Kingdom Come Week 9; The Wicked Tenants
Luke 20:9-19
Behind me is an impressive model of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day. This is the scene He glimpses when He crests the Mount of Olives and rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. In the center is the Temple. King Herod expanded the Temple and enlarged the platform around it to 37 acres. It’s still the size of the plaza around the Dome of the Rock today.
When the Scriptures speak of Jesus teaching in the Temple during Holy Week they mean here in the open plaza and not in the Temple itself. The Chief priest and leaders of the Temple are angry, nervous and fearful of Jesus. First He drives out the merchants who sell in the stalls around the perimeter. Next He attracts large audiences at the Temple during the crowded volatile week of Passover. To them Jesus is an unknown, unpredictable force who may spark a popular uprising which will bring down the fury of Rome. Even now there are soldiers stationed in the Antonia fortress ready to pounce on the crowds below. If they priests and leaders don’t stop Him the whole place could go up in flames.
So they confront Him. “Tell us by what authority you are doing these things,” they said. “Who gave you this authority?” Luke 20:2. Jesus replies by questioning their authority and their leadership of God’s people with a parable. “A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard.” Luke 20:9-10. This is a common arrangement up in Galilee where Jesus lives. Landowners living outside the country allow locals to farm the land provided they pay their rent with produce – in this case the fruit of the vine. When the time comes to pay up, the owner sends a servant to collect. Instead of loading him up with bushels of grapes, they knock him down and send him away empty-handed. The same happens to a second servant and a third. I imagine by now none of the servants want this job. So the owner changes his strategy. “I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.” Well, not exactly. “When the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.” They think the father is dead and they can seize the land once they get rid of the son. But the father is not dead. Finally he punishes the tenants and leases the vineyard to new farmers.
This is more than just a story of renters gone wrong. Everyone in the audience knows the vineyard in Jesus’ story is the Jewish nation and Jerusalem. Isaiah used this description seven centuries earlier. Back then, the king and priests yielded bad fruit. Now Jesus uses the same vineyard story to criticize the chief priest, elders, teachers in His day. Instead of producing the fruit of righteousness, justice and love they jealously clasp and control Jerusalem and the Temple as though it belongs to them. Like the servants in the parable, God sent prophets to turn the people back to Him. Yet the prophets were tortured and turned away. So now the Father sends His beloved Son to the Vineyard called Jerusalem in the hope His people will return to Him.
Yet by the end of the week, what Jesus predicts in his parable comes true: the Son is thrown outside the walls and killed on a hill called the Skull. That rock, rejected by the leaders, becomes the new foundation of God’s Kingdom. And the priests and leaders who fear Jesus will bring down the wrath of Rome, wind up igniting that firestorm themselves. In AD 70 Jerusalem is burned to the ground.
Many of the Kingdom values we uncovered in previous parables are found in this final one. Do I submit to God the Owner of my life? Do I welcome the Son He sends to me? Do I produce the kind of fruit which pleases Him? Do I share it with those outside the Vineyard? You and I are only leasing this life. What fruit will the Landlord find when the lease is up?