Luke 20:9-19 Commentary

The Parable of the Tenants
9 He went on to tell the people this parable: "A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. 10 At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 11 He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed. 12 He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out.
13 "Then the owner of the vineyard said, 'What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.'

14 "But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. 'This is the heir,' they said. 'Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.' 15 So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

"What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? 16 He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others."
When the people heard this, they said, "God forbid!"

17 Jesus looked directly at them and asked, "Then what is the meaning of that which is written:
" 'The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone' [a]?

18 Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but anyone on whom it falls will be crushed."

19 The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people.


Dig Deeper
There is a rather amazing trend that is currently going on in American politics since the last presidential election. It seems at every turn that politicians, regardless of their party, their geographic location, or their past experience and popularity are being unceremoniously voted out of office, one after the other. The one thing that all of these people have in common is that they are incumbents. The people of the United States have spent years demanding, to one degree or another, politicians that go to Washington DC and look out for the best interests of the country. But it seems clearer, with each passing election, that the politicians get there, cut their little deals and really look out for no one except themselves. There are many decent people who love their country and the idea of America who are just sick and tired of these politicians who go to Washington and then look out for only themselves. By their actions they show that they don’t really care about what is good for the country. They care about themselves and their own positions, first and foremost. So, people have finally become fed up. Regular people are starting to come out of the woodwork, people that have never been in politics before, and are running for major offices. And they are winning left and right. It seems that our country has finally hit a tipping point where the political games will no longer be tolerated. Those who promise change and then come and engage in the same old behavior are getting tossed out and people are turning things over to an entirely new generation of leaders, whom they hope will once again embrace the American ideals and return the country to its true ideals.

Of course Jesus was not talking of politicians in this parable but he certainly was talking about leaders that had become so self-focused that they had completely lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing. God had given so much to the nation of Israel and expected them to use it to hold to his will, his purposes, and his ideals. But they had long ago abandoned that. They had ceased to think of the Temple as a shining light for the world. Nowhere in sight was God’s promise of his people being the one true family of all nations. They had taken all that God had given them and begun to think that it belonged to them. They had, in fact, become so entitled that they were much more acting in their own interests rather than God’s. God had warned the people, especially the leaders, that they needed to return to him and his agenda or they would find themselves outside of the covenant with God, but they had failed to listen. The tipping point had finally come. Yet, God would give his people one more chance. He would send his own Son as a final warning. But would they listen? Would they cling to the true ideals of the family of God or would they try to fight back against God’s agenda? With this parable, Jesus answered that question loud and clear.

In the previous encounter, in verses 1-8, Jesus squared off with the chief priests who demanded to know the source of his authority and just why Jesus thought he had the right to enact judgment and authority over the Temple. With this parable, Jesus turns to the regular people and takes his case to them. Why is he exercising authority over God’s house and why are the chief priest and religious leaders so worked up about it? In fact where is this all leading and what will happen in the end? This is what Jesus is gong to explain in this parable. He will make clear who he believes himself to be, why he is coming and assuming authority, and why the leaders will oppose him all the way to his death.

It is clear that one of the more important Old Testament passages to Jesus was that of Isaiah 5:1-7. In fact it is so vital that it is next to impossible to fully understand important New Testament passages like John 15 and this parable without a at least some knowledge of Isaiah 5. Isaiah 5 depicts God as a loving gardener and his people Israel as his vineyard. The loving gardener denies no amount of love and care for his vineyard but whenever he goes to his garden to look for the good fruit of obedience and keeping his covenant, he finds nothing but the sour grapes of a people that rebel against their God. What does God say he will do in Isaiah 5? He will make it a wasteland and cut it down to nothing.

Jesus’ parable is built on the imagery of that song from Isaiah 5 but Jesus has made important changes to relate it directly to his situation. The direct point of Isaiah 5 likely had to do with the exile that Israel would face at the hands of the Babylonians, but that exile was the precursor that pointed to the ultimate exile for an Israel that continued to produce nothing but bad fruit. In John 15, Jesus promised that those who would enter into his life and remain there would finally be able to do what not even God’s people, the nation of Israel could do, they would bear fruit that would last. They would be able to keep the covenant by remaining in Christ and would become the body of Christ, the true Israel.

