In the Gospel for this Sunday, Jesus says to the Pharisees: “Therefore I say to you, the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation/people (ἔθνος – ethnos) producing the fruits of it.” (Mt 21:43) – the puzzling purpose of this prophecy is analyzed in a commentary for Sunday, October 8 for the Heschel Center of the Catholic University of Lublin by Prof. Serge Ruzer, a lecturer at the Faculty of Comparative Religious Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a researcher at the Center for Christian Studies at the same university.
Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees is the context of the parable of the bad farmers we read in the Church today. “The object of Jesus’ criticism is the priestly elite who are supposed to be the guardians of the Temple and the symbol of God’s kingdom on earth, who are supposed to lead people to holiness, an elite that has betrayed this important calling,” Razer explains.
Prof. Ruzer emphasizes that “dissatisfaction with the priestly class was common in Jewish society at that time.” According to Ruzer, it is not surprising that “the crowd cheered for Jesus who exposed the wicked leaders. “Matthew also claims further on – again nothing like this in Mark and Luke – that the crowd ‘held him (Jesus) to be a prophet’ “(Matthew 21:46).
As the Hebrew University lecturer notes, Matthew included another addition to his Gospel. For we read: “Therefore I say to you, the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation/people (ἔθνος – ethnos) producing the fruits of it.” (Mt 21:43). One wonders who would be the “people” who would replace the chosen people, or rather, in a narrower sense, the corrupt temple elite.
Some Bible interpretations say that it is a belief in the final conversion of Israel, not its replacement by another “chosen people.” However, when biblical prophecy describes the participation of the Gentiles in redemption (cf. Is 2), they use the term “nations” in the plural rather than “nation” in the singular. “We should, therefore, stick to the understanding Matthew’s addition also addressed the conflict with the religious elite, not with the ‘nation’ as a whole,” Razer points out.
However, there is another meaning of the Greek word “ethnos” – not “nation” but people as “group of people” or “caste.” In other words, “a new cadre of kingdom keepers that would replace the Temple establishment. Later in the pericope, Matthew mentions the Pharisees and priests,” Ruzer writes.
In the context of Jesus’ words, Prof. Ruzer mentions the Qumranites. “But then I thought about the group behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumranites, who viewed the Jerusalem priests as corrupt desecrators of God’s house and mightily disliked Pharisees too,” writes the scholar. The Qumranites referred to themselves as the true Jewish nation while at the same time stigmatizing the Sadducees (i.e., priestly families) and Pharisees as belonging to some marginal families. “It is an interesting nation-within-the-nation pattern of religious thought,” sums up the Bible lecturer.
