The Trap of Martyrdom

Mark 12:1-12

Then he began to speak to them in parables. ‘A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watch-tower; then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from them his share of the produce of the vineyard. But they seized him, and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. And again he sent another slave to them; this one they beat over the head and insulted. Then he sent another, and that one they killed. And so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But those tenants said to one another, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this scripture:
“The stone that the builders rejected
   has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
   and it is amazing in our eyes”?’

When they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away.

Even though this is my second sermon in my Parables of Jesus sermon series, I want to start by giving a quick explanation as to what a parable is, because I was really overthinking this one and going back to the original definition and purpose of parables brought me back to earth. So parable comes from a Greek word being “thrown together” or “thrown beside”—so the idea here is that a parable is a story that throws together concepts about the Kingdom of God with objects or scenarios that we mere mortals can understand here on earth—and then it’s up to us to dissect them and compare and contrast to really figure out what they’re telling us.

So for today’s story, we have all these characters, all allegories for something different. The general consensus here is that the vineyard is Israel, the vineyard owner is God, the slaves the owner sends who are humiliated and killed are prophets who have been ignored, the wicked tenants doing the beating and killing are the religious and political authorities of the day, and finally, the beloved son is Jesus. That’s all pretty straightforward. But the thing was having trouble with was this idea of God as the owner of the vineyard. Because everything Jesus preaches is against riches and social and economic hierarchies. Everything Jesus preaches goes against these ideas of landowners and tenants and oppressive economic classes. So I just couldn’t wrap my head around God being represented by a wealthy, elite landowner.

But you know, thank God for Bible study, because while I was pulling my hair out trying to make sense of this Brian piped in to make note, ‘well, he was probably just giving a scenario that listeners would be familiar with.’ And Brian was exactly right— in that moment, he reminded me of the very definition of a parable, so thank you, Brian! Jesus isn’t saying God is akin to a land-hoarding elite—he’s just using a story that would make sense to his listeners… tensions were often very high between landowners and the people who both lived off them and provided for some of their profits. There were very few regulatory measures in place to make sure tenants and farm workers were treated fairly,  and so it was really up to the landowner who much profit he would take.

And these men were often absentee landowners too. In our passage today, it’s written that this person started a vineyard and then went to another country. That first part of the passage is a parallel to Isaiah chapter 5’s song of the unfruitful vineyard. And in Isaiah 5, it’s written,

Ah, you who join house to house,
   who add field to field,
until there is room for no one but you,
   and you are left to live alone
   in the midst of the land!

This is Isaiah taking aim at the wealth hoarders of his day, just buying up every piece of land around them so there’s nothing left for anyone else, and they’ve bought up so much land, they’re a whole country away from that first piece of land they bought. So again, people would be hearing this and nodding their heads because it all sounds so familiar to them—but the other thing with parables—while they’re framed in the everyday, they’re not fully based in the reality. They often take a turn into nonsense, into the absurd. A man of power wouldn’t be so financially careless with his slaves or servants, sending them to get beaten of full-on die over and over. And then he certainly wouldn’t risk sending his beloved son to possibly suffer the same fate. This is where we know this is a parable, and that God is the ultimate subversion of the earthly powerful—that God is wildly patient and will sacrifice the beloved son for the people.

Now you may be thinking—‘wait a minute, doesn’t Jesus then say the landowner is going to destroy the tenants? How is that patient and loving?’ And you know… fair question. This was another thing I struggled with. When thinking about this passage. But just as parables take something familiar and turn it upside down, so Jesus does with life itself. He takes the social norms and societal rules of the day and turns them upside down, showing us there are better ways to live, that this world doesn’t have to be the way it is. And so this idea of destruction is the destruction of the world as we know it. It’s the destruction of a world that drives people to violence in pursuit of wealth and material things. It’s the destruction of a world that oppresses people, that puts some people up top and some on the bottom. It’s the destruction of hell on earth and the beginning of an earth as it is in heaven. It’s making all things new.

But this parables tells us something else too— it tells us that this specific kind of violent uprising is futile within a system that’s built to keep some people up and some people down. It’s showing that no matter what we do, what kind of uprising we organize, if we’re still working within this system of violence and degradation, there’s new use—these wicked tenants weren’t trying to make the world better. They were just trying to get what they felt was theirs by any means necessary.

