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There are Gospel passages that become easier after somebody explains them. Matthew 21.33–43 is not one of them.
Jesus tells the familiar parable of the tenants in the vineyard who kill the landowner’s messengers and finally his son too. Jesus then asks what the landowner will do. His hearers supply the obvious answer: he will destroy those tenants and lease the vineyard to others who will give him the produce at harvest time.
Then comes the sentence that causes the trouble: “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” The grammar is not particularly difficult. The theology is.
The vineyard. Jesus has not invented the image of the vineyard. His hearers know exactly where it comes from. Isaiah 5 describes Israel as God’s vineyard without any ambiguity: “the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel.”
Matthew deliberately reproduces the imagery. But there is an important difference. In Isaiah, judgment falls upon the vineyard itself. In Jesus’ parable, the vineyard remains. What changes are the tenants. The owner is still the owner. The vineyard is still precious. But those charged with its care have refused to give the owner his fruit and have assaulted his messengers.
In Matthew’s narrative, the servants naturally evoke the prophets; the son represents Jesus; and the tenants refer immediately to the religious authorities who are confronting him in Jerusalem. This is not an interpretation imposed upon the story—Matthew tells us only a few verses later that “the chief priests and the Pharisees” understood that Jesus was speaking about them. That qualification matters. Jesus is not a Gentile denouncing an alien race. He is a Jew speaking within Israel, using Israel’s prophets, addressing Israel’s leaders, and employing a thoroughly Hebrew tradition of prophetic accusation.1
But that observation cannot be used to make verse 43 disappear. Something is taken away. Something is given. And Christians have traditionally understood that transfer in ecclesial terms.
Words nobody likes anymore. The theological term is Supersessionism. The less elegant expression is Replacement Theology. At its simplest, it means that because Israel rejected the Messiah, the privileges and mission associated with Israel pass to the Church, which becomes the people of the new covenant in Christ. The promises of Scripture are therefore not abolished but reach their fulfillment in Christ and in the people gathered around Him.
There are brutal versions of that theology. There are also sophisticated versions. And we should stop pretending they are the same thing.
To say that the Church believes herself to be the messianic people constituted in Christ is not the same thing as saying that God hates Jews, that Jews are racially cursed, or that Christians are entitled to persecute them.
Saint Paul makes Gentile arrogance impossible. In Romans 11, Gentile Christians are branches grafted into Israel’s olive tree. “It is not you that support the root,” he warns them, “but the root that supports you.”
That warning eventually became particularly important after centuries of Christian-Jewish hostility and, above all, after the Holocaust. The Second Vatican Council consequently declared in Nostra Aetate that Jews must not be represented “as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.” The Council nevertheless says in the very same paragraph that the Church is “the new people of God.” Those two statements are not identical. But neither may Catholics simply delete one of them.2
Why Jews object. The Jewish objection to Replacement Theology is not difficult to understand.
From a Jewish perspective, Christianity appropriates Israel’s Scriptures, Israel’s patriarchs, Israel’s prophets, Israel’s covenant, Israel’s Messiah, and Israel’s language of election—and then declares that Judaism itself has misunderstood the conclusion.
Genuine Jewish-Christian dialogue cannot survive on vague appeals to shared values if the central disagreement is never allowed to be stated plainly. And Jewish theology cannot simply accept the Christian solution.3
If Jesus is the Messiah, Son of God, and definitive fulfillment of the covenant, then Judaism’s rejection of those claims becomes theologically consequential for Christianity. If Jesus is not those things, then Christianity’s entire rereading of Israel’s Scriptures becomes unacceptable to Judaism.
There is no clever interfaith vocabulary that makes this contradiction disappear.
Someone is wrong. In contemporary religious dialogue, saying plainly that the Jews are wrong—or that the Christians are wrong—can sound politically incorrect. It is nevertheless logically unavoidable.
What changed after Auschwitz. This is where twentieth- and twenty-first-century exegesis becomes particularly interesting. After the Holocaust, Christian scholars became intensely conscious of how anti-Jewish readings of Scripture had functioned historically. The change was not imaginary. After the Holocaust, Christian scholars became intensely conscious of how anti-Jewish readings of Scripture had functioned historically. The change was not imaginary. The shock of the Shoah placed the entire question of Christian interpretation of Israel’s Scriptures—and of the New Testament’s treatment of Jews—in a new light.4
Consequently, commentators began paying much closer attention to context. Jesus was Jewish.
