From the parable of the wicked tenants:
And the tenants took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another.
Matthew 21: 35
To move from beating to killing shows a clear escalation of violence, but the consummation of this is not murder but and unjust stoning, that is, a murder with legal and religious justifications. It’s sad, horrible, and familiar to envision how the first two envoys that the owner sent met with angry mobs bearing pitchforks, torches and lynch ropes while the third envoy was arrested, given a trial, subjected to a reading of religious texts that justified his execution, etc.
thenyssan said,
May 12, 2012 at 8:46 am
That’s a cool reading that I’d not considered before. I always thought of the stoning as a kind of savage, animalistic attack a la “proto man” in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Your reading is chilling and probably better captures the organized, enlightened way in which man rejects the gospel. It’s something Ivan would say in Brothers Karamazov.
James Chastek said,
May 12, 2012 at 9:27 am
Think of what his hearers would have thought if he said “they beat one, killed another, and a third they fed to lions”. Then everyone would have said “Oh yes, he’s talking about those awful pagans with their inhuman civilization. That is indeed the worst corruption of violence. Thank goodness he’s not talking about us, who know the true God who dwells with us in his temple.” The bad tenants, in other words, know true religion. The Gospels make it clear that his hearers figured this out immediately.
thenyssan said,
May 12, 2012 at 3:25 pm
Yeah, I was thinking about this on my way home from our hike this morning. It’s as if he said “and a third they executed by lethal injection.”
Not only that, the law in question is Divine Positive Law. Man turns the Law into a weapon against the Gospel. The connection to St. Paul (his biography as well as his letters) is striking.