Although he is possibly best known for his action roles in such films as Gladiator, the New Zealand born actor Russell Crowe (whom we Australians tend to claim as one of our own) has also starred in some rather more reflective and beautiful films such as A Beautiful Mind and the less well known A Good Year. In A Good Year Crowe plays a character named Max Skinner. Max is a somewhat arrogant, immensely successful stock-broker on the London Stock Exchange, who inherits a vineyard in Provence, southern France, from his uncle Henry, with whom he has not spoken for the best part of two decades. Rather reluctantly Max travels to the south of France in order to sell the vineyard, or at least that’s his plan. He is reluctant, because he would really rather get his obsequious lawyer to sell it on his behalf, while he gets on with the business of making ridiculous amounts of money. But, French law being what it is, he is required to oversee the transaction personally. So he travels to Provence, to his uncle’s vineyard, expecting to sign the papers and then get out of there.
Upon his arrival, he discovers that his uncle’s winemaker and the winemaker’s wife, have left him a small meal in the kitchen of the house. With the meal is a bottle of the vineyard’s own wine. Fancying himself as a bit of a wine-buff he opens the bottle and remembers the comments his long-forgotten uncle made about wine when Max was just a boy, “I enjoy making wine, because this sublime nectar is quite simply incapable of lying. Picked too early, picked too late, it matters not. The wine will always whisper into your mouth with complete unabashed honesty every time you take a sip.” So, Max takes a sip of the red, tastes it for a moment and then spits it out in disgust and says, “Well, that was honest!” It is terrible. Max can see the financial value of the vineyard draining away with the wine he pours down the sink.
Jesus tells another parable – a landowner plants a vineyard. You can almost imagine his audience warming to the parable immediately. It’s a familiar scene, one they would recognise from their own lands: a vineyard is planted and fenced, a wine press is dug, a watch tower built and the vineyard leased to tenants. Some of his listeners had probably worked on vineyards just like it. Perhaps even one or two of them were the owners of such estates. Moreover, the alert among them would also have recognised it as a metaphor for the people of Israel – an image used quite often, particularly by the prophets.
But it becomes very quickly apparent that this will not be one of Jesus’ nice parables. It’s not like the parable of the lost sheep, or the parable of the mustard seed or the sower. This is a parable with teeth. When the owner of the vineyard sends his slaves to collect the harvest, the tenants seize the slaves and beat one, kill another and stone yet another. Finally, the landowner sends his son, saying, “They will respect my son.” But they do not, and, seeking to grab the inheritance for themselves, they seize the son, throw him out of the vineyard and kill him. And Jesus ends his part of the parable with a question, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those wretches?” The answer comes, “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.”
This parable has a very strong message about bearing good fruit. It would have been understood perfectly well by some. The chief priests and the Pharisees knew precisely what it meant. The kingdom of God will be taken away from them, “and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”
Every time I hear this parable and others like it, and every time I read about Jesus’ confrontations with the Pharisees, the chief priests and the elders of the Temple, I wonder to myself, “Why is Jesus so critical of them?” Certainly Matthew’s Gospel in particular highlights this conflict, but it’s not restricted to Matthew. Why does Jesus criticise them again and again? It’s because of their inflexibility, their stubbornness of heart, and their self-righteousness. It’s because they do not produce the fruits of the kingdom.
This parable is revealing. The killing of the son is the tenants’ effort to safe-guard their own position: to protect it and secure it. It’s precisely what the Synoptic Gospel writers describe the chief priests and the elders of the people doing to Jesus: they kill him, in an effort to preserve their own position. As one of my colleagues put it, “When you’re panicking, you have no room for wisdom.”
Wisdom reveals Jesus as the incarnation of Absolute Love. A relationship with Christ determines the fruit we produce in our lives. Will it be the fruit of sour grapes, of wild grapes as Isaiah puts it, repulsive fruit that smells, that causes you to choke and spit it out, or, will it be good fruit, tasty fruit, the sort of fruit that makes you grab it and not care if its juice runs down your shirt in your haste to eat it?
As a part of his own journey towards wisdom and gentleness, Max wanders into the house’s cellar. He is looking for a nice bottle of wine to take to dinner in an attempt to impress his new friend. As he searches the cellar, carefully ignoring the vineyard’s own wine, he comes across another label. It looks promising. And indeed, when he somewhat too casually produces it for his new friend, she is, despite herself, most impressed. “Where did you get this?” she asks. “It is a glorious wine, a limited release each year, no one knows where it comes from.” Max doesn’t know, not yet anyway, but when he tastes it he recognises the honesty in the wine; it tells no lies: it is, quite simply, beautiful – the product of love. May this be our fruit as well.
The Reverend Dr Theo McCall
School Chaplain
