Landowners and tenants in Batmania

Jesus said to his audience,

'Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.
'The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all, he sent his son to them. 'They will respect my son,' he said.
'But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, "This is the heir. Come, let's kill him and take his inheritance." So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
'Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?'
'He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,' they replied, 'and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.'
Jesus said to them, 'Have you never read in the Scriptures:

"The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes"'?

'Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.'
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus' parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.
(Matthew 21:33-46)

(This story is in Luke and Mark's gospels as well.)

Normally when this story is explained, it's said that the landowner is God, the rebellious tenants are the Jewish people, and the people who get to take over the Jews' old jobs are the Christians. (There's a more indepth explanation of this interpretation here.)

One thing they do at Urban Seed is take groups on walks around the city to look at different social issues, and to compare stuff in the city with stuff in the scriptures. Last Monday, Marcus took us on one of these walks.

One of the places we went to was the statue of John Batman. John Batman claimed to be the founder of Melbourne (although he wanted it to be called Batmania). Batmania claimed to have made an agreement with the Wurundjeri people, to rent their land from them. Although he didn't agree to pay them very much, the government refused to recognise this agreement, because the colony had been founded on the premise that the whole continent was uninhabited. So John Pascoe Fawkner was recognised as the official founder of Melbourne, and there is a statue of him just near Batman's.

Marcus reckoned there was something similar going on in Jesus' story. He reckoned the landowner in the story was probably a real landowner, not a symbolic one. Apparently, the Pharisees and chief priests owned a lot of land. They used to rent their land out to the people who lived and worked on on it. However, according to Jewish law (Leviticus 25), all land was supposed to be redistributed to its traditional owners every Jubilee (fifty years). But as far as we know this law was never followed.

However, Jesus doesn't actaully say who symbolises who in the story.

In this article (title's way to long), Herman C. Waetjen presents another idea about what Jesus was trying to do. He notices that Jesus starts off the story a lot like Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard:

My loved one had a vineyard
on a fertile hillside.
He dug it up and cleared it of stones
and planted it with the choicest vines.
He built a watchtower in it
and cut out a winepress as well.
(Isaiah 5:1-2)

It's tradionally understood that this piece of scripture is talking about God. Waetjen reckons that Jesus started it off like that to trick the chief priests and Pharisees. If the Pharisees interpreted the landowner as being God, then that would make them the rebellious tenants. So perhaps Jesus was trying to trick them into looking at the situation from the point of view of the people they were oppressing?

What do you reckon?