Gospel of Mark Study #38

“Parable of the Rejected Son”

Mark 12:1-12

Study #38 in Mark Series

INTRODUCTION:

Jesus was the Master Teacher and one of the tools that He often employed was the use of parables. Parables are stories that teach moral, spiritual, or ethical lessons. They usually take the form of an analogy, a comparison. The word “parable” itself comes from the Greek word, parabolé, which means “to lay down alongside, to compare.” A parable is usually a short, simple story describing an occurrence of a familiar kind, often drawn from nature or human circumstances, from which a moral or religious lesson may be drawn. There are two dangers that should be avoided in seeking to interpret the parables in Scripture; first, that of ignoring important features, and second, that of trying to make all the details mean something, i.e., trying to make the parable stand on all four legs. The second is probably the more common pitfall.

An “allegory” is another type of word picture that is somewhat like a parable but is usually more detailed and complicated. In an allegorical story all the people, things, and happenings tend to have hidden or symbolic meanings. The “allegorical” meaning does not do away with the literal meaning of the narrative, but merely uses it as a jumping off place.

TRANSITION:

As I just mentioned, Jesus often taught using parables. Most frequently His parables conveyed truths connected with the subject of the Kingdom of God. His withholding the meaning from His hearers, as He did on several occasions, was a divine judgment upon those unworthy listeners whose hearts and minds were already closed to the truth (cf. Matthew 13:34).

Our text for today and the parable that Jesus chose to use follows immediately upon the blatant rejection of the Lord Jesus’ authority by the Jewish religious leaders, as described in Mark 11:27-33. The root of their problem lay not in their intellects, but in their stubborn wills. I told you last week that the Lord’s question to them about where John the Baptist’s authority came from was not a trap; it was yet another legitimate opportunity for them to realize and confess their spiritual blindness, and to ask Him for sight. They refused.

Therefore, the parable that Jesus used here in the first part of chapter 12 follows very naturally upon the final refusal by the Pharisees to consider the source of the Lord’s authority. In so doing, they refused to admit the fact that they already knew its source, and because of this they stood self-condemned before the Lord Christ. This parable then is, in consequence, a parable of judgment and doom upon them, the logical result and the supreme proof of their wickedness in rejecting the Savior.

NOTES on the Text:

Verse 1: And He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard and put a wall around it and dug a vat under the wine press and built a tower and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey.” 

• I explained the difference between a parable and an allegory. This parable stands out from among Jesus’ other parables in that it is much more detailed, thus tending to be more reminiscent of an allegory than a normal parable.
• What do I mean by that? Look at all the details that Jesus includes. In describing the vineyard Jesus mentions many physical features—the wall that the owner built around his property, the wine press where bare-footed workers would crush the grapes, the vat under the wine press for catching the juice, the tower that was a combination watchtower and storage place, etc. He even mentioned the fact that the vineyard was then put into the hands of tenant farmers who were responsible to show a profit from the vineyard.
• What you need to know is that Jesus took the details of His story directly from Isaiah 5:1-7, a passage very familiar to His listeners, and believe me, the meaning was not lost on them. They understood exactly what Jesus was saying, and they did not like it! They understood the fact that the owner of the vineyard is God. The vineyard itself represented the people of Israel, and the vine-growers/tenant farmers represented them, the Jewish religious leaders.

Verses 2-3: “At the harvest time he sent a slave to the vine-growers, in order to receive some of the produce of the vineyard from the vine-growers.  ³ They took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed.” 

• This servant represented a prophet whom God sent to Israel. He did not fare well, however. They caught him and beat him and sent him away. That is just what the Jews did to the prophets God sent them.

Verse 4: “Again he sent them another slave, and they wounded him in the head, and treated him shamefully.” 

• Same story, second verse. God sent many prophets but did the people listen to them? NO! Did they repent of their sinful ways and turn back to God? Most did not. 

Verse 5: “And he sent another, and that one they killed; and so, with many others, beating some and killing others.” 

• The treatment gets progressively more violent with each one the landowner sends. So, it was with the prophets of old. The irony here, as recorded both in Matthew 23:29-36 and in Luke 11:47-51 is that the religious leaders who were listening to this story readily admitted that their forefathers had killed the prophets. Indeed, they prided themselves on their superior spirituality and the fact that they showed their piety by building fine tombs for these slain prophets. The Lord pointed out dryly that this merely showed their identification with their forefathers—one generation killed the prophets, while another generation buried them, thus sharing in the crime (cf. Luke 11:48). Isn’t it interesting how we can always spot the sin and spiritual blindness of our forefathers but are blind to those same things in our own lives.

