Mark's Gospel Part 21 - The Authority of The Lord

Friends, do take a seat.

It'd be great if you could make sure you've got a Bible to hand.

Either your own if you need a Bible, raise a hand in the air, and someone will bring you one from the back.

Charlotte's on it.

We're going to be in Mark's gospel, as we have been for a while now.

And we're going to be at the end of chapter 11.

I'm going to pray for God's help, that we might have eyes to see Jesus and ears to hear his word.

And then I'm going to read our passage.

So let me pray.

Father God, I do pray for the reading and the preaching of your word this morning.

That you would help me to be faithful.

And that you would give us ears to hear.

Help us not be closed to the authority that you carry, the authority that your word carries.

Please give us hearts that will gladly bow the knee, that will gladly live for Jesus and know him and trust him and delight in him.

Amen.

We're going to read chapter 11 from verse 27.

I think this is probably just for context, the day after Jesus turned over the tables and so on in the temple that we saw last week.

And they came again to Jerusalem, and as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him, and they said to him, By what authority are you doing these things?

Or who gave you this authority to do them?

Jesus said to them, I will ask you one question, answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things.

Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man?

Answer me.

They discussed it with one another, saying, If we say from heaven, he will say, Why then did you not believe him?

But we shall we say, from man?

They were afraid of the people, for they all held that John really was a prophet.

So they answered Jesus, We do not know.

And Jesus said to them, Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.

And he began to speak to them in parables.

A man planted a vineyard, and put a fence around it, and dug a pit for the wine press, 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.

Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully.

And he sent another, and him they killed.

And so with many others, some they beat, and some they killed, 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.

What will the owner of the vineyard do?

He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.

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 marvellous in our eyes.

And they were seeking to arrest him, but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them.

So they left him and went away.

And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians to trap him in his talk.

And they came and said to him, Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God.

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

Should we pay them or should we not?

But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, Why put me to the test?

Bring me a denarius, and let me look at it.

And they brought one.

And he said to them, Whose likeness and inscription is this?

They said to him, Caesar's.

Jesus said to them, Render to Caesars the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

And they marvelled at him.

The grass withers and the flowers fall, especially in this weather.

But the word of the Lord stands forever.

If you can cast your mind back to this sort of scene, the Windsor Horse Show was a thing.

In 1991, there were lots of security guards, you know, checking tickets, keeping things secure, keeping suspicious people out, and so on.

And everything was going fine until one particular lady tried to get in without a pass.

And the guard who was on duty looked at her and saw from a distance his words, some old deer who looked a little bit like she was lost.

And so he says to her from a distance, Sorry love, you can't come in without a sticker.

She kept walking towards him.

And he said again, just in case, a little bit louder, she didn't hear it the first time, Sorry love, you can't come in without a sticker.

And this old deer approached him and replied, I think if you checked, I'll be allowed in.

But as far as he was concerned, no sticker, no entry.

Well then she got really close.

And you know what the punchline's going to be, don't you?

It was the queen.

Sorry, love, you can't come in without a sticker.

Now, something a bit like that happens in our Bible passage today.

As Jesus is stopped and he's challenged about what he can and can't do, where he can and can't go, and what authority he has in this place, the temple.

But it's not an honest mistake like that security guard.

The people who are challenging Jesus, they stare him down, stubbornly, indignantly, refusing to recognize who he is.

They don't care.

If you haven't got a sticker, you're not coming in.

Our passage today, we've seen lots of these in Mark's Gospel.

It's another one of Mark's sandwiches.

At the beginning and the end of our passage, they're like the bread in this particular sandwich, aren't they?

And that bread of the sandwich, well, it's these confrontations between religious leaders in the temple and Jesus.

Confrontations in which they ask Jesus a question, but not because they respect him as a teacher, it's because they want to trap him as a nuisance.

Two confrontations, this bread on either side, in which Jesus is the much wiser and cleverer party, and answers in such a way that ties them up in knots.

Two confrontations, this bread that reveal the heart problem of these religious leaders and the empty religious life of God's people.

And then in the middle, we get the filling, where Jesus tells this parable that unpacks what's really going on.

That's what the passage looks like.

That's what's going on.

And we're going to start then with the first piece of bread, the first confrontation, which really reveals the first big problem of their hearts and of many human hearts.

That is not accepting Jesus' authority.

Heart problem one, they don't accept Jesus' authority.

So verse 28 makes it clear that it's his authority that's the issue.

That's what they're challenging him on.

That word comes up twice.

By what authority do you do these things?

That's what they're challenging.

And you can sort of get why, right?

If you're there, you're thinking the timeline.

The previous day, Jesus let loose in the temple, tables and pigeons everywhere, kicked the traders out.

But worse than that, do you remember last week was what he was saying, accusing them of having turned the temple into a den of robbers, of running a religion that was all show and no love, no love for God, no love for neighbor.

So you expect that they might want a word with Jesus.

But these are these aren't peace talks.

By what authority?

They say, are you doing these things?

We didn't give you permission.

Who do you think you are?

These folks who come to Jesus, what we see there in verse 27, they are the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders.

They are the head honchos of temple life.

To have these groups all represented means that they were taking this really seriously.

They were properly affronted by Jesus.

And the leaders are now on the attack because they feel threatened by him.

And they do what they think is pulling rank.

They try to shut him down.

They don't want to hear what he has come to say.

Now, this was always going to happen.

If you remember Mark chapter 8, Jesus told his disciples that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again.

Mark 8 · chapter mention

Jesus knew this was going to happen.

Last week Jesus cursed the temple, and their response was to find a way to destroy him.

They're not sorry for the way they're acting.

They don't want to think about whether what he is saying is true, they just want rid.

And it's because they refuse to accept his authority.

And so what they try and do is they lay a trap for him.

By what authority do you come?

If he says he's from God, well that's blasphemy, isn't it?

That's a serious deal.

If he says he's doing it off his own back, then they can paint him as a troublemaker.

There is no good answer.

But Jesus knows what they're up to.

And it's as if he's sort of three moves ahead of them on the chessboard.

It's actually more like he knew all of the moves of the game before the game started.

And what he does is he flips it around in verse 29 and he says, Well, I'm going to ask you a question, verse okay, John's baptism.

Was that from heaven or from man?

Answer me.

He won't let them play their game.

You give me your answer, and then I'll give you mine.

And sort of what Jesus does here is he forces them to show their hand and say what they actually think.

Jesus isn't the only one in danger of having the crowd turn on him.

There is no good answer really to this question.

If they say John's from heaven, well, people are going to ask, well, why didn't you believe him?

If they say, well, John's from man, well, they don't even finish their thought.

There'll be a riot.

People had a lot of time for John the Baptist.

They understood him to be a prophet from God.

So these religious leaders are too afraid to give their ideal answer.

Public opinion is what they really care about, not the truth, not who Jesus is.

And Jesus and John the Baptist had the same message.

That is, they were calling people to repent, to admit they'd been wrong, to change their minds, to change their lives.

And these leaders don't recognize their authority to do that.

They absolutely intend to remain as they are in the position they are in.

But there's no good answer that's going to help them do that.

And so this great band of learned men sort of return to Jesus and just sort of weakly shrug.

Verse 33, and they say, We don't know.

When faced with Jesus, they, like we, have the choice of looking up to him, submitting to his authority, or rejecting him as if he isn't authorized to come in here, to enter the throne room of our lives, to sit wherever he likes.

I'm not doing anything until I see some idea, mate.

But it's obvious, isn't it?

From this encounter, just who has the authority?

And that is their first heart problem.

When faced with God's Christ, with God the Son, with the King of the Kingdom of God, they are not interested in bowing the knee to him because this is their patch.

And they'll be blowed if they'll give up their thrones for him.

And so we get to the filling of the sandwich.

Beginning of chapter 12, as Jesus tells this story, this parable that unpacks what's really going on.

It's the sort of parable for them that would have lured them in and they'd have thought, well, that's outrageous.

And then Jesus will say, Well, it is, and it's about you.

It's got a real sting in it.

If you have ears to hear, if you were there.

And this is our second point this morning that you cannot reject Jesus' authority forever.

You cannot reject Jesus' authority forever.

So verse one, you might read it like this Once upon a time, there was a good vineyard owner.

And he is good, this owner in the story.

He sets up a top-of-the-range establishment, no expense spared.

He plants it all up, he builds this great big wall around it to keep out animals, thieves.

He's built a wine press so that they can make the wine on site themselves.

He builds a tower, so you can stick a guard up there, and you've sort of got the ancient equivalent of 24-hour CCTV.

This is a brilliant vineyard.

It would probably have had a visitor centre, you know, for wine tasting, stuff like that.

It's award-winning stuff.

But he didn't plan on running it himself.

He was going to lease it out.

He could have done it himself and kept all of the proceeds, but he chooses to rent it out to tenants.

They look after the vineyard, they run it, they get to keep most of the profits, but they pay the owner rent with a share of whatever they produce.

It was an investment for him and a job for them.

And so everyone's a winner, you'd think.

A good vineyard with a good owner and good prospects.

And everything's going well until the rent is due.

Verses 2 and 3.

You see, when we get there, there's a twist in the story.

All of a sudden, we've got rebellious tenants.

What happens is the servant parks the van out the front, comes and knocks on the gates, and all of a sudden the tenants are on him, jumping on him, beating him up.

They won't hand over to the delivery man what they're supposed to give him.

They've got no intention of fulfilling their contracts, no intention of giving the owner what belongs to him.

They want all the grapes, all the wine, all the money for themselves.

It's every landlord's worst nightmare.

It might be his vineyard, but it feels very much like it ought to be mine, and I'm not going to give you anything.

So they beat up the servant and send him packing.

Now, the owner finds out, doesn't he?

And obviously, we then see this extraordinary thing.

We see his patience.

Better than any of us would be in the circumstances.

Instead of sending in the heavies, what does he do, verse 4?

He sends in another servant who they strike on the heads and treat him shamefully.

And probably at this point you'd think it was time to get serious.

But in verse 5, he sends another servant, and this time he's killed.

These guys are assaulting, they are murdering.

People have been evicted for a lot less.

But this owner, boy, he is gracious.

He is patient, possibly beyond our ability to understand.

He continues to send servants in the hope that they will change.

Some they beat, some they kill.

It gets worse and worse.

The tenants are more and more hostile and violent, but they still get chance after chance after chance.

And eventually we get to verse six.

He still had one other, a beloved son.

God sent to the end.

The owner sent him, last of all, saying, They will respect my son.

Fully aware of the risk, then the son makes the journey under his father's authority to sort out the mess.

But using that watchtower that the owner had built, so graciously they see him coming.

And I and what are they going to do as they see him coming?

They realize things are getting serious.

Are they going to heed the warning and decide to sort of sit round a table to negotiate and work things out?

No.

They hatch a plan, verse 7, to kill this heir and to make his inheritance their own.

So they took him, they killed him, and they threw him out of the vineyard.

It is evil and it is absolutely bonkers.

I mean, what kind of plan is it?

What do they think is going to happen?

Let's kill him and take the inheritance.

Why would the owner let them keep it after this?

Perhaps they misread his enormous patience as him being a soft touch.

Or maybe they thought the owner was dead or not really there.

So get the sun out the way, we can claim this place as our own.

And we get the idea, don't we, of these rebellious tenants.

But why the story?

And why told like this?

Well, the first people listening, I think, would have got what was going on.

And it would have made them think back in the Bible to Isaiah chapter 5, where we find a very similar tale.

Isaiah 5 · chapter mention

You can turn there or just listen.

I'm going to read three verses.

This is the story in Isaiah.

Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard.

My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.

He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines.

He built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it.

Sounding familiar, right?

And he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts, we read, is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting.

And he looked for justice, but behold bloodshed, for righteousness, but behold an outcry.

A number of times in the Old Testament, God's people are referred to as his vineyards.

He planted it, they belong to him.

And he wants to see the fruit of godly lives among these people, but he finds only sin.

And in Isaiah, the owner lets the vineyard go to ruin.

He knocks the walls down.

In Jesus' version, he very pointedly aims this parable right at those leaders.

God put you in charge of the vineyard, and you are rebellious tenants.

You are not giving him what he deserves.

God's worship looks impressive.

There's lots of activity, but when push comes to shove, they are not respecting the owner's authority and they are not giving him what he is due.

They have rejected the servants over and over, just like God sent Israel prophet after prophet to teach them, to warn them, to call them back to himself.

But time after time they ignored them, they rejected them, they killed them all the way up to John the Baptist.

And so the Lord gives them one final chance.

He had one left to send, a beloved son.

This is real last chance saloon stuff.

God sends his son as the final warning.

But do they respect him?

Do they listen to him?

No.

They roughed him up and demanded to know by what authorities he here.

Who gave you the right?

Who gave you the authority?

When he has every authority, when he's the son, when he's the son of God himself, when this is his vineyard.

They're acting like the owners, but they're only the tenants.

And like the tenants in the story, they say, Come, let's kill him.

And they did it within a week of this happening.

They had Jesus killed.

And then they lived happily ever after.

Right?

That's the plan.

Is that what happened?

Get rid of him, and everything will be fine.

Well, after the Son is killed, what will God do about the rejection of Jesus' authority?

That's Jesus' question in verse 9, isn't it?

What will the owner of the vineyard do?

And he does what is just.

The owner, we read, will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.

Justice is going to be served.

It's looked for years like these tenants are getting away with murder, but they won't.

They won't, not forever.

Of course, we read this parable, we we look at what the tenants are like, and we probably say down in our heart, well, how could they?

How could they act like that?

How could they refuse to accept Jesus' authority?

What wicked people that they must be, what wicked hearts they must have.

But then I remember that God has called me to care for the needy, and I've been too worried about myself to do that.

And then I remember that God has told me to put my wife first in our marriage, but I'd rather put myself first.

And God has told me not to lie, but I realize that there's probably a middle ground to be found, a compromise, isn't there?

It's not a complete lie.

And God has told me to keep the Sabbath day holy, a day lived to him, but that's just annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it?

And God has told me to give with a cheerful heart, but I'd be much more cheerful if I just spent that money on stuff for myself.

By what authority, God, are you doing these things?

Maybe we're not so dissimilar.

Being religious isn't enough.

These leaders were very religious, but they were still rebellious.

For all the work going on in the life of the temple, for all the activity, when the Son arrived, there was no fruit to give him.

They think they can reject Jesus and still be okay with the Father, but they're wrong.

Final judgment.

What does it all come down to?

Not to your religious work, to what you look like on the outside, but what we make of Jesus.

Will we accept his authority or not?

And not just the sense to his authority, but actually in our day-to-day lives, will we gladly let Jesus be in charge?

Go where he wants, do what he wants, say what he wants.

Because if not, I think this passage would say to us, we're a lot like those religious leaders, like the tenants in the story, and we'll receive the just outcome.

And yet, the parable actually does have a happy ending, doesn't it?

A very happy ending.

That the vineyard isn't destroyed or converted into a high-rise housing development.

New tenants are brought in.

He will destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.

It is a properly happy ending.

He is going to have a new people who will bear fruit and who will do so in order to give him what belongs to him.

Which really, and we're only going to look at it in passing, takes us on to the last bit of the passage, the last confrontation that's supposed to trap Jesus.

And that is the second heart problem.

Not giving Jesus what he is owed.

Not giving Jesus what he is owed.

So in that last little episode, they ask Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar, and his response is to hold up a coin and say, Well, whose image is on this?

And they say, Well, it's Caesar's.

And he says, Fine, give to Caesar what is Caesar's.

But he also says to them, give to God what is God's.

Well, and yeah, what's going on there?

The coin bears Caesar's image.

Give it to Caesar.

But what bears God's image, and you can go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, can't you?

It is people made in his likeness, made to serve him, made to worship him, made to live under his authority.

And next week, Jesus is going to tell them that the greatest commandment of all is to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength, with all of yourself, with everything you have.

Give to God what is God's yourself.

Live for him.

And they won't.

You go back to the vineyards.

They won't give him the fruit that belongs to him.

They won't give him the fruit that he is owed.

Their lives are their own to please themselves for themselves.

So the tenants, they rebel.

But that's not the end of things, is it?

Their rejection of Jesus, that's not the end.

And that is why he quotes just in verse 10 from Psalm 118 the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

The one that they've thrown aside, the sun, will not just lie there gathering moss, it will take its rightful pro place.

That Jesus turns out to be the cornerstone who holds the vineyard together, who holds God's kingdom together, the Son who was killed, that sinners like you and me, on hearing his warnings, might find grace in him, might find grace by trusting him.

Him who was killed and God raised up to reign in glory.

And so a lot of people challenge his authority, don't they?

But for those of us who accept it, we might say, along with verse 11, this was the Lord's doing.

And it is marvelous in our eyes that Christ could become so gloriously central, that he could be the reason that we can inherit the vineyards.

What an extraordinary act of grace that is that by his death we get to be his new people.

That we were outsiders and had nothing to do with it, and yet we were given it by him.

Jesus's first hearers did not think this was marvelous.

Look at verse 12.

It causes them to look for a way to arrest him.

Ironically, acting out the parable.

Because they'd worked out that the parable was against them.

But for us this morning, ask the question of do we see and do we accept Jesus' authority?

The owner was so patient, he sent his beloved son to give us one last chance that anyone who has rejected him time and time again might come back to him, might find mercy, might live in the vineyards.

If you are someone who's held out against Jesus up until this point, today is the day to turn to him, to submit to him, to receive a welcome from him that you don't deserve and that I don't deserve.

You don't squander that chance today.

If you want to talk about what that looks like in practice, I would love to have a chat with you.

And for those of us who have bowed the knee to the authority of Jesus, who know that we've sinned by rejecting his authority, who have sinned by not loving him with all that we have, and yet have heeded his warning and have turned to him for grace, isn't he, verse 11, marvelous?

Isn't he fantastic?

Isn't it wonderful that we get given the vineyard?

It ought to cause us joy.

And it ought to cause us to live changed lives.

Lives where we grow in obedience to him, where we grow more to love him and more to love that we belong to him, the gracious master.

Lives in which we more gladly give ourselves to his service, to offer him the fruits of our love and our lives, to give to God what is God's.

Meaningless religion for power-hungry people who'd want to be in charge of themselves and their lives.

We pray this morning that we would find grace and know it again.

That we belong to Jesus, forgiven and freed by him, free to live for him, free to bow the knee to him, who is the greatest master of all, free to serve him, free to give ourselves to him.

And I ask that you would work that in us through the power of your spirit and to your glory.

Amen.