From Killing Stone to Cornerstone 1

From Killing Stone to Cornerstone 1

From Killing Stone to Cornerstone:

An Exegesis of Matthew 21: 30-46

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Matthew 21: 30-46 is presented in the form of a parable Jesus delivers before the Pharisees, who were one of the most powerful Judaic groups in Jesus’s time. Jesus often used the parable genre, telling a story as a means to provide religious and moral instruction. Indeed, the parable was Jesus’s principal form of religious teaching, and many prevalent examples exist and have survived to become an immediately recognizable and important reference point to this day. Examples such as the parable of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan continue to thrive in the contemporary vernacular.

In the parable presented here, Jesus tells the fictitious story of the landowner who must travel far from home and who entrusts his land to the care of caretakers. When the landowner dispatches his servants to return home to check on the status of the property, the caretakers abuse and kill the servants. Eventually, as the caretakers realize their power to attack and destroy (by killing the landowner’s servants), their hubris grows. They begin to imagine that they can use brute force and their temporary custody of the land to take the land for themselves. However, the landowner’s power is absolute, and Jesus warns that the landowner will return, and will visit tenfold on the caretakers the destruction they have wrought.

The context of this passage is significant because Jesus presents the parable before the Pharisees. These are the leaders of the Jewish community, scholars who adhere to Mosaic law and who advocate strict adherence to the oral tradition of Jewish law. These were prestigious, highly respected men whom the Jewish community looked to for guidance and whom even Roman officials recognized for their authority and high social standing. Nevertheless, the New Testament scriptures suggest a highly contentious relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees. As Borg notes, however, the root cause of this conflict seems to be over the tradition and application of Jewish law, as outlined in particular in the book of Leviticus. Borg notes, “For the Pharisees, the core value of their social vision was holiness/purity; the core value of Jesus’ vision…was compassion” (1998, p. 8).

Within this context, then, the parable presented here may be understood as Jesus’s attempt to present a new vision of Judaism and Judaic Law. The “land” discussed in the parable symbolizes God’s law, with which the Jewish people have been entrusted since Yahweh’s visitation and covenant with Moses and His handing down of the Ten Commandments to Moses. The “husbandmen” entrusted with the care of the householder’s land are those who have been entrusted with the Law (i.e. the Jewish peoples), while the “householder” discussed in the parable is God/Yahweh Himself.

The Law belongs to Yahweh, the parable suggests, not to the husbandmen, whose job is to care for and protect the land/Law. Destruction, Jesus suggests, will be visited upon those who abuse the land/Law and who presume to take for themselves that which does not belong to them. This is significant in that it seems to suggest that Jesus is condemning the Pharisees’ interpretation and application of Judaic Law. The Pharisees, as Borg notes, were particularly concerned with tithing and with issues of purity, especially in relation to table fellowship (ibid., p. 7).

The Pharisees’ emphasis on these issues, however, reflect Judaism’s efforts in the first century to develop a strong, nationalistic presencein Roman-occupied Israel. Table fellowship and other purity laws were designed fundamentally to assert a coherent Jewish identity in contradistinction to that of the Roman occupiers and other religious and ethnic groups settled in ancient Israel at the time. The emphasis on tithing, likewise, constitutes a rigorous effort for the development and codification of a stable economic system unique to and for the benefit of the Jewish nation. These concerns affirm the Pharisees’ status as the social, political, economic, and theological heads of the nation in the period.

Jesus’s conflict with the Pharisees seems to derive fundamentally from what He perceived to be a misinterpretation and, especially, a misuse of Jewish law. This relates directly to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, described in Matthew, Chapter 5, in which Jesus presents a new vision and application of Jewish Law, a shift, as has been noted, away from the “letter of the Law” and toward the “spirit” of the Law. These conflicting perspectives on Jewish Law have served, as Borg suggests, as one of the most significant attributes of the distinction between Christian and non-Christian Judaism and it positions Jesus, as least in Matthew 21, as a subversive figure in the eyes of the Pharisees, a threat to the stable, nationalistic, Jewish identity that the Pharisees were endeavoring to cultivate and preserve. It is for this reason that in verse 46, the Pharisees consider seizing Jesus on the grounds of blasphemy.

What prevents the Pharisees from doing this, the scriptures note, is Jesus’s enormous popularity. Matthew 21: 46 (King James Version) asserts that the Pharisees “feared the multitude, because they took him (Jesus) for a prophet”. Jesus’s iconoclastic, reformative vision of Judaic Law had gained enormous popularity because it welcomed all comers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and it embraced traditions and practices outside of the strict rabbinical tradition that the Pharisees sought to affirm and enforce. Again, this threat to a national, ethnic, and religious identity is, at least from the perspective of the Pharisees, a threat to the very existence of the peoples as a whole, particularly in a climate where the presence of an occupying force, such as that of the mighty Roman Empire, already poses a challenge to Jewish national identity, authority, and autonomy.Kazen notes,

During the first century CE, religious development within Second Temple Judaism resulted in the two major movements of rabbinic Judaism and the Christian church. These two emerging religions were taking very different stances toward the role and function of the Torah, particularly in respect to covenant conditions and group boundaries. (2010, p. 8)

Rabbinic Judaism envisions the Jewish nation as the exclusive bearers and keepers of Yahweh’s covenant. The manifestation of this, according to the rabbinic tradition, is through the strict interpretation and application of the Law.

