Today’s reading: Numbers 4; Mark 12
The parable of the vineyard Jesus tells at the beginning of Mark 12 used to bother me because of how much sense it doesn’t make. Normally, when Jesus tells a parable, the imagery He chooses makes sense in its own right apart from the spiritual truth or lesson attached to it, but this one really doesn’t, and that seems like it undermines His point a bit. Specifically I am talking about when the tenants see the owner’s son coming and say, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” Clearly there is no world in which, if you kill someone’s heir, you become their heir instead.
Now, maybe I was just slow on the uptake and everybody else got the point right away, but this parable being so divorced from reality that it almost seems silly is exactly Jesus’ point.
The vineyard imagery itself that He uses is drawn from the prophets. A number of the prophets talk about Israel as a vineyard, and Isaiah even uses language very similar to what Jesus uses in terms of clearing it out, building a wall, etc. In the prophets, the point is generally that the vineyard isn’t producing the fruit it should be producing; that even though God has prepared Israel to be His people, and protected her from her enemies, she still turns away from Him, chasing after other gods, and generally refusing to walk in His ways.
Here, Jesus doesn’t make it about the vineyard not producing good fruit like the prophets do, but instead He makes it about the tenants that the vineyard is leased out to while the owner is away. If Israel is the vineyard, who are the tenants? The same group we talked about in yesterday’s post, who Jesus was confronting at the end of Mark 11, and to whom, Mark tells us at the beginning of chapter 12, Jesus begins talking to in parables. The tenants are the chief priests, elders, scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, etc. The tenants are the people who have been in charge of Israel, and who should be stewarding that authority faithfully.
Here’s the thing, there was certainly some corruption among this group, and people who were more interested in personal gain than in serving the Lord, but that doesn’t describe all, or even the majority, of this group. I have talked about this in previous posts, but we know from writings we have from the time that the Pharisees thought they were zealously guarding God’s people from slipping back into apostasy and exile. They weren’t making up rules and forcing people to follow them just to make themselves feel good, they were looking at the covenant unfaithfulness in Israel’s past that resulted in the exile and were trying to keep people in line, living faithfully after God’s covenant, so that that wouldn’t happen again. Paul himself is a prime example of this; he was a die-hard Pharisee and believed everything he did was in service to God. They, as a group, were trying to properly protect and cultivate the vineyard, and the Pharisees, in particular, were doing it with an eye toward the coming Messiah, expecting to be the ones to welcome Him in and to be rewarded by Him for their faithful service in preparing His people for His arrival.
The irony then is that this very group of people who have supposedly been preparing and watching for the arrival of the Messiah is the group rejecting Jesus because of His teachings. This is the very group, we saw yesterday, that sees all the evidence that Jesus is the Messiah, but reject that same evidence because Jesus doesn’t match with their own pre-conceptions about who and what the Messiah will be. And rather than responding to the evidence before them and accepting that maybe they have been wrong in their expectations, they ignore the evidence and seek to kill the vineyard owner’s son so that they can maintain their status quo.
The reason Jesus’ parable doesn’t make sense in reality is that what the Jewish leaders are doing equally makes no sense. Obviously killing the heir does not give you inheritance of property, that would be absolutely ludicrous, but it is exactly what the Jewish leaders are doing in rejecting the Jesus as the Messiah. They are rejecting the clear evidence of who Jesus is as though if they don't accept His identity that makes it true, meaning they are operating as though they get to decide who runs the vineyard.
I think Jesus is telling this parable to two groups of people within the group of Jewish leaders. I think there are those among them who like their authority and status and want to be in charge, and so don't really care whether Jesus is the Messiah or not because either way, they don't want to cede their authority, and to this group Jesus' parable is pointing out just how foolish that position is. But then I think there are many others in the group who, like Paul, are rejecting Jesus in the integrity of their hearts, and to this group Jesus' parable is a challenge. They have the evidence in front of them for who Jesus is, but they are rejecting the clear evidence because it doesn't match their expectations. So in giving them such an outlandish scenario of killing the heir to try to claim ownership, I think Jesus is asking this portion of the group, "Who gets to decide who the heir is, the tenant or the owner?" And the clear answer to that question is that God, the owner, gets to decide who the heir is, the tenant obviously has no such authority. By rejecting the evidence for Jesus' identity as the Messiah because He doesn't match their expectations, they are saying that their expectations matter more than the Son's actual identity, and I think this parable is intended to, at the very least, make them recognize what they are doing and force them to question if that that is approach they really want to take, of putting themselves in the owner's position to declare who is or isn't the Messiah.
While it is easy to sit on this side of the cross and look down on the Jewish leaders for their short-sightedness in rejecting Jesus for not being what they wanted Him to be, we are often in the same position today as they were then.
Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one can get to the Father except through Him, but many people reject that way because they think they would rather find their own way to the Father. God is the author and designer of life - He knows how He made us to function, He knows what we need, He knows our abilities and limitations - but many people, including many Christians, aren't interested in how He says we should be living when it conflicts with how they feel or what they want.
We are fine with the vineyard owner being in charge when He runs things our way, but when how He runs His own vineyard clashes with what we want from Him, we can so easily be ready to kill the heir, as though we have any authority whatsoever to decide how things should be run.
Just like the Jewish leaders Jesus is confronting with this parable in Mark 12, we have to decide who actually has the authority to decide what is true and how we should live, God, or us. And even if we, like those Jewish leaders, would say that obviously it is God who has that authority, the bigger question is whether, day to day, we live like we believe that is true.
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