MARK 12 (PART 1)
Read Mark 12:1-17
Jesus had already upset the religious authorities by making a scene in the Temple when he arrived in Jerusalem. He now set about upsetting them some more with his provocative teaching. He told a story about a man with a vineyard who rented out that vineyard. When he sent a servant to collect the rent the tenants beat him and sent him away. The man sent another servant and they beat him too; the third servant they killed. Eventually the owner sent his son thinking the tenants would respect the son, but no, they killed him too. “What would the owner do now?” Jesus asked. He answered his own question, saying that the man would come and kill the tenants who had acted so disrespectfully and killed his son.
Jesus is, of course, telling a parable, but what would really have hit home to the religious people here is that Jesus was building on a parable from the Old Testament, Isaiah 5:1-7. They knew their scriptures well and would have recognised what Jesus was doing, and it was clear that in the Isaiah parable the vineyard represented Israel and the owner of the vineyard is God. So, for them, it is clear that what Jesus was saying was that he was the son of God and he had come to claim what was due to him. However, the vineyard tenants, that is, the Israelite religious leadership, rejected him as God’s son and wanted to kill him. And the result of that would be judgement upon them. Verse 12 tells us that they recognised that this parable was about them and that angered them.
Their next ploy was to try to discredit Jesus by trying to trap him into saying publicly that it was right to pay taxes to the Romans. The Pharisees stood for strict obedience to Jewish law and they opposed Roman rule very strongly. What they actually asked Jesus was, “is it right to give money to Caesar”. This impact of this is a bit lost in our English translations; there is a sense of choice in the way the Pharisees framed the question with the word for ‘give’. Jesus recognised their hypocrisy and their trickery. He used a different word, one meaning ‘payment’, when he replied that you should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and so avoided the trap of looking like someone who would freely choose to give money to the enemy Romans.
But Jesus took things further and didn’t let the Pharisees off the hook. With their talk of giving money to the Romans and Jesus’ reply that it is only Caesar’s anyway so why not give it him, he then hit them with what they should really be considering. OK, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but what is more important is to give God what belongs to God. There is a stinging rebuke to the Pharisees here. They are wasting their time with word games and trying to trap Jesus when they should be concentrating on serving God however they can. It brings to mind the old theological debates about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and suchlike. And even today we can see people being distracted from what is important by obscure theological arguments that are of no importance at all to one’s faith.