In Germany in 1525, Thomas Muntzer, a priest and theologian was fed up with both the Catholic Church and what had quickly become of the Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation—he was passionate and angry that, reformation or not, the poor were still forgotten and oppressed, and he led a rebellion known as the German Peasants’ War. In his semi-fictionalized account of the German Peasants’ War, called The War of the Poor, Eric Vuillard writes,

They had a hard time understanding why God, the God of beggars, crucified between two thieves, needed such pomp. Why his ministers needed luxury of such embarrassing proportions. Why the God of the poor was so strangely on the side of the rich, always with the rich. Why his words about giving up everything issued from the mouths of those who had taken everything.

 This was what prompted Muntzer to join and then lead an uprising of the poor straight to the gates of some of the most powerful aristocrats in Germany. Muntzer was a radical, and took great pride in preaching the word of God in his native German instead of Latin; he’s rumored to have attracted thousands of followers with this own interpretations of his acquaintance Martin Luther’s Reformation doctrines; he truly wanted to be a man of the people, and he practiced what he preached—but he was a zealot. And he believed that intense suffering and despair was the only way to be a good Christian, and he believed that the end was nigh, and it was up to the people to usher in Christ’s second coming. And so, with his charisma and his preaching, his army of peasants and poor built and built, as did his passion and zealousness the closer he got to the castle. And then, what started with a bang, ended with a violent and bloody whimper. In the end, the aristocrats just had too much ammunition, too many in their employ, too many resources. It’s estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 peasants were killed.

At the end of Vuillard’s book, after he writes about Muntzer’s beheading at the hands of the German aristocracy he writes, “Martyrdom is a trap for the oppressed. Only victory is desirable.”

You might recall that a few weeks ago, I preached about Jesus laying his life down for his friends, and that he calls upon us to do the same—though, in the end, he’s probably not literally calling for that, because what good are we in changing the world if we’re not actually physically here? Jesus is the ultimate example of sacrificial love, and none of us can live up to it, nor should we try to that extent. Rather, we should do what we can to sacrifice some of our own needs and wants for the good of others, but certainly not our entire lives. And so when Vuillard ends his book with “martyrdom is a trap for the oppressed,” he’s saying that this is kind of uprising is futile. We cannot change the world for the better with the same violence and force that brought us to this place.

In today’s parable, the wicked tenants attempt to take the land they’re working on with violence, and in the end, it gets them nowhere. While this is a parable, and it’s somewhat absurd in many ways— in the extreme violence of killing multiple servants, in the tenants’ incorrect assumption that they would legally “inherit” the land if they murdered the beloved son—it is based in reality. People did often take hold of land or property by forceful or unethical means. People were taken advantage of. It was not a fair or just society in which these folks lived. And a never-ending cycle of violence wasn’t going to change anything. Violence would beget more violence, suffering more suffering, despair more despair. We can’t change this world for the better by using the same tactics as the oppressors.

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” Jesus says, quoting Psalm 118. This world will be saved in ways we least expect it; it will indeed be saved by the meek, and whatever happens will certainly be disruptive, maybe even frightening, but we will not make this world an earth as it is in heaven by the same violent and unethical means of those in the past. Not only do we have to think outside the box here, but we really have to lead with Love. We have to lead with the love, the hope, and the knowledge that we are all deserving of a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life, that we are all God’s children. And just as the parables are jarring and perplexing, so will be the way we change the world.

Often in my sermons for Martin Luther King Day, I talk about how unpopular he was, and how unpopular his protests were—protests that were peaceful. But those protests were confusing and disruptive for people, because they challenged the powerful and the status-quo without violence or force. Those protests confused people, and people fear what they don’t understand. And though King was martyred for the work he did, he managed to change this country by doing the unexpected, by acting as that rejected cornerstone.

And so today’s parable is violent, but it is one of hope under the surface. It’s a parable about the futility of a cycle of violence. It’s a parable that spoke to people familiar and fed up with class tensions and unjust economic systems. It’s a parable about how we change the world, starting small, with this community right here, by thinking of new ways to be the church in the world, by thinking about new ways to spread the word of Christ—not with coercion or force, but with Love and understanding. Because in today’s world, it sometimes seems that Love and understanding are the most unexpected things of all. Amen.