Mark 12:1-12

The rejection of Jesus' authority in the preceding passage is expressed in this parable. The vineyard motif is an expression from Isaiah, which he used consistently to illustrate Israel's condition. As soon as Jesus started talking “vineyard” the leaders would have thought of Israel. The tenant farmer is a new twist on the old expression.  But the religious elite would have readily identified themselves as those who tended Israel; they would not have missed the point. We need to be conscientious that when we read through Scripture we are aware of what it is saying to us, as clearly as they were aware that Jesus was talking about them.

The tenant farmers rejected the ones sent from the owner just as Israel rejected the prophets. The tenant farmers’ motivations for rejecting the messengers became clear when the owner sends his son. They wanted to possess the vineyard for themselves. The tenant farmers, the religious elite of Jesus' day and today, have a wrong perception to whom the church or Israel or the vineyard belongs. When we fight to possess what is not ours as if it were our own we will gladly reject the real owner.

The guilt of the tenant farmers was most intensely focused in the fact that they had known the son. They didn't kill him in ignorance of who he was. They rejected him and then killed him precisely because they knew he was the son. In the same way the leaders could not claim ignorance about Jesus. The evidence of Jesus’ identity was there before them. Their guilt was not omission but commission; they actively rejected the Son.

The worst thing imaginable to the religious elite was pronounced in their hearing. What the religious elite rejected would become the chief cornerstone of something unexpected, something of which they would have no part: the extension of grace to the Gentiles. For all time there is this principle: God's plan will not be thwarted. When people He calls, be that Israel, a person, a congregation, the church in America or in the west, reject His purposes He will find others through whom His will is accomplished. There is no point in prayers being offered for anyone or group that has rejected the Son, there is no pleading to the Lord for them, except that they repent.