His first followers were Jewish. His enemies in these passages were particular Jewish authorities, not every Jewish person living then and certainly not every Jew who would ever live. That was a necessary correction.
But corrections can become overcorrections. There is now an understandable anxiety among Christian scholars and preachers that anything resembling Supersessionism will immediately be branded anti-Semitic. And once that anxiety enters the room, Matthew 21.43 becomes troublesome. So we are sometimes told that no real transfer takes place. Only leadership changes.
Or the “nation” is merely a renewed Israel. Or the verse is almost entirely about ethical fruitfulness and scarcely at all about ecclesiology. There are exegetical arguments for each of those positions.
But there is also an uncomfortable possibility: sometimes interpreters are trying very hard to prevent Matthew from saying something they fear Christians are no longer permitted to say.
The text stubbornly remains: “taken away from you” and “given to another people.”
Fruitfulness rather than ethnicity is decisive: possession of religious privilege does not exempt anyone from judgment.5 At the same time, Matthew still presents a genuine transfer of responsibility to the community that responds faithfully to Jesus.6
Historical sensitivity is necessary. But historical sensitivity is not a license to rewrite the Gospel.
And then there are the Fathers. Modern Christians sometimes talk as though nobody understood the Patristic passages properly until the twentieth century. That should make us nervous.
Saint Irenaeus understands the Church gathered from the nations as receiving and bearing the fruit of God’s covenantal promises in Christ.7 Saint John Chrysostom reads the parable without the hesitation of a modern ecumenical conference. He sees in it the sending of the prophets, the killing of the Son, judgment upon unbelief, and “the calling of the Gentiles.”8 Elsewhere, he says explicitly that the vineyard is given away after the rejection of the Son.9 Saint Augustine repeatedly describes Christians from Israel and the Gentiles as forming the one people gathered into Christ.10
Now, Catholics do not believe that every sentence written by every Father is infallible. The Fathers disagree. They sometimes exaggerate. Some of their rhetoric about Jews is harsh enough that I would not reproduce it from a pulpit today.
But there is another extreme that is equally unserious: treating the Fathers as embarrassing relatives whose interpretation may simply be discarded whenever modern sensibilities change. When a reading arises very early, appears broadly throughout Christian tradition, corresponds naturally to the text, and becomes woven into the Church’s understanding of herself, it deserves more than: Well, we know better now. The Fathers may require qualification. But they do not require cancellation.
There is another side to this history. This is where Christian discussion of Jewish-Christian relations can become strangely one-sided. Christians are frequently reminded—and rightly so—of Christian contempt for Judaism. But we should also be honest enough to acknowledge that contempt did not travel in only one direction.
Jewish polemical literature includes some extraordinarily hostile portrayals of Jesus and Christianity. Rabbinic traditions include sharp polemics against Jesus: they ridicule Him, His mother, His birth, reject His claim to be Messiah, present His execution as deserved, mock Christian belief in His resurrection, and even describe His punishment after death. These traditions function as a deliberate and sophisticated Jewish counter-narrative to Christianity.11
Medieval Jewish polemic likewise developed increasingly sophisticated attacks upon central Christian doctrines. Scholars of Jewish-Christian relations openly document those disputes; they are not inventions of modern Christian grievance.12
There is nothing shocking about acknowledging this. Religions that make contradictory claims about the same God, the same Scriptures, the same Messiah, and the same history are going to criticize one another.
Judaism says Christianity is wrong about Jesus. Christianity says Judaism is wrong about Jesus. That is not anti-Semitism. It is religious disagreement. And genuine Jewish-Christian dialogue becomes intellectually dishonest if Christians are expected to soften Christian claims while Jewish rejection of those claims is simply regarded as authentic Jewish self-expression.
The standard has to work both ways. A Jew may tell me that Jesus is not the Messiah. I may tell him that Jesus is. Neither statement is hatred. Both are theology.
Christians do not need permission to tell the Christian story. This is perhaps the point Christians have become most nervous about saying: we do not need another religion’s permission to believe what Christianity teaches about that religion’s Scriptures.
Christians believe that Abraham belongs to our history. We believe Isaiah speaks ultimately toward Christ. We believe Jeremiah’s promised new covenant is fulfilled in him. We believe Israel’s Messiah has come. We believe the crucified Convict rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone. And we believe that the Church, composed from Israel and the Gentiles, belongs to the fulfillment of that story.
