Allegory: an exercise in interpretation that may well leave you wondering, “Is that what it’s supposed to mean?”

An allegorical interpretation means that you pick the individual story elements apart, then assign each one a particular significance such that, taken together, they apply the narrative to something quite different. A = X, B = Y, C = Z and so on until another story emerges that consists, not of ABC, but of XYZ.

The story Jesus tells in our Gospel reading for today is just dripping with allegory. But there’s a surface parable (what it looks like the story is saying, at first glance) and a deeper level.

This is another case in which a story or saying attributed to Jesus in one of the Gospels only makes sense when we remember that the Gospels were put in their final written form two or three generations after the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel writers used written and oral source material but shaped the story according to their perceptions of what their communities needed to remember from the life and teaching of Jesus — and that in turn reflected the challenges that the communities faced in their own time. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, in Logion 65, tells a very similar story.

There are some elements in this parable that scholars believe do go back to an authentic story told by Jesus. Absentee landlords, for example, were common in Galilee at this time. Landowners might set up a business such as a vineyard, then return to their own country, somewhere in the Roman Empire, depending on the local management to run the business and make it turn a profit, part of which accrued to the landowner and was paid to his representatives. But this Gospel story takes a dark turn as the local tenants abuse, even kill (!) the landowner’s agents who come to collect. More shockingly, when he sends his son to deal with the tenants’ refusal to pay, the tenants calculate that they can keep the vineyard for themselves if they kill the heir.

The below-the-surface interpretation of this story identifies God as the landowner, the tenants as the evil Temple leaders, the servants as all the prophets who were rejected, and Jesus as the son (which would mean that Jesus is predicting his own death.) This would illustrate a certain interpretation of salvation history that took shape after, not before, the death and resurrection of Jesus. Verses 45-46, which appear in the Revised Common Lectionary but not the Roman Missal, clarify Matthew’s intent:

“When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard these parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. But while seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds because they held him to be a prophet.”

Ultimately Matthew holds the Jewish leaders, not the Romans, responsible for Jesus’ death.

Matthew was writing for communities consisting largely of Jews who had become Christians. The Jewish members had already been ejected from their synagogues for their allegiance to Christ as the Messiah. For this reason the Christian community was known in Greek as ekklesia, from “ek-kaleo,” those who have been called out. Because of their adherence to the Christian faith, they could never “go home” again.