But what of this parable? The overall meaning of this parable is rather obvious. God is the landowner while the vineyard is the promised family. In Isaiah 5 the people of God were virtually one in the same with the vineyard but now Jesus changes that in an important way. The vineyard is indeed the promised people and family of God, but the people of Israel, particularly the religious leaders, are now cast as the tenants. They have completely misused the vineyard and began to feel so entitled to it that they thought of it as their own to do with as they pleased. The owner continued to send one slave, (rendered “servant” in the TNIV) after another, but the tenants didn’t care. They were unconcerned with what the owner wanted so they beat and drove out the owner’s messengers. Yet, they would not leave his land because they thought they had a right to it. The slaves in this parable are clearly the prophets, from the Old Testament prophets right down to John the Baptist (it was common in the Old Testament to refer to God’s prophets as slaves: 1 Ki. 14:18; 15:29; 2 Ki. 9:7; 10:10; 14:24; Isa. 20:3; 44:26, etc., although the TNIV also renders all of these references as “servants”).

Left with no other options, the owner will give his wayward tenants one more chance and send his son, the one whom he loves. Surely they will listen to the sole possessor of the father’s inheritance. This is a clear indicator of who Jesus thought he was. The chief priests demanded to know where Jesus’ authority came from and here, Jesus gave the crowd the deafening answer. He is the beloved Son, the one whom the Father declared to be the Son that he loved at his baptism (Lk. 3:22). He is the rightful heir who was coming on the authority of the Father to warn the tenants that their time was up. The owner was not pleased and it was time for them to go if they would not fall in line with the owner’s purposes. But the tenants had things so backwards that they killed the son. In their twisted thinking they somehow believed that they could kill the son and take his inheritance and then the vineyard really would be theirs. In so doing they proved that they underestimated the Son and they didn’t know the true nature or plan of the Father at all.

So what will the owner do? How will he respond? He would respond swiftly and decisively. He would, said Jesus in a thinly veiled promise, come to the vineyard and kill the tenants. He would remove them forcefully from his vineyard and give the promise of the resurrection, the covenant family of all nations, the kingdom of God, in short, the inheritance, to others. It would be given to those who would, as Jesus stated so succinctly in John 15, enter into his life and trust nothing more than that.

When the people heard this, they knew precisely what Jesus was saying. He was claiming that the nation of Israel was being removed as the tenants of the family of God and the family would be given to someone else. They simply could not believe that he was teaching this. Could this possibly be? But Jesus appealed immediately to Psalm 118:22, a Psalm that was often used in connection with the annual rite of re-enthronement of the king. There is a bit of irony here in that, according to scholar Joseph Fitzmeyer, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day referred to themselves as the “builders of Israel.” Psalm 118 promised that God would build a gate for all to enter into his kingdom, but the finishing stone, the most important one, would be the very one that the builders rejected. “Yes,” Jesus was saying, this is how it had to go down. The “builders” were before their very eyes rejecting the Son, the cornerstone. What was the response of the people going to be? Were they going to side with the tenants or the Son?

In fact, said Jesus, “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.” Simeon had taken the infant Jesus in his arms and prophesied that he would be the cause of great trouble for and division in Israel (LK. 2:25-35). That was happening and Jesus, with his seemingly enigmatic reference to everyone being broken up and crushed by the stone, was confirming that prophecy by appealing to Daniel 2:44-45. The passage in Daniel prophesied that God would set up a kingdom one day that would never be destroyed and that this kingdom, depicted as a great stone, would crush all kingdoms that were opposed to God’s kingdom. The nation of Israel had clung to the belief that this would happen to the pagan nations one day, but they failed to see that they had become the chief among those opposed to God. All nations, all peoples, including Israel would be judged by this stone and anyone who opposed it would be smashed to pieces.

We must wonder if the chief priests understood Jesus’ point. Did they understand that he was denouncing them and declaring quite clearly his identity, his authority, and the judgment that was about to come down on the nation of Israel? Were they clear on the idea that they vineyard was going to be handed over to someone else? Did they grasp his claim that the nation of Israel would no longer be the true Israel, the true people of God (Rom. 2:28-29; 9:6; Gal. 3:7)? Yes, they understood well his point and they wanted to lay their hands on him to arrest him, to shut him up, and eventually to kill him. They, evidently, did not catch the irony of wanting to kill Jesus for the fact that he was declaring himself to be the Son that they wanted to kill.

As Jesus’ people, members of his family, we cannot ever forget that just as he went into places of power, religion, injustice, and opposition to God and was soundly rejected, we must be prepared to go preach the true gospel in the same types of places and expect similar reactions. But there is one important difference. The vineyard owner already has returned to restore his vineyard and it is our job to call people to be part of that grand kingdom and bear the fruit of the life of Christ. We don’t have to declare that the owner of the vineyard is coming but that he has already come and that all people and all nations can be part of his family right now.


Devotional Thought
The main problem that Israel’s leaders had was that they began to turn the benefits of the vineyard in on themselves rather than serving as a light to all nations. How does this challenge you to constantly work to make sure that your church family is committed to the ministry of reconciliation rather than making your church a comfortable place for those already there?