Being a tenant farmer back in the first century looks like a bad deal, when you take a close look at it. Because here’s how this relationship worked, the relationship that in this gospel parable goes so very, very badly. You, the tenant farmer, are in charge of a vineyard you don’t own. You do all the work, you plant the grapes, you fend off the vermin, you worry about the rain, you pick the weeds, you do all the backbreaking manual labor that goes along with running a vineyard. If something breaks, you fix it, even though it’s not yours. And then, at the end of the season, when the grapes are gathered in and sold, all of which you did, the owner, who has been nowhere all this time, takes almost all the revenue, and you get a sliver of it. What did you get for all this work? You got to live on the farm, you got enough to live on. The rest went somewhere else.
So on the one hand, these farmers who decide they’re in charge of the vineyard and plot to take over the place and run it like it’s theirs, we can sympathize to some extent. We might feel like they did — we should own this place, we’re here and that landowner isn’t. We should be able to take this place and do whatever we want with it, certainly we should get all the money, right? This place is really ours. Of course at the end of the story, the landowner returns, and it’s not theirs, it turns out. They were fooling themselves. It was never theirs. They had a job and they didn’t do it, they were given something to manage and they took it over for their own purposes. And the gospel says that led to a wretched death for them.
So yes, you wouldn’t want to have been a tenant farmer. But of course, this parable isn’t about farming. This story, it turns out, is loaded with a powerful lesson that isn’t immediately obvious, but it was obvious to the people listening to it. It made them furious. Jesus was speaking to the chief priests in the temple in Jerusalem. Right there, talking to leaders of his faith, in what to us would be the same as being in Rome speaking to monsignors and bishops in their regalia, Jesus told them that it was all going to be taken away from them. They, the chief priests, were the evil workers in the vineyard, he said, entrusted by the vineyard’s owner, God, to produce fruit. But they had taken the place over for their own purposes, shown no respect to the real owner, grown no good fruit, squandered the tools at their disposal, they were going to kill the owner’s son, and in turn they would be driven from the place in disgrace. They didn’t have to be very smart to see who he was talking about. This gospel passage continues, “They realized that he was speaking about them,” it says. “And they wanted to arrest him.”
So the message was hard news for the chief priests, who had gradually convinced themselves that they were in charge of a religion, instead of humble caretakers who were supposed to make it fruitful. But the reason this story still has the power to make people uncomfortable is that in a way it’s about all of us, because all of us are people working in a vineyard that is not ours, and too many times, we are the ones who allow ourselves to forget.
If there is one concept that underlies the Catholic idea of our place in this world, and of what we call Catholic social teaching in general, it’s this: That we are put here in a glorious world that we do not own. Like the workers in the vineyard in this gospel, we are just tenants. This world around us has everything necessary for us to work, just as this vineyard had all the equipment these tenants needed. They are not there solely for us to use to make ourselves rich. They are there for the work that has been given to us.
In the bible, it’s not unusual for the world to be described as a vineyard. It can produce amazing fruit, but it needs constant care and work. This gospel of Matthew uses the image of “bearing fruit” again and again when Jesus is talking about what we’re supposed to do, and with these images we’re reminded that we are workers on a great estate owned by someone else, and the goal is not for us to hoard what we fool ourselves into thinking is ours, but to use it in ways that bear fruit for everyone.
We know what happens when the world doesn’t work this way. It affects our economy, when everyone’s desire to keep what’s theirs overshadows their sense of how we care for those who have far less. If affects how we care for the environment, when people treat the earth like they own it, instead of a place that has been given to us to care for with love and intelligence. We all have things we are inclined, over time, to think we own, we did that, we accomplished it, we’re entitled to it, the way those tenant farmers felt like they owned the vineyard. We forget that down the road there is an accounting for all this, we were given tools to work with and work to do, and the question is, what have we done with them, what have we produced for the landowner, for the greater good and not for ourselves?
How we all figure out a way to do this is different for each of us. There are as many ways as there are people in this world to do what Jesus calls bearing fruit. There is no perfect way to use money, no perfect way to put your gifts to work. But some of us have been given a lot, and the question can’t be avoided. I’m sure you have people who inspire you in these areas. I know I do. It turns out it’s not so bad being someone who just works on a farm, as long as you remember that it’s worrying about what you produce, and not what you get, that is what makes this farm work.