Take a few deep breaths to center your heart and your mind as you prepare to meet with God.

Meditation on God

Mark 12:10 says, “The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.” Jesus is the perfect son of God, and was always perfectly doing the will of God by forging a path for us to come back into a right relationship with Him, but when He was here on Earth, people like us treated Him very badly. People can still do that today. Take a moment and ask yourself this question: How are you treating the Son of God? How are you treating the servants of God?

Teaching

Then Jesus began teaching them with stories: “A man planted a vineyard. He built a wall around it, dug a pit for pressing out the grape juice, and built a lookout tower. Then he leased the vineyard to tenant farmers and moved to another country. At the time of the grape harvest, he sent one of his servants to collect his share of the crop. But the farmers grabbed the servant, beat him up, and sent him back empty-handed. The owner then sent another servant, but they insulted him and beat him over the head. The next servant he sent was killed. Others he sent were either beaten or killed, until there was only one left—his son whom he loved dearly. The owner finally sent him, thinking, ‘Surely they will respect my son.’ “But the tenant farmers said to one another, ‘Here comes the heir to this estate. Let’s kill him and get the estate for ourselves!’ So they grabbed him and murdered him and threw his body out of the vineyard. “What do you suppose the owner of the vineyard will do?” Jesus asked. “I’ll tell you—he will come and kill those farmers and lease the vineyard to others. Didn’t you ever read this in the Scriptures?‘The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is wonderful to see.’” The religious leaders wanted to arrest Jesus because they realized he was telling the story against them—they were the wicked farmers. But they were afraid of the crowd, so they left him and went away. (Mark 12:1-12)

Here in Chapter 12, we see something unusual – even shocking. Jesus is speaking again to the chief priest, teachers of the law, and the elders. In other words, to the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. And Jesus does so in a parable. But this is not a normal parable. We learned in Chapter 4 of Mark’s Gospel the purpose of a normal parable. There, Jesus tells disciples that to those on the outside – like the religious elite, everything is said in parables so that “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.”

In other words, Jesus normally uses parables to both reveal and conceal the truths of God. Jesus’ parables reveal God’s truth to his disciples and to His true followers, yet those same parables conceal the truth from those outside the kingdom.

Here, however, Jesus uses a different kind of parable. This is one that those outside the kingdom – i.e., the religious leaders and elites – will clearly understand. This is a parable where the meaning of the parable is anything but hidden. Rather, the parable’s meaning hits the religious leaders right between the eyes, and in the most unflattering of ways.

In this parable, Jesus says to the leaders: “let me tell you a story.” And that story is a tale of almost unbelievable evil. It’s a story where a good and generous owner of a vineyard sees his own servants, and ultimately his son, beaten and killed by his evil tenants. And these tenants are the very people to whom the owner has entrusted the vineyard that the owner has worked so hard to plant and establish.

The story reminds me of the time when Nathan the prophet confronted King David with the story after David had committed sin with Bathsheba. There, after telling David about an evil rich man who takes advantage of his poor neighbor, and after David becomes upset and pronounces judgment on the evil rich man, Nathan then points his finger at David and says: “You are the man.” You, David, are the problem, not the solution. 

In the same way, in this parable, Jesus tells the religious leaders of his day that “they are the man” – that they are the evil tenants that are in rebellion against the owner of the vineyard. They are the problem, not the solution.

What is so tempting about this story is to consign it as just applying to the religious leaders of Jesus’ times. To just sit back, look down our noses at the chief priest and religious leaders, and be satisfied that Jesus has again put them in their place. However, before we become too comfortable with this story, let me ask you this question: are you the man? Or are you the woman? Are you a person who treats with contempt God’s servants, or even the very son of God? Examine your actions and how you treated others, both in the church and outside it. Are your actions those that honor God, the owner of not only the vineyard, but of your life also?

Examination

No matter how good or bad we think we normally act in our lives, all of us struggle with taking credit for the good and honorable things in our lives and forgetting that everything we have belongs to God. If we were the owners of our own property and lives, our actions would make sense, but we forget that all of our possessions and relationships are on loan to us as God’s tenant farmers. Take a moment and think about how you’ve interacted last week with God’s servants and with the Son of God.

Memory Verse

As you go through your day today, think of ways that you can be a faithful tenant in God’s vineyard, and take to heart the words of Isaiah 5,

“The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the garden of His delight.” (Isaiah 5:7)