Holy Week Thoughts, Part 3: Words that Stung
On Tuesday of what we now call Holy Week, Jesus went up to the Temple. The chief priests and elders questioned His authority, and after that Jesus began to deliver some parables.
One of those parables He spoke had to sting in the ears of some of His hearers:
‘Listen to another parable,’ Jesus went on. ‘Once upon a time there was a householder who planted a vineyard, built a wall for it, dug out a wine-press in it, and built a tower. Then he let it out to tenant farmers and went away on a journey.
‘When harvest time arrived, he sent his slaves to the farmers to collect his produce. The farmers seized his slaves; they beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than before, and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them.
‘ “They’ll respect my son,” he said. ‘
But the farmers saw the son.
‘ “This fellow’s the heir!” they said among themselves. “Come on, let’s kill him, and then we can take over the property!” ‘So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
‘Now then: when the vineyard-owner returns, what will he do to those farmers?’
‘He’ll kill them brutally, the wretches!’ they said. ‘And he’ll lease the vineyard to other farmers who’ll give him the produce at the right time.’
‘Did you never read what the Bible says?’ said Jesus to them:
The stone the builders threw away
is now atop the corner;
it’s from the Lord, all this, they say
and we looked on in wonder.‘So then let me tell you this: God’s kingdom is going to be taken away from you and given to a nation that will produce the goods. Anyone who falls on this stone will be smashed to pieces, and anyone it falls on will be crushed.’
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew he was talking about them. They tried to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowds, who regarded him as a prophet.
Matthew 21:33-46 (The Bible for Everyone)
The priests and elders had to know what Jesus was referring to. The Hebrews hadn’t treated God’s prophets very well, and now that Jesus was claiming to be God’s son, the son and heir in the parable had to be Him.
Jesus quoted Psalm 118 (which N.T. Wright so marvelously turns into a very British-sounding poem in his translation) to note that God was no mere human landowner like the one in the parable:
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the LORD’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
Psalm 118:22-23 (ESV)
God knew that the ruling class in Jerusalem—both the priests and the Roman authorities—would reject Jesus in just a matter of days, but Jesus would become more than a mere throwaway stone. He would become the foundation on which the entirety of God’s perfect plan for salvation would be built.
Jesus points out that already in Psalm 118 written hundreds of years before the sending of the Son, the plan was laid out: The Messiah will be rejected, killed, and raised from the dead. And this is all “the Lord’s doing.”
The death of the Son was not a surprise. It was a plan.
So in the parable itself we are told not to construe the owner’s words, “They will respect my son,” as part of the way God is being represented. That is what a human owner might say. It is incidental to the point of the parable.
What God said, in fact, was: “The builders will reject my Son and I will make him Lord and Christ.”
Can you imagine what went through the heads of the priests and elders? Jesus just compared them to hateful tenants violating the Lord’s pristine vineyard.
They wanted to arrest Jesus right then and there, but it would take a few more days for that to happen.
Because it wasn’t their plan. It was God’s plan.
Photo by Jonathan Farber on Unsplash