GOD IS THE OWNER OF THE LAND
Matthew 20:1 “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard."
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According to the ancient tradition the text you can read almost anywhere either in the Holy scriptures or in the commentaries or any poems or in ancient epics or even philosophical works it always has different layers of meaning poems.
There is the literal meaning for sure, though many times the text itself is a metaphor or an illusion or a referral to something else then the literal meaning. Sometimes the mere sound of the words, the harmony or the disharmony within the sound, the sequence, the position of the words in a sentence, all can carry a tint or a twist in the meaning, and everything combined of these can color the images in the mind.
Also a text can be originally a coded message intended to be deliberately ambiguous waiting to be the deciphered by the recipients, though it is sometimes almost impossible without having the decoding key, especially if the message or bundles of messages are thousands of years old.
For a long time it was an unsolvable puzzle as scholars, researchers, adventurers gazed at the strange shapes of the Mesopotamian cuneiform carvings or at the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
They were indeed desperately unsolvable puzzles, so there needed to come a little luck to decipher them. The miracle came around not once but twice to solve both cases.
For the Sumerian scripts they found trilingual texts in the ancient city of Persepolis.
Cuneiform scripts were / are wedge-shaped impressions forming compound signs, and were the earliest known writing system on Earth. It was invented in the Sumerian Mesopotamia, which is the modern day Iraq. It survived till the second century after Jesus as a living writing system, and was used by all the big empires in the East including old Persia.
The decipherment of this writing system and the ancient languages like the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian helped Bible scholars to understand that ancient Mesopotamian stories like the Creation, the Flood, the Tower of Bible found their way into the very Bible. No wonder, that these texts influenced the writers of the Bible from the same geopolitical and religious arena.
The other very important scenery was Egypt. Its hieroglyphs had at least 1000 distinctive characters, varying of pictograms, syllable signs and simplified characters. Knowledge of how to read the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period. This changed with the discovery of the so called Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's French troops in 1799.
The Rosetta stone had a hieroglyphic text and a parallel Greek translation, and this was a break through to decipher the hieroglyphs and the ancient Egyptian language. For Bible scholars and researchers and even for theologians this discovery came also with the understanding, that also Egyptian stories found their ways into the very Bible, like the seven years of abundance and the seven years of famine. Except that it had happened at least a thousand years earlier than approximated time-frame of Joseph, and the Vizier, PM, of the Pharaoh was the infamous Imhotep.
Also a similar story of the Ten Plagues is described more or less in the Ipuwer Papyrus hailed from the the 19th century BCE. An other story like this, but possibly about Moses can be found the Egyptian Tale of the two brothers, and it supposedly makes Moses, called Amenmesse in the Egyptian tale, a rival Pharaoh to hiss step brother Seti I, where Moses or Amenmesse led a civil war in Egypt, helped by his Western Asian allies settled in the Nile Delta. Even the Ten Commandments has its Egyptian source document, called the 42 confessions, as part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The Bible authors took these stories and reshaped them to create a message about God, who is the deliverer and liberator of the people, and the only king over life and death, who deposes earthly kings at will.
Arriving at the New Testament story about the landowner in Israel, we can immediately sense it, that it is a figurative tale, it never happened in this reality, however the story is more than alive in the spiritual realm.
In this very story we can catch red handed the change of the patterns and the change in paradigm and the narratives. In the Egyptian story of Imhotep, he used the famine and the hunger of the people to push forced expropriations and foreclosures for the Pharaoh, in order that the Pharaoh become the mightiest or even the sole landowner in Egypt.
In this New Testament wisdom literature story, it must be obvious from the context that the landowner is God, when he hired the workers, into his vineyard, as the text begins with the familiar introduction, that “For the kingdom of heaven is like”.
It is a metaphor with a deep meaning. The story could have said that one of the landowners hired workers. However, Jesus speaks about only one landowner, the King of the Kingdom of Heaven, where the working day is either a lifespan of a person or the entire time of the history on Earth or in the Universe. This makes the story eschatological, talking about the end times, where the end of the day is the judgment day.
We used to pay attention to the workers, and they different entries into the workforce, amazed by the fact that God pays equally all workers regardless of the time of their commencement of repenting and making amendments. The reward is the equal admission into Heaven, when everything ends here on Earth.
Nonetheless, we should pay attention or even pay tribute to it, that God is the sole owner of the land. Everybody else is a tenant on God’s Land. It is especially clear, when our time comes, and we have to leave the Earth behind for the spiritual realm, that we do not have a permanent abode here, not even mentioning of ownership of any kind.
In order to get things in order, we must acknowledge the sole Kingship of God. It is forbidden in the Bible for Israel to have any kings over them, but God. They did not listen, they forced prophet Samuel at that time to select a King from among them, so he anointed first Saul, then David to be King, but the institution of the kingship did not end well, and in Jerusalem finally fell into the hands of the child killer Herod. If we wish something better, than the rule of consecutive Herods, then we must also acknowledge the sole ownership of God over Heaven and Earth, as God is the Master of the Universe, and as its Creator God owns everything in it.
We breathe, because God gave us lungs and air, we walk, because God gave us legs and strength. We work, because God gave us arms and motivation. We love, because God gave us loved ones and heart, we contemplate and pray because God gave us awe and Spirit, and we are alive, because God gave us soul and life. We do not own anything, everything we have is received, and we live on borrowed time.
May the Lord’s name be praised by our thoughts, speeches and mostly by our deeds, according to the will of God, by the grace of Jesus the Christ, by the Holy Spirit, AMEN
