Last week we closed a series on being dead to the world. We said the Christian life is not withdrawal from the world, but reorientation within it. The world is not our home. Our citizenship is in heaven. And the life we now live, we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself for us.

This week we are not moving forward into new theology. We are going back. We are going back to one day in the last week of Jesus’ life. A single day at the temple in Jerusalem. A day when the teachers of the law came to test Him with everything they had — and Jesus answered with more than they could handle.

This is Mark chapter 12. Seven encounters. Seven teachings. One day. And it begins, as so many confrontations in Jesus’ life begin, with a story.

The Vineyard Owner

“A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country. When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed.” — Mark 12:1-3

This is not a subtle parable. The details are drawn directly from Isaiah 5, where Israel is the vineyard of the Lord. The fence, the winepress, the tower — every feature is a deliberate echo of God’s care for His people. The vineyard is Israel. The owner is God. The tenants are the leaders of Israel. And the servants are the prophets.

The picture is unmistakable. God planted, fenced, equipped, and entrusted. Then He sent servant after servant to collect the fruit. And one after another, the servants were beaten, killed, and stoned. Mark is not gentle about it. He is making plain what Jesus is saying out loud in the temple courts: the history of God’s people is the history of God’s patience, abused.

The Son, At Last

“He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.” — Mark 12:6-8

What do you do when the servants do not work? You send the son. The son is not the first resort. He is the last one. And the parable is candid about why the owner finally sends him — the tenants will respect my son. Not the servants. The son. There is a dignity to the relationship, an expectation of honor, that the servants did not carry.

But the tenants calculate differently. If the heir is gone, the inheritance passes. The vineyard becomes ours. They will not respect the son. They will kill him. And Mark records, with brutal economy, that they did exactly that.

Mark is telling his readers, and the temple authorities standing right there in front of Jesus, what is about to happen in Jerusalem. The Son is going to be sent. The Son is going to be killed. And the vineyard is going to be taken from the ones who refused to honor Him.

The Cornerstone

“Have you not read this Scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” — Mark 12:10-11

This is Psalm 118:22-23, and Jesus does not soften it. The builders — the very people who were supposed to be building the house of God — are the ones who rejected the stone that God has now made the cornerstone. The construction project of God’s kingdom does not include them as architects anymore. They have been overruled.

And the verse at the end is the one that should make the temple authorities squirm. “This was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Marvelous. The whole thing is the Lord’s doing. The rejection, the resurrection, the reversal — all of it. The cornerstoning of the rejected stone is not an accident. It is not a failure rescued. It is the Lord’s doing. And it is wonderful.

What Happens in the Heart

Here is the question the parable leaves sitting in the room. What do you do with the Son?

The religious leaders in Mark 12 “perceived that He had told this parable against them.” They knew. They heard themselves in the tenants. And Mark 12:12 says they “sought to arrest Him, but they were afraid of the crowd.” They recognized the indictment. They understood the cornerstoning. And their response was to look for a way to kill Him.

That is one response. It is the response of the tenants. It is the response of those who would rather kill the Son than yield the vineyard.

But there is another response. The builders who recognize the stone for what it is. The tenants who finally respect the son. The people who, when they hear the parable, fall to their knees and say, “What shall I do, since I have rejected the cornerstone for years, and the Lord is in the middle of making Him marvelous?”

That is the response Jesus is looking for. Not the religious leaders who walked away plotting murder. The ones who walked away undone.

The Day Begins

This is the start of the day in Mark 12. A parable. A confrontation. A warning. And the Son still standing in the temple, with everything that is about to happen to Him still on the calendar of God.

Tomorrow: the Pharisees and the Herodians try to trap Him with a coin. And He answers with a sentence that has been ringing through two thousand years.

Father, we have been the tenants. We have been the builders. We have looked at Your Son and calculated what we could get away with, instead of falling at His feet. Forgive us. Bring us to the place where we see the rejected stone and recognize that You have made Him the cornerstone. Not for the religious. Not for the impressive. For everyone who has rejected Him and is being given one more chance to see Him as Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Reflection question: What area of your life have you been treating as “your inheritance” instead of the Lord’s vineyard? What would it look like to hand it back today?