The parable of the wicked tenants in Mark 12:1–12 (parallels in Matthew 21:33–46; Luke 20:9–19) interweaves echoes from Jewish Scripture (Isaiah 5:1–7, which portrays God planting a vineyard, building a watchtower, and making a wine vat), allegory (the tenants symbolizing those who persecuted prophets and killed the ‘beloved son’, Jesus), and first-century socio-economic pressures (struggles over land and resources between non-elite tenants and wealthy, absentee landlords).

Later Christian interpreters elaborated extensively on the allegorical foundation laid by Mark. Irenaeus, for example, argued that the parable means that God rejected those who rejected the Son of God—those of the ‘former dispensation to whom the vineyard was formerly entrusted’—and gave the vineyard to Gentiles (the Church) who were formerly outside the vineyard (Against Heresies 4.36.1–4). Such supersessionism—the idea that Christians have replaced Jews as the ‘people of God’—is a problematic, anachronistic, anti-Jewish reading of the parable. It is entirely foreign to the historical Jesus, who proclaimed a renewal and restoration of Israel—a new leadership within Judaism, not an alternative outside of it.

Jesus was an impoverished, first-century Jew who was a member of a politically, militarily, and economically oppressed minority. Even if the parable includes some allegorical elements, it still evokes a first-century context in which an unjust redistribution of wealth by the elite forced many small independent landowners into being landless, dependent labourers. The worsening economic situation of numerous Galileans led to growing resentment against these landlords, and the economic hopelessness of the non-elite, including their inability to pay taxes to the rulers and pay off debts to the elite, was a central element of social conflict. Thus, this parable reflects a struggle over land and resources in which the wealthy elite relegated many non-elites to a bare subsistence level (Gowler 2012: 204–09). The later Gentile Christian church developed the parable into an anti-Jewish allegory, for example by explicitly stating that the owner (‘lord’; kurios) of the vineyard in the parable (Mark 12:9) symbolizes God (kurios; Mark 12:11).

Some scholars, then, evaluate the rebellion of the tenants as a desperate attempt to survive, one that continues an escalating spiral of violence that began with their oppression and results in their destruction. If this reading of the parable is accurate, then the owner of the vineyard does not symbolize God, and the parable urges Jewish ‘holy people of God’ not to respond to Roman exploitation ‘with hatred and violence’ but to work together in the Jewish tradition of nonviolent resistance (Schottroff 2006: 23–24; cf. Kloppenborg 2006).

The Golden Gospels of Echternach includes a full-page illumination of the parable of the wicked tenants, as well as full pages for three other parables, all of which involve socio-economic issues: the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16), the great supper (Luke 14:16–24), and the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31; see Metz 1957, plates 67–70). The image of the wicked tenants is a ‘narrative type’ illumination, because it primarily follows the story found in the gospels—which already has allegorical elements—as distinct from ‘symbolic type’ illuminations that include extensive allegorical elaborations (cf. Mantas 2011: 214–15).

John Everett Millais’s The Wicked Husbandmen is one of twenty prints he created for The Parables of Our Lord (Millais 1975 [1864]). Unlike the Golden Gospel illumination, which portrays several scenes of the parable with explanatory written titles and labels, Millais’s print depicts one scene to stand in for the whole: a moment shortly after the murder of the son. It is more of an illustration—similar to his illustrations in novels (e.g., five novels of Anthony Trollope; Sanders 2001: 75)—rather than a visual commentary that leads to further contemplation of the parable’s mystery. Yet the image itself remains haunting, powerful, and evocative.

Strikingly, neither of the two artworks discussed above contains any hint of the tenants’ oppression or imminent destruction (Mark 12:9). Adolfo Pérez Esquivel’s Stations of the Cross, however, although it does not depict the parable, provides a mode of response to it—one espoused by Jesus—that, in Pérez Esquivel’s words, seeks ‘to achieve by nonviolent struggle the abolition of injustice and the attainment of a more just and humane society for all’ (Pérez Esquivel 1981: 106).

Pérez Esquivel’s Stations of the Cross thus modernizes Jesus and his message authentically, without, as Christian interpreters have tended to do over the centuries, domesticating Jesus—a first-century Jewish prophet of an oppressed people—or anachronizing his radical message.

References

Gowler, David B. 2012. ‘The Enthymematic Nature of Parables: A Dialogic Reading of the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:16–20)’, Review and Expositor, 109.2: 199–217

Kloppenborg, John. 2006. The Tenants in the Vineyard (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck)

Mantas, Apostolos. 2011. Die Ikonographie der Gleichnisse Jesu in der ostkirchlichen Kunst (5.-15. Jh.) (Leiden: Alexandros Press)

Metz, Peter. 1957. The Golden Gospels of Echternach (London: Thames and Hudson)

Millais, John Everett. 1975 [1864]. The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (New York: Dover)

Pérez Esquivel, Adolfo. 1984. Christ in a Poncho (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books)

Sanders, Andrew. 2001. “Millais and Literature,” in John Everett Millais Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, ed. by Debra N. Mancoff (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 69–93

Schottroff, Luise. 2006. The Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress)