Tenants

Passage: Mark 12:1-12

According to Mark, Jesus uses the Parable of the Tenants as an illustration of the breakdown between God and the religious leaders of his people. In the story, the tenants are allowed to occupy and tend the vineyard of a landowner. When the landowner sends servants to collect according to the terms of the lease, the tenants revolt. The landowner is far away; as far as the tenants are concerned, they now possess the vineyard and all its produce. The implication is that God, who owns all, has entrusted some property – his people – to a group of tenants. The religious leaders of 1^st century Israel are charged with the task of tending this piece of property. But as God has sent messengers to correct and guide his tenants, they’ve resisted with increasingly degrees of severity. At the climax of the story the landowner sends his son, whom the tenants kill in order to secure their hold on the borrowed plot of land. The plan of course backfires as the landowner shows up in person, violently evicting the tenants. Jesus tells the story to caution those who have been delinquent in their duties as stewards of God’s vineyard. In the telling, Jesus also foreshadows his inevitable death.

The Parable of the Tenants is directed at Jesus’ contemporaries – 1^st century Jews called to account for their religious life. But it contains a message for God’s people, and all humanity, today. The reminder is this: we are all tenants. We’ve been allowed residency and privileges that seem unbounded. But none of this is ours. One day we will be held to account for how we’ve treated the possessions and the people in our lives. We have a chance, now, to consider what it means to be tenants – stewards. We are called to consider how we would manage our relationships with property and people if each was the treasured possession of someone else – someone who’d entrusted all this to our care.