When the Jews hear this parable, it obviously ticks them off, and they begin plotting to kill Jesus, just like the wicked tenants in the parable-which is pretty ironic, given the fact that their reaction to the parable is "Heaven forbid!" The moral of the story: Christians are the good guys, Jews are the bad guys, and we righteous Christians can celebrate the fact that in revenge for putting Jesus to death, God is going to give these Jews their just desserts. God is going to wipe them out and put us in charge of the Kingdom of Heaven. Hooray for us.

There's your sermon in a nutshell. Everyone can go home happy, right?

Well, you may have noticed there are a few minor problems with this traditional interpretation. One problem is that this interpretation pretty much ignores the fact that Jesus himself was a faithful Jew, and it makes no distinctions between what groups of people Jesus is addressing in this parable. In other words, it's an interpretation completely out of context. In ignoring Jesus' Jewish identity and his Jewish context, the traditional interpretation ends up being blatantly anti-Semitic. This interpretation may have been toned down a bit over the ages, to be sure, but too many Christians still tend to act as if Christianity replaced Judaism as God's favorite child.

But the biggest problem with this allegorical interpretation is in the way the parable ends. For if the owner of the vineyard is God, and the owner comes and destroys the tenants (that is, the Jews) in revenge for the murder of his beloved Son, then the parable is foretelling something completely opposite to what actually happens three and a half chapters later, at the end of Luke's gospel.

When Jesus comes back, he's not an angry, vengeful Christ, bent on destroying those who tried to destroy him. No, he's a forgiving Christ, rooted in the Jewish scriptures as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, who commissions the disciples to proclaim God's forgiveness of sins in his name to Jews and Gentiles alike, starting with the Jews in Jerusalem. In fact, the last verse of Luke's gospel recounts the disciples' faithful Jewish response to Jesus' resurrection: "and they were continually in the temple blessing God." This emphasis on the continuity between the Jewish temple and the Christian church is all the more remarkable considering the fact that St. Luke was himself a Gentile. Clearly, Luke is proclaiming peace and reconciliation, not war and revenge.

The real irony here is that a parable intended to lead people to a recognition of their collusion in violence and their need for repentance has instead been misinterpreted as a justification for the very violence and exclusion it implicitly condemns! We must instead get below the surface level of that simplistic (and misguided) allegorical interpretation, and to do that, we have to understand two things: first, who Jesus is addressing in this parable, and second, what it is that Jesus is alluding to through it.

In Luke, Jesus is portrayed speaking to "the people," in Greek the "laos," from which we derive our word "laity"-that is, regular folk, many of whom were doubtless tenant farmers, who may or may not have known the Scriptures in depth. However, we also know that "the scribes and chief priests" are listening in, that is, the temple clergy, who would certainly know the Scriptures inside and out.

The laity, many of whom know full well what it's like to be oppressed by absentee landowners, would be inclined to sympathize with the tenants in the parable, not the landowner. They might even have cheered when Jesus told a story about tenants who stood up to their landlord and were audacious enough to send the man's slaves away "empty-handed," without the produce they had worked so hard to grow. The laity would also have known that if both the landowner and his heir were to die, the land would be up for grabs. Presumably, most of Jesus' hearers were law-abiding, and would not have condoned murdering the son, but still, they probably sympathized with the position of the oppressed tenants. Far from understanding the vineyard owner as representing God, they would have understood him as representing the rich and powerful.

Among those rich and powerful were the chief priests and their retainers, the scribes, many of whom were likely to be absentee landlords themselves. Their sympathies would naturally lie with the landowner, and in addition to identifying with the landowner as one of their own, they would have associated that landowner with God. They were, after all, God's official representatives on earth.

Now, here's where Jesus' deep knowledge of the Scriptures comes into play. Luke's parable begins: "A man planted a vineyard, and leased it to tenants…" In Matthew [21:33] (and Mark), we are provided with even more detail: "There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants…" By starting off his parable in this way, Jesus would be reminding the clergy and the better-educated laity of the fifth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, which reads [1-7]:

Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watch-tower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;

Sound familiar? By alluding to Isaiah's "Song of the Vineyard," Jesus is referencing a well-known passage from Scripture that soon turns to judgment; for the vineyard does not yield the produce God expects of it. Thus, when Jesus says, "What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others," he is doubtless alluding to these later verses, where Isaiah's vineyard owner answers:

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness,
but heard a cry!

In other words, Jesus is subtly (and not-so-subtly) accusing the clergy of being just as complicit in the endless cycle of violence as were the tenants in the vineyard who beat the landowner's slaves and killed the landowner's son. The clergy would be seriously disturbed by such an assertion. From their point of view, the landowner in the parable is being more than merciful in sending his slaves instead of a destroying army, and they would empathize with the landowner's heartbreak over the death of his beloved son.

What the clergy fail to see, however, is that the death of the son does not justify the destruction of the tenants. The answer that Jesus gives: "He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others" isn't actually Jesus' answer-he is merely articulating the normal, sinful, human answer. In fact, in Matthew's version of this parable, Matthew makes it explicit that the human answer is not Jesus' answer, for there, Jesus asks, "Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" and the crowd answers him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time." That's the human response, but it's not God's.

Think of the Jews and the Palestinians today, or the Middle East as a whole. One act of violence or vengeance leads to another, to the point where none of us can see an end to it. In the parable, when the laity say "Heaven forbid," they really mean "Heaven forbid that the tenants be killed for standing up to an oppressive landlord." When the clergy say "Heaven forbid," they really mean "Heaven forbid that the wicked tenants should kill the landowner's beloved son." But neither group recognizes that they are both colluding in the killing of God's beloved Son. In our parable, both the laity and the clergy respond with the right reaction: "Heaven forbid!" What they don't recognize, however, is their own role in perpetuating this cycle of violence and their own responsibility in helping to bring it to an end. For if that cycle of violence is to be broken, they need to say "Heaven forbid!" to both the son's killing and the tenants' destruction.

And that's just the point Jesus is trying to make. Heaven forbid that God be as vengeful to all of us as we are toward each other. Unfortunately, the lesson seems to be lost on the clergy, for Luke tells us, "When the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the [laity]." And, just in case you think the laity here are blameless, we would do well to remember that only a couple of days after telling this parable, the clergy will have succeeded in turning the laity's "Hosanna" into "Crucify him!"

It would be natural for us, observing this scene from the distance of two millennia, to blame both the clergy and the laity of Jesus' day and let ourselves off the hook; after all, we had nothing to do with these distant events. But are we any closer to living the true lesson that Jesus' parable proclaims? When we see acts of violence on the television news or hear of terrorist acts at home and abroad, we do well to exclaim "Heaven forbid!" But are we saying that only for ourselves? The 9/11 Commission meeting on Capitol Hill this past week embodies the exclamation, "Heaven forbid that such a tragedy should occur in our national life again!" And yet, the Commission has been operating on the faulty assumption that killing Osama bin Laden back in the late 1990s would have prevented the violence of 9/11. We see the violence against our side and we rightly react in horror: "Heaven forbid!" And then we look at our enemy and snarl, "Crucify him!"

In Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus proclaims:

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same…But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked…Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. [6:27; 31-33, 35-36]

This is a hard teaching, but if we don't live it every day…Heaven forbid!