The Swiss theologian Ulrich Luz writes that our understanding of this Sunday’s Gospel—which features the Parable of the Two Sons—is influenced by which son we consider its focus.
In Matthew 21, Jesus is scrutinized by the chief priests and elders, who question his teaching. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they ask him (v. 23). When they cannot come up with an answer, Jesus tells them the story of two sons: the first, who initially refuses to work in his father’s vineyard but then relents, and a second, who promises to work but does not follow through.
The chief priests and elders say that only the first son obeyed his father. Jesus then utters the famous reply: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (v. 31).
What is the lesson here? Is Jesus, through the example of the first son, calling us to turn towards him and away from sin? Or is he rather, by way of the second son, chastising people who say one thing and then do another? “Depending on one’s decision,” writes Luz, “our parable is either an exhortation to repentance or a warning against disobedience.”
When interrogated by Jewish authorities, Christ is teaching in the temple—which is technically controlled by his questioners. Jesus’s divine authority, given to him by the Father, clashes with the temporal authority of his biblical opponents. Furthermore, the chief priests and elders are specifically skeptical of preaching by John the Baptist, whose power they also view critically.
Luz writes that Jesus forces the Jewish leaders to select the more righteous son, implying that there is a right and wrong answer. The first son initially refuses to obey his father, but has a change of heart, while the temple leaders both reject John the Baptist and then also fail to correct their error.
Therefore, Luz notes, Jesus designates his interrogators as “worse than both sons of the parable,” despite their lofty standing in Jerusalem. Greater than the chief priests and elders, then, are the pariahs of Jesus’s time—people on the margins who accepted the words of John the Baptist and embraced Christ. The faithful “go ahead” (προάγω) of those who wield power on earth.
--Ryan Di Corpo
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