The story is instantly recognizable. Isaiah pictured Israel as a vineyard God planted with care (Isaiah 5:1-7), and the tenants stand for the leaders listening. The owner sends servant after servant to collect fruit, and each is treated worse than the last: the first is beaten and sent away empty-handed, the second beaten and shamefully treated, and the third wounded and cast out (verses 10-12). The servants are the prophets God kept sending, asking for the righteousness and justice the vineyard was meant to produce, and meeting the same violent rejection.
The owner has gone into another country for a long while (verse 9), and the long absence is God's patience in the story. The owner's last decision carries pathos. He asks himself, 13"What shall I do?" and a moment of deliberation we rarely see from God opens in the story, a father weighing his only son's life against hope for the tenants. His answer is this: 13"I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him." It is the patient hope of a father still willing to risk everything on a chance that this time will differ. The tenants' calculation is clear-eyed by contrast: 14"This is the heir. Let us kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours." They understand exactly who he is and what killing him could gain them, and they act without hesitation. They 15"threw him out of the vineyard and killed him," which anticipates what will happen to Jesus outside the city walls.
Jesus asks what the owner will do and answers himself: 16"He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others." The crowd says 16"Surely not!" They grasped what the story describes and recoiled. Jesus does not soften it. He looks directly at them and quotes a psalm (Psalm 118:22). The rejected son of the parable and the rejected stone of the psalm are meant to be heard as the same figure. The builders responsible for choosing which stones belong will discard the one that matters most, and God will make it the cornerstone anyway.
He adds a harsher image: 18"Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him." Whether a person stumbles over the stone in unbelief or the stone falls in judgment, the collision is devastating. There is no safe, neutral position toward the cornerstone Jesus claims to be. The safe place is on the stone, built on it, and the danger comes only to those who stumble over it or stand beneath it when it falls.
The scribes and chief priests understand every bit of it. They perceive that he told the parable against them (verse 19) and want to lay hands on him at that very hour, proving in real time the instinct the story described. Only fear of the people restrains them, as it has before, and it will not hold much longer.
Build on the stone this week. Name one decision where you have been tempted to build without him, and put his word under it.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a patience that kept sending prophets, and finally your own beloved Son, even when every earlier messenger had been rejected. Keep us from the tenants' fatal miscalculation, imagining that rejecting what belongs to you could secure anything worth keeping. Make the stone the builders rejected our own cornerstone, the ground we build on. In Jesus' name, amen.