“Your brothers, you know, are tending our flocks at Shechem.
Get ready; I will send you to them.”
The father sent his beloved son to the son's brothers. He did this out of love for all of them. He wanted Joseph to be a blessing to his brothers.
They noticed him from a distance,
and before he came up to them, they plotted to kill him.
They said to one another: “Here comes that master dreamer!
Come on, let us kill him and throw him into one of the cisterns here;
we could say that a wild beast devoured him.
The brothers, for their part, could not receive the coming of Joseph as anything other than a threat to themselves. They were more concerned about what they could get for themselves than about family. Joseph would have been a blessing to them, but they instead gave in to jealousy. They did not want to receive, but instead felt the need to take for themselves.
Finally, he sent his son to them,
thinking, ‘They will respect my son.’
The father in the parable did not send his son because doing so would provide an excuse to put the tenants to death. The father loved the son too much to use him as a mere excuse for escalation. And yet, did he not realize what would happen? Was there not sufficient precedent to realize it probably wouldn't end well for his son either? Although there certainly was, the father ignored it. We might say he was blinded by a love that persisted even when the tenants refused to recognize it. Why else would he go so far?
But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another,
‘This is the heir.
Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.’
The tenants felt threatened that the coming of the son meant that they would lose control over the vineyard, over their livelihood, their ability to control and provide for themselves without help of others. But the tenants were never meant to use the vineyard for themselves alone. They had perverted its purpose by not providing its fruit in due season. They hoarded the harvest, and this precisely because they couldn't entrust that harvest to the landowner. It was a similar level of the felt need for self-protection that marked the tenants as that which marked the brothers of Joseph. It caused the same failure to receive what would have in fact been great blessings. The coming of the son would have put the vineyard back in order, bringing joy to those who worked in it, and to those who received its fruit. The coming of Joseph to his brothers too could have been a great blessing.
Rather than being received as a blessing, Jesus was sold for a price of silver, just as was Joseph. Rather than being allowed to turn creation back to its intended purpose as an offering to God, bearing fruit in due season, he was killed by those to whom he came, even though he was the Son and we were merely tenants. We were stewards that had forgotten we were stewards and instead tried to wrest the throne for ourselves.
The lesson in all of this is that we need to have a fundamental belief that God desires what is best for us so that we don't receive his blessings as a threat to our autonomy. When we believe he knows what makes for our flourishing we won't try to horde the fruit of the gifts he has given us.
Therefore, I say to you,
the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you
and given to a people that will produce its fruit.
In what ways are we rejecting the stone that is intended to be the cornerstone, the one who will make the whole structure make sense and with whom alone it can grow as a temple sacred to the Lord (see Ephesians 2:21)? If we look at our hearts for the places where we have fruit but we are afraid to share it, if we look for places where we are jealous of the fruit of others, we may find places in our own hearts where we do not yet trust God as he wants us to trust him. To the extent that we do not our minds are still darkened. Yet he came to give us light. Let us ask him for this light today.
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us (see First John 4:16).
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