A CERTAIN HOUSEHOLDER, WHICH PLANTED A VINEYARD

This parable is perhaps the most remarkable of all spoken by our Lord. Just four days before Golgotha, He faces His foes and poi­gnantly traces His Father’s dealings with them. Then, He depicts, in dark strokes, the heinous crime which they were plot­ting and would perpetrate against Himself, the Father’s Son and heir. In the ‘two sons’, Christ unmasks their dishonesty towards John. Now, He predicts not only their perfidy, but murder of the very One whom John the Baptist, God’s messenger had her­alded. The parable is deeply significant; like ‘the sower’ and ‘the mustard seed’ it occurs in all three synoptic gospels.

The householder is Jehovah. The vineyard is Israel which He had planted, hedged and developed with winepress and tower. The husbandmen were the national leaders during ten centuries of its history. When He sent servants, the prophets, to them to collect His agreed share of the fruit, they refused them with increasingly shameful violence. At last, the heavenly house­holder, in a final act of conciliation, deliberated as to the sending of His ‘only’, ‘wellbeloved’, Son, Mark 12. 6. ‘They will reverence my son!’ If this failed, not only would His resources of patience and grace be exhausted, but they who had rejected His envoys would fill up the measure of their guilt.

However, like Joseph’s treacherous brethren, these villains, in premeditated evil, ‘caught’ the heir, ‘cast him out of the vine­yard, and slew Him’. Christ, too, ‘suffered without the gate’, Heb. 13. 12. They ‘killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard’, denying Him ordinary rites of burial. Likewise, ‘They made his grave with the wicked’, Isa. 53. 9 RV.

Such murderous tenants, lusting to be landlords, faced fearful retribution. ‘The people’, Luke 20. 9, listening intently, pro­nounce sentence, ‘He will wretchedly destroy those wretched men’ NIV ‘The stone’, Christ, rejected by Jewish builders, would, in exaltation, become the corner and keystone of a new ‘nation’, the church, 1 Pet. 2. 6. Israel, ‘broken’ by stumbling over Him, would now itself lie rejected. ‘Other husbandmen’, saved Gentiles, will henceforth provide fruit for God.