The Owner's Son

"Thank you for giving us the Bible and teaching us about yourself through it."

Those words were in Robin's prayer the other day. Our habit each evening is to read the Bible together and then for one of us to pray. As she said those words I thought, "Ouch! One thing I just heard from the Bible had to do with people, and our hearts towards God, and it wasn't pretty."

The passage we had just read was Mark 12:1-12, the Parable of the Tenants. Briefly, it goes like this: A man builds a vineyard and all the accessories, then rents it out while he goes away. Harvest time comes and he sends a servant to get what is due him. The tenants beat the servant and send him off. The owner sends a number of other servants, who are treated worse, including at least one death. Finally, the owner sends his son, thinking the tenants will respect him. Good idea, but bad outcome. For the tenants the opportunity to kill the heir means they think that they can grab ownership of the vineyard for themselves. The parable closes with the news that this act by the tenants will not bring about their freedom, but their destruction at the hands of the owner.

Parables are pictures painted in words, designed for us to understand truths about God that we might not have picked up on before. One thing the Parable of the Tenants shows is God's persistence in sending messengers to his children, messengers to call them to live towards God as they should.

But what stood out to me that evening was the deep-seated human desire to be its own god, to the point of killing the owner's son in the mistaken belief that it was the way to achieve freedom from any responsibility towards the owner. The Parable of the Tenants peels away all the layers that cover the human heart's desire to be its own ruler, not bowing down to anyone or anything.

That desire for freedom from God is the worst desire I or anyone else could ever achieve. In the parable it results in the destruction of the tenants at the hands of the owner. And in life? The consequences of freedom from God are not so clear cut. On both ends of the spectrum, from those who love God to those who hate him, we can find the complete range of the good and bad of life. The Bible shows that it is only as human life comes to an end that we get an idea of what a life that welcomes God really looks like. Or what a life that rejects God looks like.

And so to come back to the parable, in the end I'm glad that the owner didn't stop with sending his servants, but that he made the effort of sending his son. The truth is that like the tenants, I pushed all servants of God away, but that did not stop the Son from eventually reaching me, for my own good.

They saying goes "God is good, all the time!" And the goodness of God is seen most clearly in the face of His Son, Jesus, who comes, against the natural desires of our hearts, for me and for you, so that we can live today and eternally as God's dearly loved children. Amen.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.