Sunday’s Gospel passage continues Jesus’ tense interactions with the religious leaders in the temple just days before he will be crucified by the Roman authorities. Jesus tells a parable which criticizes the religious leaders and strongly implies that God will punish them. He tells them, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruit” (Matthew 21:43).

Over the centuries Christians have read this passage to claim that God has withdrawn his blessing from the Jewish people, condemned them to suffering, and instead blessed the church to be his covenant people. This false teaching – based on terrible readings of this and other passages – is the foundation for centuries of wretchedly evil religious violence committed by Christians against Jews, from the early medieval era through to the 20th century and still to this day.

Christians must do better. We must repent of the sins of our ancestors and do everything in our power today to avoid their errors. We must seek the kind of understanding that overcomes longstanding prejudice against our Jewish neighbors. 

A little bit of personal background: 

My step-siblings are Jewish, as is my childhood best friend. My public schools were closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, because we had such a large Jewish population in our community. I attended a dozen or more Bat and Bar Mitzvahs when I was in middle school. The local bread company in the Philadelphia area – Amoroso – sells fresh baked loaves in grocery stores. The bread bag is printed with three prayers for bread – Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. I worked one summer at a synagogue day camp while I was in high school. 

As a Chaplain in the US Army I supported the free expression of religion for Soldiers of all faiths. One of my most memorable experiences in the Chaplain Corps was supporting Jewish Soldiers to say Shabbat prayers on a Friday evening along the flightline of our base in the Kuwaiti desert. In the two years before I left Indiana for Florida, I was engaged in local Jewish-Christian dialogue with a Rabbi and a lay Jewish community leader, and together we attended a grant-funded week-long symposium at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC for Christian and Jewish clergy and community leaders.

A degree of interfaith understanding and partnership is just baked into who I am, how I grew up, and how I live my faith.

Let’s turn to Matthew 21:33-45 briefly. There is unambiguous tension in this passage between Jesus and the religious leaders – this we need not deny. The question is this: as Christians today, what do we do when we read about a conflict Jesus had with Jewish religious leaders 2000 years ago? What conclusions do we draw about what was happening then, and what this conflict means for us now?

A few points to consider:

When Jesus critiques the religious leaders of his time, it is not a particularly new or revolutionary thing he’s doing. His critique is not all that different than that of the prophets hundreds of years earlier – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, etc. – who in their day called for faithfulness and renewal among religious leaders and society’s elites. Jesus stands on their shoulders. 

When we read Mathew 21 carefully, we see that Jesus is talking to a group of religious elites – not to “all the Jews.” Jesus’ critique here is not about Judaism, or the faith of the Jews broadly. No. Jesus, a Jew standing in the tradition of the Jewish prophets, here is critical of the religious leaders. His harsh words warn that the kingdom could be taken from these religious elites and “given to a people who produce [the kingdom’s] fruit.” Over the centuries many Christians came to believe that the Jews were now replaced by the Christians. This is supersessionism - the misguided teaching that Christians have replaced Jews as God's covenant people in the world.

Let's not read into these words what's not in the text or the context. In fact, Jesus' teaching here is just another iteration and echo of the reversals that Jesus had been talking about in recent chapters and verses. Just in last week's reading Jesus said that “tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the kingdom of heaven before you,” (Matthew 21:31). A week before that, Jesus promised that “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). Jesus consistently teaches that what we see now is not all that there is; and, in fact, that what we see now is usually NOT what God intends. As such, we should always expect God to turn things upside down. Always.

These reversals are neither narrowly tailored nor are they limited to the ancient debates between Jesus and the religious leaders of his generation. No. Jesus' inversions are timeless truths about power, faithfulness, and responsibility to our neighbors. They are truths that apply today just as much as they did 2000 years ago.

  • When Jesus talks about the first and the last, where do we see ourselves?
  • Who are the “first” today who will be “last” in the kingdom of God?
  • Who are those entrusted with stewardship of the kingdom of God today who may lose it so that it might be given to "a people who produce it’s fruit”? (As a pastor I take particular interest in this question.)

Let us be humble in our judgment, discerning in our own self-assessment, and ceaseless in our prayer.

There’s so much more to say on this topic … but for now, let’s turn to Saint Paul, who in his letter to the Romans asks, “Has God rejected his people? By no means!” (Romans 11:1). God’s promise to Israel is unchanging. God’s love for the Jewish people endures forever. Christians and Jews have real religious differences, and that’s fine. Such differences, however, are never a reason for Christians to malign, dehumanize, harm, or justify the mistreatment of our Jewish siblings. Such behavior cannot be supported by Scripture, but instead is condemned by Scripture.

We are called to love, to seek understanding, and to humble ourselves always before our neighbors. Love is always the answer.