This parable originates with Jesus and against the backdrop of conflict with the Jewish leadership of the Temple. It was perhaps the last week of Jesus’ life. This is called the parable of the “murderous tenants.” The vineyard is a typical image for Israel with God as the absentee landlord. The servant who are sent to collect the revenue or portion of the produce of the vineyard at harvest time are the prophets. One is beaten, another killed, and the third stoned. The landlord sends his own son, “They will respect him.” But they seize him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him for his inheritance.

Jesus addresses a crowd in Jerusalem, asking them: “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” The crowd answers, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at harvest time.”

Two things stand out immediately in this parable. The first is the courage of Jesus telling this parable about his fate and expected death in Jerusalem the week before his crucifixion. How many of could tell a story about our impending murder and death? The second is that the Pharisees and the priestly leadership of the Temple hear this parable directed at themselves.

In the gospel today, the temple leadership realizes that Jesus’ parable undermines question their leadership abilities over the vineyard. There has been a series of confrontations and oral conflicts this last week in Jerusalem. They may have been seething with anger but the crowds temper their anger public display of anger. The crowd viewed Jesus as a prophet.

But what does Jesus mean telling such a gloomy and prophetic parable? This is certainly not God’s reign with the tenants killing the vineyard owner’s son. Is the reign of God with God coming end wreaking vengeance upon the murderers of his son?

If we leave at the end of the parable, we might make some sense of the story as the opposite of God’s kin-dom. This is not God’s kin-dom, this is the way of the Roman Empire and the empires of the world. These are the actions of religious folks in Jesus’ time and in our time.

For his audience, there is hope that the temple leadership will get their due for their greed, oppression of the poor, and desire for power. There is a glee in their fate and punishment. But the landlord portrayed is not the God of Jesus and his ministry. It is a vengeful God taught by the temple leadership. This is how the world works and how God deals with such a world from traditional religion. God punishes the wicked, even vengefully.

But Jesus throws a curb into his story with the addition: He says, “Have you never read in the scriptures: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes?” Jesus goes on: Therefore I will tell you, the kin-dom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who produces fruits of the kin-dom.” He disturbs his own story with how God will genuinely act to overcome the evil of the murderous action of the tenants. God will undermine the vision of the world that promotes violence and killing as the only solution.

Jesus quotes a verse from Psalm 118:22-23 that changes the parable. Jesus affirms God often changes the circumstances even when they are tragic and horrific. He affirms that even his own death is the ultimate violation warranting the vengeance of death. God, however, works differently from human empires and religious institutions. God will restore the stone that is foundational for the kin-dom and rejected by the tenants. That is how God works with surprises and unexpected ways. There will be a new people who will bring the reign of God, and it will neither be the Romans nor the coopted Temple leadership. It will be people of the resurrected one who trust in God with their hearts even when all odds are against them.

The core affirmation of Jesus is that God’s resurrection of himself and resurrection in general tells us much about the gracious God of the universe and how God deals with evil and tragedy in life.

Jesus recognizes that there is a lethal price to pay in Jerusalem for the week of conflicts and confrontations with the religious authorities. He will pay dearly with his life, crucified to a cross by the Romans.

I want to turn your attention to the not too distant past when several folks who bore witness to Christ and God’s kin-dom and care for the poor against the military rulers, the rich families that supported the oppressed the poor and hungry, and the church bishops who refused to speak out. Archbishop Oscar Romero, a moderate bishop in San Salvador, who cared about his people spoke up against the military violence and injustice against the people. In the movie, Romero, he is a poor village, and his cassock is torn by the military officer, and the Archbishop starts to preside at a mass on the spot. He lives the gospel of Christ in the midst of persecution.

Here are his words:

It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts. What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine Church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses; proclaims to the people God’s wonders to be believed and venerated, and accuses of sin those who oppose God’s reign.

