Mark 11:27 – 12:44 Controversies in Jerusalem

We remember the controversy stories that are at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee (2:1 – 3:6). Here, at the beginning of Jesus’ time in Jerusalem, we have a stylized set of controversy stories. ‘Stylized’ because they are ordered against every Jerusalem-based group known to Mark - Chief Priests and their Scribes, Pharisees, Herodians, Sadducees and the Scribes - they each have their moment in the sun. There, towards the beginning of Jesus’ Galilee ministry the issues are his authority to teach, to forgive and to heal on the Sabbath. Here, in Jerusalem, he will not re-visit the issue of his authority, Here, the controversies are over the future of the Temple, their rejection of God’s envoys, their favoring the image of Caesar over the image of God, their arrogant attitude towards widows.

Mark 11: 27 – 12:12 Controversy with the Chief Priests and Scribes

The silencing of the Chief Priests and their scribes: (i) we already know Jesus’ source of authority. We have been told the words of the prophets, heard the divine voice, we have seen him teaching and healing with authority, we have heard the crowds acclaim. It is more than enough! (ii) Jesus counter-question is seen to appeal to the popularity of the Baptist among “the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem who were going out to him” (1:5). (iii) What we can’t understand is why they don’t resort to a version of the defensive counter-response: “we asked first so you answer first”. The rules of the game are unclear to us but they seem to dictate a stalemate and both sides withdraw … . (iv) .or do they?

The parable of the tenants: As followers of Mark’s Jesus we note that the context of the parable is given as a resolution of the standoff. “They perceived that he told this story against them and they wanted to arrest him…”(12:12) Mark’s Jesus is scoring against the Chief Priests and their scribes. Clearly, making sense of how "he told this parable against them” is going to be key to our understanding of this controversy.

The conventional option for interpretation is to see the parable as a theological allegory built on Isaiah 5 (“My beloved had a vineyard…”): The code is: the Holy One Blessed be He is the owner, the tenants are the Jerusalem authorities, the servants are the prophets, the beloved son is Jesus, the destruction of the vineyard is the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70CE and the ‘others’ refers to the emerging church. It is thought that the details of the actions of the owner and the tenants would not fit in with a realistic narrative – “what owner would do that, what tenant would think like that”.

An alternative is to read the parable against the background of land confiscation and absentee landlords, rampant in the world of Jesus. Germane to this are:

1. Isaiah 5 embodies the failure of expectations – God planted grapes and they produced thorns. Mark’s story heads off in another direction – a man planted a vineyard, appointed tenants and departed out of the area. There is nothing to suggest that the man represents God; the appointing of tenants and the departure, point to an absentee landlord.
2. Where did the man get the large quantity of land to support a vineyard? Land was held by small families as a gift from God and was not available for sale. It must have been acquired by some variation of theft or foreclosing on a loan following a bad harvest.
3. Grapes were a luxury crop, here planted in the midst of a subsistence economy.
4. There was a 4-5 year wait before a crop was produced so the owner would need other wealth (=land) to tide him over. (v) Tenants would often receive a (small) share of vegetables grown between the vines during this pre-crop period.
5. The man was quite probably Jewish and resident in Jerusalem: the verb ‘depart’ does not necessarily require going offshore. We know that the first action of the revolutionaries on taking over Jerusalem in 65CE was the seizure and burning of the land records that were kept in Jerusalem, records that attempted to legitimate the blasphemous theft of ancestral, God-given land.
   

What we are seeing is the emergence of a story that operates in the world of the redistribution of land away from the small, family, peasant land-holdings into the large estates. (Herzog, 103). The tenants are attempting to regain their land by refusing to pay the so-called owners their so-called entitlement; the elite create the law and have the weapons to resist the peasants.

We could call this The Parable of The Wicked Jerusalem-based Absentee Landlord. Such a parable fits both the world of Jesus and the narrative of Mark thus far. Confronted by the Chief Priests and their scribes in Jerusalem, following his challenge to the temple industry in chapter 11, Jesus tells a parable about their despoiling of the land of Israel and the constant threat of a peasant revolt. Quite correctly, they see themselves shown up by this parable. Is Jesus’ fate settled? You bet!

You may want to revisit the comments made on 4:1-9 about parables