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In Christ, Mark
In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy
word.
“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
moved to another place. 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 cornerstone; 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. Anyone
who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone 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 ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks
be to God.
It was Tuesday of the last
week of Jesus’ ministry. He had already caused quite a commotion, first
arriving to the fanfare reserved for royalty on Sunday and then driving out the
money changers and merchants in the Court of the Gentiles the following day.
It was the latter event that
drew the attention of the religious leaders of the day. And so as Jesus came to
the temple courts to teach on Tuesday, He found Himself not just in the company
of people in Jerusalem who had come to hear what He had to say but also the
chief priests, elders, and Pharisees who challenged Jesus about His authority
to no avail before receiving two parables from Jesus, the second of which we
find in today’s scripture passage. Look again at those words here:
“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 moved to another place. 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 cornerstone; 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. Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to
pieces; anyone 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
Now, before we go any further
with this illustration used by Jesus, we need to connect people and objects in
the parable to their intended meaning. These included:
The landowner = God
The vineyard = Israel
The fence and watchtower =
represented God’s protection for His nation and its people
The winepress = God’s
expectation of His people to bear fruit
Tenant farmers = The Jewish
religious leaders
The servants = The prophets
sent by God to His people
The son = Jesus
Other tenants = The Gentiles
So given this, let’s insert
these intended meanings into the parable. Once we do, it would now read like
this:
God planted the Israelites into the land He promised. He
placed His protection on His people and expected them to bear fruit within the
land He provided. He turned over some of the control of the land to Jewish
religious leaders and expected them to take care of His land with the
expectation that they would bear fruit for Him. And when the time came for God
to receive the fruits of the Jewish Religious leaders’ labors, He sent His
prophets to the them to collect.
The Jewish religious leaders seized the prophets, beating
one, killing another, and stoning a third. God then sent more prophets the second
time and the same fate fell upon them. Unwilling to give up, God then sent His
Son Jesus believing that at least the Jewish religious leaders would respect
and spare Him.
But that didn’t happen because when the Jewish religious
leaders saw Jesus, they first conspired to kill Him before murdered Him with
the hope of stealing His inheritance.
Well, not yet seeing that Jesus was really talking about
them, we find the Jewish religious leaders believing that the tenants deserved
to be destroyed and the land given to others who would bear fruit for the
landowner and have it ready to present at harvest time.
In other words, they had proclaimed the sentence they
deserved to receive.
Perhaps if they had only remembered the scriptures as
they were supposed to, none of this would have had to happen. For we find Jesus
reminding the Jewish religious leaders that God promised to send His Son as the
“stone” that they (the builders) had rejected, the stone that would “become the
cornerstone” or the main stone upon which any Christian would build the
foundation of their faith.
Because the Jewish religious authorities had chosen to
not respect and revere Jesus as the Son of God who had been given great
authority from God the Father, God removed His kingdom from them with the
express intent of giving it to other who would produce fruit, those others
being the Gentiles.
Well, the scriptures tell us that all of a sudden, the “chief
priests and the Pharisees” had an epiphany and knew that Jesus was “talking
about them”. In other words, at that moment, they realized that they were the
wretched, that they had just proclaimed their own death sentence through their
reaction to the parable. It was truly a self fulfilling prophecy in every way.
So what did the chief priests and Pharisees do?
After all, they were at a critical moment, one where they
could choose one of two responses, a moment that was a matter of life or death
for them.
On one hand, they could have repented and submitted to
Jesus’ authority, realizing who He truly was through the eyes of the parable: the
very Son of God, the One in line to be God’s heir and the recipient of His
inheritance.
They could have done this but they didn’t. Instead, they
started to look for a way to have Jesus arrested with the intent of murdering
Him. In other words, they were who Jesus said they were. They were just as
wretched and wicked as the tenants within Jesus’ parable.
And as we will soon see, they accomplished what they
chose to do, arresting Jesus with the help of a betrayer (Judas who we’ll look
at tomorrow) and then murdering Him, facilitating an outcome that they could
never have dreamed of, an outcome that will fulfill the promise of Jesus to
give the Gentiles the same right and access to the kingdom of God as everyone
else, an outcome that ushered in the opportunity for salvation for all mankind.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
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