Today’s Gospel setting is in the temple the day after the triumphant entrance into Jerusalem (21:1-11) and the cleansing of the temple (21:12-17), the day after the original Palm Sunday. After the cleansing, Jesus retreated to Bethany. The next morning, he returned to the temple. Matthew says he wanted to teach. A crowd gathered around him.
To enter the scene, we need to leave our culture and try to get into theirs. Religion and politics were inseparable. The source of social order was the Mosaic Law. The priests and elders assisted the Roman oppressors in maintaining order.
Scripture often describes Israel as a vineyard (Isa 5:1-7; Isa 27 2-3). The sons working the vineyard suggest the ongoing responsibility to construct society. God’s values are to guide those responsible for a good and just social order. Religious movements like those of the prophets and like John the Baptist’s and Jesus’s emerged when the leadership failed to aspire to God’s ways, to justice and charity, to inclusion and equality, to nonviolence and peace. The prophets, John, and Jesus called the leadership to reform. The failing religious/political order felt threatened. The Lord’s teaching and the cleansing of the temple were immediate warnings to the religious/political order.
The protectors of the social order questioned Jesus’s authority: what is its source and who gave it to him? In return, Jesus challenged them regarding John the Baptist’s religious movement. John’s movement became popular. On that day, the leadership became scared of the crowd. Note well: these religious/political leaders did not base their response on transcendent truth or on divinely sourced morality. They based their decision on the crowd’s collective mood and mindset.
The commentary by Davies and Allison directs us to the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 7:21-23). Jesus teaches, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.” In that great sermon, the ones critiqued by the Lord protest that they had done all the right religious stuff: they had prophesied; they did exorcisms; they even did miracles. Jesus responds that only doing the will of the Father opens the doors to God’s kingdom. Believers are to cultivate a society with godly values—truth, justice, empathy, and compassion.
This parable was a biting insult to the priests and elders. And more: it challenged their role in shaping a peaceful and just society. Regardless of their piety and religious showmanship, Jesus thought that the leadership would be replaced by the lowliest of the low who convert, tax collectors and prostitutes. Only those who live the Lord’s teaching will enter the kingdom of God.