Christian interpretation necessarily rereads Israel’s Scriptures in the light of Jesus Christ, and Christians and Jews therefore remain in serious disagreement over their fulfillment. That disagreement, however, is theological and should not by itself be confused with anti-Jewish hatred.13
That distinction matters enormously.
Calling Judaism incomplete from the standpoint of Christian revelation is Christian theology. But calling Jews racially inferior is racial prejudice. Proclaiming Christ as the fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures is Christian theology. But mistreating Jewish people is sin. Saying that Christianity and Judaism cannot both be right about Jesus is elementary logic. None of those propositions requires hatred. We should stop pretending otherwise.
But now the parable turns around. There is, however, a temptation hiding inside everything I have just written. It is the temptation to finish this essay feeling rather pleased with ourselves.
We defended the Fathers. We defended Christian identity. We refused to be bullied out of reading Matthew as Christians. Very good.
However, Jesus asks now for the fruit. That is where the parable becomes dangerous again. The new tenants are not chosen because Gentiles are morally superior to Jews. They are entrusted with the vineyard because the owner expects produce.
That means Matthew 21 cannot become a Christian victory speech. The moment we use the parable only to explain why somebody else lost the vineyard, we begin behaving remarkably like tenants who have forgotten who owns it.
We have bishops. We have apostolic succession. We have valid sacraments. We have councils, catechisms, synods, seminaries, canon law, religious orders, universities, basilicas, relics, vestments, titles and two thousand years of tradition. Fine.
But where is the fruit?
Where is repentance? Where is holiness? Where is mercy? Where is truth when truth becomes socially expensive? Where is courage when conviction is immediately described as offensive? And where is charity when courage becomes an excuse for cruelty? Those questions apply to us.
And also to “them.” The vineyard was never Israel’s private possession. It is not ours either. It belongs to God.
So perhaps the most Christian reading of Matthew 21.33–43 is neither to deny the transfer nor to boast about it. The Church may indeed be the tenant now. That should frighten us more than flatter us.
Because the Landowner still comes for the harvest. And He has changed tenants before.
That Again.
The Hebrew word shō’āh [שואה] means “catastrophe,” “devastation,” “ruin,” or “waste.”14 It eventually became one of the names for the destruction of European Jewry under Nazi Germany: the systematic murder of six million Jews, together with the persecution and murder of millions of other victims of the Nazi regime.15 Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann took that single word as the title of his 1985 documentary, and in doing so helped give it a currency far beyond Hebrew-speaking Jewish communities.
Criterion has just released it on Blu-ray for the first time: a four-disc edition built around a 2K restoration, with Lanzmann’s related films and Guillaume Ribot’s new documentary All I Had Was Nothingness. It remains Criterion spine #663—not quite one of the company’s earliest spine numbers, although it has been part of the collection since the 2013 DVD edition.
Lanzmann gives us no dramatizations and, famously, no archival footage. There are survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, trains, fields, forests, railway lines. Places where almost nothing visible remains, while people speak about what happened there. The film lasts 566 minutes because Lanzmann apparently decided that the viewer would not be allowed the usual escape routes of documentary cinema: summary, montage, climax, consolation.16
We have seen a great deal since then. The box set is sitting in front of me as I write this.
Whether I will actually watch it is another matter. I have not seen Shoah in years. I first encountered it when I was much younger, when nine and a half hours of austere documentary cinema did not seem quite as impossible as nine and a half hours seem to me now. At my age, my attention span occasionally regards a forty-minute television episode as a contractual dispute. So perhaps I will watch Shoah again. Perhaps I will not.
But there is another difficulty. I am no longer the innocent, earnest teenager who first watched it.
That will actually matter.
It has become permissible to admit something that once sounded almost indecent: people can become tired of Holocaust representation. Not tired of the historical fact. Not tired in the sense that Auschwitz has somehow ceased to matter.
We’re just tired of the cultural form. There have been Holocaust films, documentaries, museums, novels, memoirs, classroom units, anniversary programs, prestige dramas, speeches, ceremonies, and the inevitable cinematic vocabulary of trains, striped uniforms, barbed wire, violins, children, ashes, and snow.
