In Shakespeare’s tragic tale, Hamlet seeks revenge against his conniving uncle, who has murdered Hamlet’s father (the king) to marry his mother and seize the crown. Hamlet declares, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” So he enlists a company of actors to perform a play about a murdered king in the royal court. The play provokes a response that confirms the Claudius’s guilt. If “the play’s the thing” for Hamlet, “the parable’s the thing” whereby Jesus asserts his authority, reveals his identity, and confronts his opponents in his Parable of the Wicked Tenants in Mark 12. Yet this parable during his passion week goes far beyond Shakespeare’s play within the play, for the authoritative author has written himself into the story.
As was Jesus’s custom, “he began to speak to them in parables” (12:1). These parables are not just creative sermon illustrations. They are stories with a point, stories that teach and also challenge. And the Parable of the Wicked Tenants is the last parable recorded in Mark’s Gospel as well as our Lord’s most confrontational parable.
This parable proceeds in four parts. First, Jesus introduces the rented vineyard (12:1), which recalls a famous prophetic parable in Isaiah 5: “My beloved had a vineyard….” Throughout the Bible and here in Jesus’s story, a vineyard (or vine) is a picture of Israel (see Psalm 60:8–9; Isaiah 5:7). Next, Jesus recounts the rejected servants (Mark 12:2–5). Time and again, the owner sent his servants to collect fruit from the tenants. But time and again, these sent servants met with outrageous resistance from the rogue renters. They chased off, chastised, clubbed, even killed the master’s servants. If the vineyard stands for Israel in this story, who are the tenants and the servants? The tenants are the priests and scribes who failed to teach and lead God’s people, like shepherds in Jeremiah’s day who “destroyed” the Lord’s vineyard (Jeremiah 12:10). The sent servants are God’s prophets, as in Jeremiah 7:25–26: “I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day. Yet they did not listen to me….” So Jesus’s story within a story recounts the larger biblical story of a gracious God who sent prophets to his people and encountered constant resistance and rebellion from Israel’s self-serving shepherds.
Jesus’s parable reaches its climax in verses 6–8 with the rejected son. “He had still one other, a beloved son.” The mention of “a beloved son” reminds us of the heavenly testimony at Christ’s baptism and transfiguration: “You are my beloved Son.… This is my beloved Son” (Mark 1:11; 9:7). In the story, the tenants did not listen to the son. Rather, they seized and slaughtered him and shamefully threw away his body. By mistreating the servants and the son, these high-handed rebels rejected the master’s authority and asserted their own illegitimate claim to the vineyard. This leads to the fourth part of the parable: the reckoning for rebels. “What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others” (verse 9). The point is clear: the rebellious tenants will reap what they sow. They try to destroy the Son, and apparently succeed, but they will be destroyed in the end.
Jesus then poses another question: “Have you not read this Scripture?” Here we reach the punchline of the passage, as our Lord quotes Psalm 118:22–23:
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
Doubtless the religious scholars would have thought, “Of course we’ve read the Bible.” They could recite it word for word. But Jesus’s rhetorical question, like the parable in the preceding verses, holds up a mirror to his opponents’ hearts. It is not enough to know the words; one must respond rightly to God’s Word and to God’s Son.
It may seem, at first glance, that this Scripture about a stone has little to do with Jesus’s parable about the vineyard, but it is actually key that unlocks the story’s meaning. This is very same psalm was on the crowd’s lips as they cried “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” when the king arrived in Mark 11:9. And earlier, Jesus predicted that he would be “rejected” and “killed.” Thus, the builders of Psalm 118 and the tenants in the parable both stand for Jesus’s opponents—that’s why they perceived that Jesus told this story “against them” (verse 12). The parable’s the thing to disclose their rebellious intentions, which reached fruition later that week with Jesus’s shocking arrest, sham trial, and shameful crucifixion.
Psalm 118 unlocks Jesus’s parable in two ways. First, it shows that Christ’s imminent rejection was no accident but followed the biblical script. Thus, by slaying the heaven-sent Son, these rebels actually carried out the secret plan of God to save his people from their sins. Second, while the parable concludes with the son’s death and the farmers’ demise, the psalm takes us the next step from rejection to triumph. The cast-off stone is also the chosen cornerstone, as the rejected Son is the risen Lord of all. This psalm previews Jesus’s resurrection on the other side of the cross.
Jesus’s great parable in Mark 12 prepares us for the expectant “Hosanna” of Palm Sunday, the shocking “Crucify him” of Friday, and the wondrous “He is not here” of Easter morn. This story within the story reveals not only the rebellion of Jesus’s enemies but also the gracious plans of the Lord of the vineyard to rescue us from our sins and establish a living cornerstone on which to build our lives.
Brian J. Tabb
President