Romero mirrors the ministry of Jesus God’s Christ in the last week before his death in Jerusalem. He– like prophets sent to the tenants– was murdered at the altar by a military assassin while celebrating mass. He knew in his heart that in following Christ he would be killed. Even today the Catholic bishops of El Salvador have blocked the investigation into the death of Romero because of the Catholic Church’s complicity in his death. The tenants of the vineyard are still alive.

I find myself in admiration and awe of Jesus for telling this parable about himself and his placing his trust and heart in Abba God. It raises a question the title of a book written by the Jewish rabbi Harold Kushner—When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He wrote the book because his three year old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease and would live only into his early teens. He writes as heart-broken parent and rabbi. There are no easy solution to the doubts, fears, and questions when tragedy or something terrible happens. This is a question that impacts all of us who have been challenged by various cancers, health challenges, tragedies, and harm perpetrated against us.

According to John chapter 9, Jesus was unable to answer a question why a man was born blind. He rejected the Temple authorities and Pharisee’s explanation that the man was born blind because of his sin or the sins of his parents. Jesus refused to accept the explanation. Evil and tragedy may strike you and spare your neighbor or person who is just the nastiest person imaginable. This mystery has bewildered the understanding of human beings from the very beginning of history. There is no easy answer, Jesus felt that on the cross when he cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”

Let me push this problem to another example of horrific proportions.

Another Jewish author, Elie Wiesel, who authored the book The Trial of God, explores this issue in massive death. It takes place while he was imprisoned in Auschwitz. A group of rabbis in the concentration camp placed God on trial during the worst possible nightmare of death and horror they could imagine—the extermination of Jews and other peoples by the Nazis.

If you have ever gone through a Holocaust Museum, you will understood part of the magnitude of evil and horror. I went through the Holocaust Museum in Washing D.C. I was speaking at Georgetown University on gay theology, and the hos that I was staying with arranged for me to go through a VIP tour of the Museum. You can choose a real live person to follow through the concentration camp. I chose a gay man who was interred and died the gas chambers in Auschwitz. My mistake was going through the experience alone. I witnessed the cattle car that housed and shipped a hundred people to the camp. I saw a real gas chamber, the art of the children murdered in the chambers, and the smelled the decaying shoes left over and brought from the camp. At the end of tour you end up a quiet space to feel the intense emotions evoked by the experience. There were several people in the room in tears, including myself.

Going back to Wiesel, several rabbis place God on trial for God’s silence about the experience at Auschwitz. The issue is the questioning of God by Job on the justice of God. Is God apathetic because does God not care or is God powerless to save us?

In this case, the trial is how can the rabbis understand God to be just and good in light of the innocent suffering and massive death around themselves? If is truly God, why does God limit God’s power in this situation of horror and the many horrific events in history. At the end of the trial, the rabbis find God guilty of silence, but they take some hoarded bread crumbs to celebrate the Friday Sabbath service. They are faithful to observe the Sabbath and placed their faith in God despite the guilty verdict.

Elie Wiesel often retells the story about two Holocaust survivors, one a rabbi, who meet after liberation of the camps by the Allies. The survivor asks the rabbi how he can still believe in God after all he witnessed and experienced in the concentration camp. The rabbi responds by asking how, after all their experiences of the horror and death that has happened, can he not believe in God.

The question of evil and its meaning when it strikes—such as diagnosis of cancer or a terminal illness or the horrors of death of AIDS in the early stages of the pandemic—remain unanswerable. We can look to the faithfulness of the rabbis who attested that God may be silent but God was with them in their suffering and impending death.

Or we as Christians can look to Jesus. He answers, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” He points to his trust he has in Abba God and the resurrection. God may allow his creatures to do evil actions and crimes, but God experiences our suffering, knows what it means to abandoned and betrayed, arrested, flogged, scorned, the pain of crucifixion, and the last and painful breath of Jesus as he dies. We may not have the answers when bad things and evil strike us, but we know that God is with us each step with us and God will raise us to life with God’s self.