not go on to pronounce the eternal standing of the men who lost it, and the sentence stands complete without that further word.

The leaders themselves understood exactly what they had been told. "And when the chief priests and Pharisees had heard his parables, they perceived that he spake of them. But when they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet."¹³ They grasped the accusation and answered it by looking for a way to arrest Him rather than by repenting of what they had heard, which is the pattern of hardness the whole parable was told to expose.

The Rejected Stone Made the Head of the Corner

The judgment is not where Jesus leaves the parable. The psalm He quoted had described a stone once discarded by the very builders responsible for a structure, later set at the corner that determined the alignment of the whole. Peter later applied the same psalm directly to Christ, standing before the same council that had rejected Him: "This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."¹⁴ The builders who discarded the stone did not thereby prevent its use. They lost only the credit for having recognized it, and what they refused to build with became, by the Lord's own doing, the foundation of everything He has built since.