Jesus’s parable, however, condemns the Pharisees’ misapplication of Yahweh’s law. The land and its “fruits,” its abundance, are not for the husbandmen (the Jews) alone. These belong to the householder/Yahweh, whose right it is to share His abundance as He sees fit. The householder’s son who is sent to retake the land but is killed is, of course, an allusion to Jesus and His crucifixion. Verses 41-45, however, refer to the reclamation of the Law into Yahweh’s hands, presumably through the Second Coming and the establishment of the Second Earth. Here, the “stone” which is rejected (i.e. Jesus and His teachings) will become the cornerstone (i.e. the central focus, the strongest point, and the foundational element) of the restoration of the Kingdom of God on Earth, and those who have abused the Law, using it to condemn and destroy, will in turn be condemned and destroyed by it.

One of the challenges associated with this emphasis on the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, however, has been in the exploitation of this tradition throughout history as the basis of and justification for anti-Semitic practices. Beginning in particular with the medieval period and progressing into the modern era, most notably in the horrors of the Holocaust, the relationship between Christianity and Judaism has been characterized as conflicted, if not openly hostile, and Jesus’s interactions with the Pharisees, particularly as presented in these versus, are most often cited as the basis for such claims, a fact that Borg urges readers to remember and be particularly sensitive to, lest misinterpretation gives rise to atrocity, as it has so often done in Judeo-Christian history.

Indeed, recent Biblical scholarship has noted the ideological inflections of traditional readings of Jesus’s interactions with the Pharisees and of verses like these in particular. Garber (2011) asserts, “…Jesus the historical being, that is to say, Jesus before the oral and written traditions, is transformed and transfigured into a narrative character that appears in the canonized New Testament” (p. 2). In other words, traditional interpretations of this parable and of related encounters between Jesus and the Jewish nation have been informed by Christian ideologies which seek to assert the faith and to sever—or at least diminish and interrogate—ties between Judaism and Christianity. Above all, these measures have been historically motivated by (conscious or subconscious) efforts to deny or limit Jesus’s Jewishness, His adherence to Jewish values, beliefs, customs, and traditions.

The Book of Matthew has been cited as among the first of articulation of the Gospels, and was esteemed by the first Church Fathers as among the most authoritative and important of the scriptures. Papias (AD 130), who was the Bishop of Hieropolis in Phrygia, was the first to associate these Gospels with Matthew. One of the most significant challenges of the exegesis of the book of Matthew is simply in its translation. Early accounts suggest that the Book of Matthew was written in diverse languages, including Greek, Syro-Chaldaic, and perhaps at least two other forms of an ancient Palestinian dialect whose origins and nature remain unclear (Blue Letter Bible, 2016). It is also difficult to ascertain where or when the Book of Matthew was written, though the most reliable scholarship dates the Gospel’s composition between 50 and 100 AD, but seems to have been written before the destruction of the Second Temple, around 60 AD (ibid).

What seems most significant about the Gospel of Matthew are the frequent references to the Old Testament. This seems, fundamentally, to be a Gospel written for and about the Jewish people, perhaps in an effort to ascertain how the Jewish nation might reconcile itself and its identity to the new reality of Jesus Christ and the emergence of Christianity. This would make the use of Matthew in particular as a traditional rationalization for anti-Semitism all the more ironic—and horrifying.

Recent scholarship which explores and affirms the Jewishness of Jesus, however, can help us to understand the vision Jesus presents in the parable of a new faith, a new codification and application of the law. The return of the householder signifies the return of God, but the destruction that follows in His wake is not a fundamentally a vengeance to be visited upon the husbandmen per se, but upon the misuse of the Law. It seems particularly fitting, then, that the scripture would emphasize the word “stone” insofar as this seems to allude to Jesus’s founding of the Church with Peter as its head. “Peter” means “rock” and in Matthew 16:18, when Peter through divine inspiration declares his belief that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus rechristens the man, declaring, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The correlation between the symbolic use of “rock” and “stone” in both passages reveals that what is at stake in the parable in Matthew 21 is the building of the Church in keeping with a new vision of God’s Law.

The parable of the householder in Matthew 21: 30-44 suggests a new image of the covenant between Yahwah and His people, as well as a new vision of the Law the covenant provides. Spoken before the Pharisees, the parable has long been interpreted as a token of the contentious relationship between Jesus and the Jewish people, and has as such been historically used to justify anti-Semitism. Modern scholarship, however, recognizes the affinity between Jesus and the Jewish nation. This enables a new interpretation of this passage, one which emphasizes not the destruction of the husbandman in the parable, but the founding of a new world, a second Kingdom of God, whose cornerstone will be the Church and its new vision of God’s Law as brought to the world through the teachings of Jesus Christ.

References

Blue Letter Bible. (2016). The Gospel of Matthew. Retrieved from

Borg, M.J. (1998). Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International.

Garber, Z. (2011). The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP.

Kazen, T. (2010). Jesus and Purity Halakhah: Was Jesus Indifferent to Impurity? Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns.