Sermon from October 28, 2001
Donald Gray Barnhouse, senior pastor for many years at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, told the story of a conversation between the King of Prussia and his chaplain about Holy Scripture. The king is supposed to have said to his chaplain, "How can I know that the Bible is the word of God?"

The chaplain replied, "Your majesty, I can answer that in one word."

"And what," asked the king, "is that one word?"

"Israel, your majesty," said the chaplain. "Israel vindicates the Bible as the word of God."

The problem with anecdotes is that they travel with light intellectual baggage. The chaplain did not have to explain himself in the story, although the king my have pressed him for details. Israel surely stands as a kind of sign or symbol of something transcendent in the long story of mankind. A decisive moment in its history took place when the greatest Jew of them all appeared in Jewish life. The climax of that appearance took place in Jerusalem during Passover when Pontius Pilate was Prefect of Judea. Mark 12:1-11 takes us again to that climactic week.

Nearly all the action in Mark 11-12 takes place in the Jerusalem temple. Nearly all of it raises the stakes between Jesus and official Judaism very high. Jesus behaves with the conviction that His every action comes stamped with Heaven's seal of approval. That conviction and the fact that He acts publicly in the temple lends gravity to every word He speaks. Nothing carries quite so much weight as the parable He tells to the chief priests, teachers of the law and the elders of Israel, who come to take Him to task for cleansing the temple the day before.

Whoever said, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt," never paid attention to this parable. Verse 12 indicates just how much His parable pierced their hearts. Then they looked for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them. Let's read the parable together, stopping here and there to get our bearings, and then at the end pausing to reflect on the enormity of what Jesus was saying.

Verses 1-2 get us started innocently enough. He then began to speak to them in parables: "A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard."

Look with me for a moment at Psalm 80:8. You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. Jesus is drawing on a time-honored word picture to describe the nation Israel. It is God's vineyard. Verse 16 of Psalm 80 goes on to say, Your vine is cut down, it is burned with fire; at your rebuke your people perish. Obviously, the word picture could be applied in sad ways as well as happy ways.

The most masterful use of this word picture in the Old Testament appears in Isaiah 5. Listen to the first two verses. I will sing for the one I love a song about his 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. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes.

Again, Jesus consciously chooses to stand in the tradition of the great prophet Isaiah. He models His devastating parable on Isaiah's own devastating parable. The tension between Jesus and the authorities was a quarrel among Jews, an old quarrel, going back hundreds of years to the likes of Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos. In Jesus, who was a prophet and more than a prophet, the quarrel had reached a particularly decisive stage, and He expressed the decisive moment in the time-honored prophetic imagery of a vineyard.

The turning point in Isaiah's parable comes in verse two: Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. The turning point in Jesus parable comes in verses 3-5. But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully. He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed. The point in both parables is that the vineyard Owner did not get any fruit from His vineyard.

Also, the execution of John the Baptist comes to mind, and in the history of Israel there were many other martyrs before him. Verse six is unique, because the one it refers to is unique. "He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, 'They will respect my son.'"

At once, we remember the opening line of the Gospel of Mark: The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God; and the voice at Jesus' baptism: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased;" and even the tormented voice of the Gadarene demoniac: "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?" and the voice on the Mount of Transfiguration: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" and the voice of the centurion at the crucifixion: "Surely this man was the Son of God!" We need not doubt that Jesus is telling a story not only about Israel but also about Himself as the one who bears in Himself the meaning of Israel for the world.

The vineyard owner's confidence is ill-founded, say verses 7-8. "But the tenants said to one another, 'This is the heir. Come, let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.' So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard." Jesus' threefold prediction of coming rejection, suffering and death rush back to mind. It is as if these verses and this parable capture the driving force of the Gospel of Mark up to this point.

There are consequences in both Isaiah's and Jesus' parables. Isaiah's parable had put it this way: "Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there. I will commmand the clouds not to rain on it," (Isa. 5:3-6)

Jesus will say something very much like this in chapter 13. In His parable He focuses on what will happen to those who kill the vineyard Owner's son. Verse nine: "What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others."

The parable could have stopped right there, but in verses 10-11 Jesus adds a quotation from Psalm 118 that reinforces His point. Haven't you read this scripture:

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

Let's get a grip on the imagery Jesus uses and then see how He uses it. The imagery is taken from a building project that uses stones. The builders have come across a stone, which for some reason they reject and throw away into the junk pile. To everyone's surprise someone else comes along and takes this same stone out of the junk pile and not only uses it in the building but actually gives it a place of honor in that building. What is the point?

It isn't hard to figure out. The stone the builders rejected is another reference to Jesus Himself. He is the son whom the tenants of the vineyard kill, and He is the stone the builders rejected. However, the imagery of the stone suggests that those who wish to get rid of Jesus may think they succeed, but He will in fact come back not only to haunt them but also to hold a place of honor.

Mark has made it clear in a number of ways that Jesus came to teach Israel a new way of being Israel. A number of powerful people found His offer to be unpalatable. The parable seems to say that the new is coming, and doing the worst to Jesus will not prevent it from coming, nor will it prevent Jesus from holding the place of honor in that new way of being Israel.

If it takes us a few minutes to figure out what Jesus was saying in His parable, it did not take His accusers long at all. Verse 12 expresses their reaction and the bind they find themselves in. Then they looked for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them. But they were afraid of the crowd; so they left him and went away. They did not go away to stay away. They went away and licked their wounds and made their plans to silence this Troublemaker once and fo all, as we shall see next week.

For the next few minutes I want to reflect with you on the meaning of this parable. It is a major factor in the Christian understanding of Judaism, and in the often poisoned atmosphere of Jewish and Christian relations, we gentile Christians would do well to think long and hard about the meaning of this parable.

First, as I have said several times, we must read the story of Jesus first as a Jewish story. The conflict between Jesus and Jewish authorities was a quarrel about one of the oldest items on the Jewish agenda, namely, what does it mean to be a Jew? In the New Testament period that question defined the debate between Church and Synagogue. Jews today still debate that question.

The terrible way in which Christians came to treat Jews often left the impression that Jesus Himself had rejected Judaism lock, stock and barrel. The Gospel of Mark corrects that impression. Jesus worships routinely in the synagogue. He encourages people to make use of the system of sacrifices (Mark 1:43-44). He cherishes and uses the Torah; His mind is permeated by it, and He never teaches contrary to it. All His followers are Jews, and by all accounts His following among the common people was extensive and persistent. He seldom leaves Israel. He thinks of Himself as a prophet, like of the Jewish prophets of old.

When Jesus takes issue with the Judiasm of His day, He does so almost invariably in the spirit and with the language of the greatest of the Jewish prophets, Isaiah. In fact, you can make a good case that Jesus was just doing in His day what Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and others were doing in their day. Like them, He was calling His people, the covenant people of God, back to their true calling. Like them, He was often misunderstood, mistreated and even threatened with death.

We Christians, especially we gentile Christians need to reread the story of Jesus with great sympathy for the terrible debate that raged between Jesus and His critics over the question of what it means to be a Jew. Jewish leadership in Jesus' day was under tremendous pressure from Roman occupation forces on one hand, who could be ruthless in suppressing Jewish rebellion and on the other hand from protest groups within Judaism, who saw present Jewish leadership as corrupt and ineffective in dealing with the blasphemous pagans who lived in the Fortress of Antonio adjacent to the temple itself.

In this volatile atmosphere came Jesus of Nazareth preaching a message that signaled either another political plot to overthrow the Romans or else a religious movement of such proportions that the Romans might be provoked to show their might against the temple and the integrity of Israel's leadership, such as it was.

And Jesus did not relent in pursuing His agenda. Israel was to learn a new way of being Israel. He apparently believed it could be done without disastrous Roman intervention. The lines were drawn deeper and deeper in the temple confrontations.

That brings me to a second reflection on the parable of Mark 12. In this parable Jesus interprets the meaning of the history of Israel. That breathtaking perspective is what makes Jesus a person to be recokened with, not only by every generation of Jews but also by any nation that gives Him a moment's serious thought.

In His parable Jesus, following Isaiah, places Israel in a position of highest privilege. The Owner of the vineyard clearly refers to God, and the vineyard clearly refers to Israel and places Israel in a unique relationship with God that many failures do not sever. Even the strong words of Isaiah for his generation and their fulfillment did not sever that relationship.

However, in the parable Jesus, following no one else, places the Israel of His generation in a position of decisive choice. It is no longer a servant of the vineyard Owner that the tenants refuse, mistreat or kill; it is the Owner's Son. The quotation about the stone the builders rejected communicates Jesus' conviction that the nation's failure at that critical juncture in its life would have far-reaching consequences for the nation and would also see a restoration of the Owner's Son to a place of prominence.

The parable, understood this way, serves as an invitation to the Israel of the chief priests, teachers of the law and elders who had come to accuse Him. It serves as an invitation to receive Jesus into their counsels and heed His message. The parable was, as they said, against them only if they persisted in rejecting Jesus.

The Church, authorized by Jesus, stands today in the same position with regards to the nations of the earth. We offer the nations of the earth an invitation to receive Jesus into their counsels and heed His message. Few can say when any nation has reached a critical juncture in its life similar to that of Israel at Passover in the imperial reign of Caesar Tiberius. We can say that in the present world crisis, the Lord of the nations is once again on the move. He is questioning the Islamic nations of the Middle East and Europe and the nations of Western Europe and North America. How we answer Him will shape our nations for generations to come. We the Church must answer those questions by turning from triviality and self-indulgence and devoting ourselves to Christ.

Let us not treat the Son lightly, for He represents the Father. Let us not treat the Church, His body, lightly, for it represents the Son until He appears once again to bring about the times of refreshing that will renew the earth. Let us not treat Israel lightly, for it still has a divinely appointed role to play in the drama to come.