There is even a scholarly term for the phenomenon: Holocaust fatigue. A culture of memory can become so established that repetition begins to produce disengagement, even though that public memory was painfully difficult to establish in the first place.17 Something similar has happened with films about Black slavery. There comes a point at which some viewers say, perhaps guiltily, perhaps impatiently: I know. I have seen this.
Sometimes that reaction is callous. Sometimes it is simply human. And sometimes it should worry us. Because the sentence I have seen this can quietly become there is nothing more here for me to see. That is precisely where Shoah becomes difficult again.
Lanzmann does not allow us the comfort of thinking we have “seen” the Holocaust at all. There is virtually nothing to see. The event itself is gone. What remains is a barber describing cutting women’s hair before they entered the gas chamber; a railway worker remembering trains; former Nazis speaking with varying degrees of evasion; fields growing where people were murdered. The film asks us to remain before absence.
That was difficult in 1985. It may be more difficult now.
And now there is the State of Israel. No serious person can pretend that someone watching Shoah in 2026 necessarily brings the same political imagination to it that a viewer brought in 1985.
October 7 happened. The war in Gaza happened and continues to shape the moral vocabulary through which millions of people now hear words such as Jewish suffering, victimhood, security, atrocity, collective punishment, anti-Semitism, and genocide.
And, therefore, people will see Shoah carrying arguments that the film itself did not carry. Some will see the murder of European Jewry and think immediately of the necessity of a Jewish state. Others will watch Jewish victims speaking and simultaneously think of Palestinian suffering. Some will resent that juxtaposition. Others will insist upon it. Still others will regard the comparison itself as morally obscene.
That disagreement cannot be settled by Shoah, because Shoah is not a film about the contemporary State of Israel, borders, settlements, Zionism, Gaza, Hamas, or Netanyahu. It is a film about the annihilation of European Jews. Lanzmann himself was passionately attached to modern Israel, but the achievement of Shoah is precisely that it refuses to convert the murdered into an argument with a neat conclusion.18
Perhaps that restraint is something worth recovering. Suffering does not become false because the descendants of the sufferers later acquire power. Nor does earlier suffering confer moral immunity upon anyone forever. Those are different propositions. We should be capable of holding both.
Which brings us back to the vineyard. That is why Shoah belongs, strangely enough, beside Matthew’s parable.
One of the dangers in reading Matthew 21.33–43 is that memory becomes possession. Christians remember the failures and hostility of the Jewish people and conclude that the vineyard now belongs to us. Jews remember Christian persecution and understandably become suspicious when Christians begin speaking about judgment upon Israel.
Everyone arrives carrying history. Then everyone is tempted to use history as evidence that our respective moral positions are permanently secure.
But the vineyard does not work that way. The Landowner does not ask the tenants whether they have suffered. He does not ask whether their enemies behaved worse. He does not ask whether their historical narrative has been properly respected.
He always asks for fruit.
That is what makes Supersessionism dangerous when it becomes triumphalism. It takes a warning addressed to those entrusted with something holy and transforms it into proof that we are the people who finally got everything right. And it is also why Christians cannot be required to abandon the Christian reading of Israel, Christ, and the Church merely because Christian history contains sins against Jews.
History does not require theological amnesia. The difficult work is to remember without weaponizing memory. History requires repentance.
Perhaps that is also what Lanzmann demands of the viewer. I look at those four Blu-ray discs—nine and a half hours before I even reach the supplements—and I am still not certain whether I will put the first one into the player.
Maybe I have already seen Shoah. Or maybe that is exactly the problem.
1. Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, rev. ed., trans. S. H. Hooke (London: SCM Press, 1963), 70–72, 166.
2. Gavin D’Costa, Catholic Doctrines on the Jewish People after Vatican II (Oxford: University Press, 2019), 1–26.
3. David Novak, Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 8–25, 58.
4. John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 174–209, 239–272.
5. Klyne Snodgrass, The Parable of the Wicked Tenants: An Inquiry into Parable Interpretation (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1983), 72–118.
6. David C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 148–149.
7. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), 514–515.
8. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 10, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888), 402–403.
9. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, 403.
10. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 827–828.
11. Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: University Press, 2007), 15–24, 63–104.
12. Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages: With a New Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 45–160.
13. R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 12–18, 109–175.
14. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 996.
15. Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 207–274.
16. Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 63–84.
17. Arlene Stein, Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166–182.
18. Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 411–528.