Week 3: “Vineyard”
Set the Space
Before reading this Devotional, take a moment to tune into the Spirit.
Get comfortable where you are sitting. Feel free to light a candle or close your eyes.
Take a few deep breaths and focus on the movement of the air gently expanding and contracting your lungs. Be still and know that this is the Spirit rushing through you.
When you are ready, turn to Mark 12:1-9 and read part of our passage for this week.
“Jesus then began to speak to them in parables:
“A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it,
dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower.
Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place.
At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard.
But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed.
Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and
treated him shamefully.
He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed.
“He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved.
He sent him last of all, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
“But the tenants said to one another,
‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’
So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.
“What then will the owner of the vineyard do?
He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.”
(Mark 12:1-9)
Think About It
In Mark 12, Jesus is being questioned by a group of religious leaders in the temple. Jesus opens up the discussion by telling them a parable. In this parable, he talks about a man who built an extravagant vineyard. It’s so big that he hires workers to work the land. When the harvest time comes, the man who hired the workers sends servants to collect the harvest from the vineyard. The workers, who seem threatened by the absence of the vineyard owner, decide to beat or kill each messenger. It seems they plan on taking the vineyard hostage since they were the ones who were working the fields.
Finally, the vineyard owner sends his son, but the workers decide to kill him to receive the inheritance of the land. At this, Jesus says in the parable, the vineyard owner will have no option but to kill the vineyard workers and find new ones.
This seems on the surface like an unsettling story from Jesus and in many ways it is. In this parable, Jesus is foretelling his death brought on by his own people and corrupt religious and political systems. The audience Jesus is addressing are Jewish pilgrims and religious leaders in the Temple. Any mention of a vineyard would have immediately been received as a metaphor for Israel (Isaiah 5:1-7). The workers then would be those in charge of protecting Israel; the Religious leaders such as Pharisees and Sadducees. Who are the servants in the story being sent to retrieve the harvest? In Matthew 23:37, Jesus is weeping over the city of Jerusalem. He uses similar language in his parable to talk about how prophets have been sent to Jerusalem and killed. So, this means that the vineyard owner’s son is Jesus.
What does all of this have to do with our theme of cultivating the Christ in you? At times, I think it is easy for us to fall into the position of the vineyard workers. Before you quickly dismiss this, let’s take a closer look at the situation they found themselves in. The arrangement that Jesus is describing in this parable was a common one. New Testament scholar Leon L. Morris says, “In a day when title was sometimes uncertain, anyone who had had the use of land for three years was presumed to own it in the absence of an alternative claim.” This means that in the physical absence of the owner, the Vineyard workers had started to be associated with the land. So much so, it seems, that they became quite protective of the harvest they had worked so hard to produce. They had toiled day after day, tilling the ground, pruning the vines, and collecting the grapes. The vineyard workers probably would have had to press all of the grapes in the winepress and transport huge heavy stone jars full of wine to the store houses. Living on the land, these workers had labored tirelessly in the hot middle eastern sun. So, imagine after all this back breaking work for who knows how long, a servant of the owner shows up one day. He announces that the Owner is in need of some of this fruit from the vineyard. Why should he receive the result of your toil and hard work? Of course, parting with it would be an emotional task.
Killing the servants seems like a bit of an overreaction, though. This reveals the hearts of those working in the vineyard. It reveals a heart posture that I think we can all suffer from sometimes. It’s the idea of entitlement. When we become fully engaged in the work of cultivating the Christ in us and begin to forget that it was God who placed that inside of us to begin with. We can begin to become so associated with the work God is doing through us that it can become a slippery slope into pride when we forget the Source. It’s no longer “God through us” or “Christ in us”. It’s our talents, or ambition, or drive.
The way Jesus begins this parable is important. He says,
”A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place.” (Mark 12:1b)
This whole thing didn’t start with you! God created all things! God was working through space and time to orchestrate the right moment for your arrival. God knit you together and positioned you with the purpose he has for you. God gave you the faith, the grace, the forgiveness, the existence, the consciousness, and the strength to do it all. It didn’t start with you! God is by no means efficient. If he was, he who had the power to make it all would do it all.
But God desperately enjoys working through beautiful things (that means you). We can begin to kill our sight of the new self when we lose track of all that. When we allow the work we are doing and the struggle that accompanies it to give us the sense that we deserve some of the glory for ourselves.
Take With You
“At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!” (Luke 1:39-45)
After Mary had received the news from the Angel, the first thing she did was go to Elizabeth’s house. This is because the angel mentioned that Elizabeth, an elderly relative of Mary, was also pregnant. The Bible tells us that when the pregnant Mary entered the house, Elizabeth’s baby jumped in her womb full of the Holy Spirit.
One of the added pressures in the parable from today was the absence of the Vineyard owner. Because he wasn’t physically there, it was hard at times to feel the weight of his authority over the vineyard. This doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, it was just not always evident. The parable says that when the vineyard workers saw the son of the Owner they recognized him. This part puzzled me because if this parable is addressing how Jesus’s own people would kill him by not knowing him, then how could he tell a story where they know who he is?
There was an inner recognition in Elizabeth that felt the presence of the Savior inside Mary. Even though on the surface Mary might not have been showing or had even said anything about it, Elizabeth knew. The Holy Spirit did the work of announcing it to her spirit and it reverberated so much with joy that the baby leaped in her womb. That’s a special knowing when you decipher a baby’s leap as a sign that the Lord is near. Same thing with the Religious leaders Jesus is addressing in this passage. All throughout the Gospels, these same leaders hear Jesus speak and the tagline is always “they were amazed because he spoke as one with authority”. They saw the many signs he had performed. Right before this passage they fail to stump him on a question about authority because they knew deep down who they were dealing with. This, unlike Elizabeth, is what it looks like to repress the voice of the Spirit in yourself.
Listen for the Spirit. It will alert you to the presence of God even when you don’t feel it. The result of perceived absence is the opportunity for stronger faith.
