Adapted from a sermon on Mark 12: 1-12, preached November 4, 2007
Joanna Harader

I don’t have much personal experience with vineyards, but I’ve seen the movie “A Walk in the Clouds.” In one beautiful scene, there is an early frost coming and the whole family has to go out to the vineyard in the middle of the night with torches to keep the grapes warm. This is, of course, a warm fuzzy occasion with swelling music and nicely framed shots of the beautiful daughter in her flowing night gown. You know, the one the main male character is falling in love with.

Somehow, I don’t think I would be quite so lovely, or so happy, to be outside in the middle of the night trying to care for a bunch of grapes.

So, based on this extensive research of a movie I saw several years ago, I have concluded that caring for a vineyard is a pretty tough job. Certainly a job that the wealthy vineyard owner doesn’t want to have to do himself.

He’s done the hard work of loaning money to peasants and then taking their land when they can’t pay the exorbitant interest rates–this is how he acquired the acreage needed for a vineyard. He’s done the hard work of saving enough money so that he can live comfortably for the five years it will take the new vineyard to begin bearing fruit. And he’s done the hard work, or at least overseen the work, of building the walls and the watchtower, digging the pit for the winepress, and planting the vines.

Now it’s time for the owner to go back to his main household where his family and slaves are. So he turns the land over to tenants—some of whom might be the previous owners of the land they will now tend for the benefit of someone else.

These tenants will grow their own food in between the rows of grape vines during the five years it takes for the vines to mature. They may or may not have to give the owner a portion of this produce. But they know that when the grapes come, the owner will collect his share—possibly up to fifty percent.

My husband and I got lost once in Chicago. And it seemed that by simply crossing one street we went from the “nice” part of town–where the landscaping costs more than our house—to the poor part of town where broken windows and graffiti were the norm.

In Mexico City, the tour bus takes you along a mountain road, and from part way up you can look down on the city and see the posh hotels and gated estates. From the same spot you can look up and see clusters of cardboard and tin shelters where people live without electricity or running water.

In first century Palestine, everywhere was that dividing street in Chicago, that spot on the Mexico City mountainside. There was no middle class. There was no comfortable place you could situate yourself so that you didn’t have to see the extreme poverty—or the grotesque wealth. They were both there, side by side, all the time.

And this made the rich fearful. Because if they stopped being rich, they would be terribly, terribly poor.

And this made the poor angry. Because their already difficult poverty seemed even more unbearable next to the lavish living of the elite.

So while this story Jesus tells is bloody and horrific, it should not be surprising. Fear and anger, often born of injustice, are a sure recipe for violence. In fact, there is a well-documented link between rising income inequality and rising violent crime rates in the United States.

It is likely that both fear and anger motivate the tenants to abuse the first slaves that are sent to collect the owner’s share of the vineyard produce. The tenants are angry that the owner, who has so much—who even owns slaves that he can send to do his dirty work for him—would demand an unreasonable portion of the grapes they have worked so hard to produce. They are afraid that after the owner takes his share there will not be enough left for them to live on.

Violence seems to them the only way to protect themselves from exploitation. And once they have abused the first slaves, it’s just that much easier to enact violence when the next group comes to collect the owner’s produce. Violence becomes a pattern for the tenants. It’s just what they do; it’s how they relate to the slaves of the owner.

The owner, of course, continues to send slaves—human beings that he owns—to these tenants, knowing full well that the slaves will be beaten and possibly killed on this errand. Finally, though, the game is up. The owner is running low on human collateral and decides it is time to collect. He sends his son because surely the tenants will know that the consequences of killing a member of the elite are far more dire than those of killing mere slaves.

Now either the tenants no longer care about consequences or, as the text suggests, they think that the owner is dead and that with the son out of the way they will get to keep the vineyard and its produce for themselves. Whatever their reasoning (or lack thereof), the tenants throw the son out of the vineyard and kill him.

This story that Jesus tells is a true tragedy. It reminds me of Hamlet—bodies strewn all over the stage. Needless death. A hopeless situation.

Except that I find a glimmer of hope here—just a glimmer. The hope is in Jesus’ question: “What then will the owner of the vineyard do?”

In Mark and Luke, Jesus himself answers his own question. In Matthew, it’s the chief priests and elders who respond: The owner will “put those wretches to a miserable death and give the vineyard to others.”

The fact is, there are no quotation marks in the Greek texts. We have to guess about who said what based on the context. And to me, it makes sense that it would be the religious elites who provide this answer to Jesus’ question. They take an already tragic tale to its ultimate, bloody conclusion.

But the question from Jesus suggests that the answer might be different. The question is what gives me hope—hope for an end to the cycle of violence. Because all of the people involved in this—and other situations of violence–have the opportunity to answer the question for themselves: “What will I do now in response to this violence?”

We know that the response is often, “I will go and destroy.”

But sometimes the response is, “I will train people in non-violent resistance and preach that hatred only begets more hatred.”

Sometimes the response is, “We will reach out with love to the family of the man who shot our children.”

Sometimes the response is, “We will protest the death penalty because the death of the man who killed our son will not make anything right.”

Sometimes, by the grace of God, the response is, “We will ask the courts to forgive those who kidnapped us, those who killed our friend. Because we understand that our captors are caught up in an out-of-control cycle of violence. And the violence has to stop somewhere.”

It is difficult to stop the violence. But not impossible.

When we share together in communion, the juice (or wine) on the tables is made from grapes from a vineyard. It represents for us the blood of Jesus. And as we remember the crucifixion, we know that even God became a victim of the injustice and violence of the world. We also know that in Christ God did not perpetuate the cycle of violence, but told his disciples to put away their swords and died with words of forgiveness on his lips.

As Christians, this meal is not merely, not mostly, a commemoration of Jesus’ death, but a celebration of his resurrection. A witness to the world that the power of God’s love will ultimately bring life even out of the ruins of injustice and violence.

At this table, Jesus again asks, “What will you do in response to the violence of the world?” And in eating the bread, taking the cup, we give our answer.