Verse 6: “He had one more to send, a beloved son; he sent him last of all to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’” 

• Here we see the grace, love, and mercy of the Father, sending His only begotten Son to earth as His special representative in the hopes that men would listen to Him and turn from their wicked ways.
• You see, whoever would receive the Father must receive the Son as well. John 12:44, “And Jesus cried out and said, ‘He who believes in Me does not believe in Me only, but in Him who sent Me.’”

Verses 7-8: “But those vine-growers said to one another, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours!’  ⁸ They took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.” 

• You could perhaps build a case to show that Israel did not recognize that the prophets had been sent by God. But Jesus’ words here shine light on the fact that the religious leaders knew who He was and were trying to kill Him anyway. Their sin was deliberate and wicked to the core. It was not through their failure to recognize the Son that they would kill Him; that would perhaps have been pardonable. It was, as in the parable, precisely because they recognized Him for who He was that they had Him nailed to a cross.

Verse 9: “What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine-growers and will give the vineyard to others.” 

• This is a logical question, but the answer is a foregone conclusion— “He will come and destroy the vine-growers and will give the vineyard to others.” Jesus’ hearers understood perfectly, and they were aghast at the thought. Luke records in 20:16, “And when they heard it, they said, ‘May it never be!’” [= “God forbid it!”]
• Jesus made it crystal clear that God was going to bring judgment on the house of Israel for their sins. We know that this was fulfilled in AD 70 when a Roman legion under the command of General Titus Flavius Vespasianus destroyed Jerusalem and put an end to the Jews’ self-rule.
• But the thing that really got these guys fired up was what Jesus said about the landowner giving the vineyard to others. They could not fathom that Jehovah would ever reject them, even though they had rejected His Son whom He had sent. 

Verses 10-11: “Have you not even read this Scripture: ‘The Stone, which the builders rejected, this became the Chief Cornerstone; ¹¹ this came about from the LORD, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” 

• Here Jesus quoted verbatim from the Greek LXX Version (Septuagint) of Psalm 118:22-23, but not before He needled them just a little bit. His question, “Have you not even read this Scripture?” was a slap in the face for them. He is implying that they do not understand the principle, even if they understand the words themselves. He is saying that they have missed the point of the passage.
• Those verses clearly point to Jesus, who, as John pointed out in John 1:10-12, “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him.  ¹¹ He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him.  ¹² But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.” The Builders [i.e., the Jews] rejected Jesus, but whoever receives Him is given the right to be called a child of God. Praise God! There is hope for us!

Verse 12: And they were seeking to seize Him, and yet they feared the people, for they understood that He spoke the parable against them. And so, they left Him and went away. 

• “And they were seeking to seize Him…” This connects back to 11:18, “And the chief priests and the scribes heard this and began seeking how to destroy Him; for they were afraid of Him, for all the multitude was astonished at His teaching.” 
• They sized up the situation and realized that this was not yet their golden moment to grab Jesus. They would wait for a better opportunity. Instead, they went slinking back off to their dark dens to hatch another plot to catch Him.

CONCLUSION:

There was a Gospel song that made its way to the top of both the country and pop charts in the 1970’s. You might remember it. Anne Murray sang it, as well as a bunch of other artists. It was written by Gene MacLellan in 1971 and was called, “Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man from Galilee.” The second verse goes like this:

Every time I look into the Holy Book I wanna tremble,

When I read about the part where the Carpenter cleared the Temple;

For the buyers and the sellers were no different fellows than what I profess to be,

And it causes me shame to know I’m not the man that I should be.

My question is, are we really so very different from those people to whom Jesus taught this parable so long ago? We would certainly like to think that we are!

Today, we as Gentile Christians have been grafted into the old trunk of God’s covenant people, Israel. This happened because of their rejection of Yeshu’a HaMashiach. However, there is no room for bragging or complacency on our part, as Paul so clearly points out in Romans 11:22, “Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell [i.e., Israel], severity, but to you, [i.e., Gentile believers] God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise, you also will be cut off.”

The Bible makes it clear that anyone who rejects the Son also rejects eternal life, because eternal life is in Jesus. You cannot receive one without accepting the other. It is a package deal! Yet that is exactly what half the world wants to do. They want all the benefits of salvation without any of the sacrifice, and without having to deal with Jesus, because Jesus makes them nervous.