A Letter on the Vineyard
A reflection on Mark 12:1–12
The Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece, c.1512-15 by Matthias Grünewald
My friends,
Maran atha.
I'll tell you what that means before I sign off. Hold onto it just until then.
I'm writing rather than speaking because I can't be in the room with you, and for this topic, that matters. Almost everything I want to tell you about this morning is about something that has to be done in person, by hand, in front of somebody. A letter is what you send when you can't do that. It's the second-best thing, and it has always been the second-best thing since our story began — the apostles wrote when they couldn't come, and told the churches to read the letters out loud to everybody.
~
So. The vineyard.
The setting of the story is half the meaning of it, and we usually skip it.
Jesus has come into Jerusalem. There were crowds and shouting and a colt. The next morning he walked into the temple and turned over the tables of the money changers. Now the chief priests and the scribes and the elders have come to find him, and they ask him who gave him the authority to do that.
They want him arrested. But they don't, and Mark tells us the reason with no varnish on it at all: they're afraid of the crowd. That's the only thing holding them back. Not doubt. Not deliberation. Crowd management.
And in front of these men, who are at that moment working out how to have him killed, Jesus starts telling a story:
A man planted a vineyard. He did it thoroughly — a fence around it, a pit dug for the winepress, a watchtower built. Then he leased it to tenants and left the country.
At harvest he sent a servant to collect what was owed him. They beat the man and sent him back with nothing.
So, he sent another. That one they hit in the head and humiliated.
Then, he sent another, and that one they killed.
And then Mark, who does not write for effect, closes the ledger in a single sentence: and many others, some of them beaten, some of them killed.
Here is where I want to draw our attention, and slow down:
He had one left — a son, the one he loved. He sent him last of all, and he said: they will respect my son.
But the tenants said to one another, this is the heir. Let's kill him and the inheritance is ours.
And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.
That's Mark 12, verses six through eight, in my own rendering. Five words in the middle of it are what I want to give you today.
They will respect my son.
To begin, we should admit that the story is badly told, if what we wanted was a story about a reasonable man.
There's a word for someone who keeps sending his people into a house where his people are being killed. Several words. None of them are compliments. Any sensible listener left this parable two servants ago.
But look at what Jesus has just done. He is standing in front of the men who will hand him over, and he tells them a story in which his Father says out loud, in advance, they will respect my son — and the story then proceeds to prove him wrong. The son goes out. They see him coming. They kill him and throw his body over the wall.
Jesus is telling these men a story about his Father hoping. And being wrong. And sending him anyway.
There's an older vineyard behind this one. In Isaiah, God sings about a hillside he cleared himself, and then asks a question I've never been able to read quickly: what more was there to do for my vineyard that I hadn't already done?
That isn't power speaking. That is someone who has gone all the way down the list of things a person can do, reached the bottom of it, and has decided not to stop.
So what kind of love is that?
Go back to the garden in Genesis. The sentence has been passed, the ground is cursed, they're being put out. And in the verse between the sentence and the exile, there's a line most of us read straight past.
God makes them clothes out of skins, and he dresses them.
He doesn't reverse it. He doesn't reopen the gate. He dresses them for the weather they're walking into. Something died to make those clothes, and they leave the garden wearing it.
That's the first thing love does after the first failure. It doesn't rush to repair. It doesn't just spare you. It stays, and it clothes you, and it lets you go out.
Now I have to ask you to hear how strange this sort of religion actually is, because I think we've worn it too smooth in our confidence.
What we claim — and we say it out loud every week without flinching — is that God took a body from a girl in Nazareth; that this body was opened on a cross; that out of the opened side a Church was made the way Eve was made from the opened side of a sleeping man; and that we are folded into that body. Not admiringly. Not as an image. But really. We say we are members of his flesh and of his bones. We say we eat him.
That is not normal, and I want you to feel that it isn't. It is strange.
The Romans accused the first Christians of cannibalism and of incest — eating flesh, brothers and sisters in love with one another — and we tell that story as though it were a comic misunderstanding by people who hadn't been handed a catechism. But those people hadn't misunderstood. They heard it accurately and responded the way you'd expect.
Ours is a faith with a body exchange at the center of it, and every soul and generation that has taken this seriously has struck the reasonable people around it as somewhat unwell. And this is exactly why it could only ever be handed over by hand.
Paul and the Apostles never says they reasoned it out and are offering it for consideration. Paul says he received it and is delivering it to you, and what he delivers is a sign. A gesture. These men arrive with bread, wine, hands; done in front of people, by men who had themselves watched it done.
You can't inherit that from words on a page. Somebody has to do it where you can see.
That's why we call the faith apostolic instead of instructional. This is the faith of those people, handed to us through words and signs that they have heard and seen themselves. These were people who had seen something they could not unsee, and then spent the remainder of their lives attempting to show it to somebody else before they were killed.
And it's why I said at the start that this letter is second-best. I can hand you the words. I can't hand you the bread.
Let me tell you plainly what I think this adds up to, because it's the reason any of it ever spread.
We usually defend the martyrs by saying that nobody dies for something they know is a lie. This is true. But it's a weak argument. People die for lies all the time, sincerely, and always have. The stronger claim is the one we keep apologizing for: that they died for a claim that was blatantly ridiculous on its face. Paul says so himself. He preaches a crucified man — an offense to one audience, nonsense to the other — and then calls that the wisdom of God. He isn't conceding a liability. He's telling you the content of the truth. Tertullian put it the other way around a century later: that it is believable because it is unfit. Nobody inventing a religion invents one like this.
So when one person is willing to die for something this absurd, it is frightening. One person, one to one, is somebody you cross the street to avoid.
But a chain of them, handing the absurd thing forward by hand, generation after generation, never once sanding it down to make it easier to carry — that isn't frightening. That is formidable. At some point it stops looking like derangement and begins to look like evidence.
Luke reports both reactions in a single breath. After the first deaths in the young church, he writes that no one dared to join them; and in the same sentence, that people kept carrying the sick into the streets to get near them.
And the same Tertullian, writing to the magistrates who were killing Christians, told them their arithmetic was wrong. The blood, he said, is seed.
And here is the part we leave out. They failed constantly.
We remember Peter's shadow falling across the sick in the street, but we don't remember that Paul left Trophimus behind at Miletus because he was ill and didn't get better, and says so flatly and moves on. We don't remember him telling Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach, because he is a man out of miracles now reaching for a remedy. We don't remember that he asked three times to have his own suffering removed and was told no.
When the plague reached Alexandria in the third century, the bishop wrote afterward that the Christians went into the houses of the sick, nursed them, caught it, and died in their place.
They weren't curing anyone. They were catching it.
And that is what emptied the old temples inside of three generations; not their success rate. A hundred years later an emperor was still writing furious letters about how these people had taken over by feeding the poor — and not only their own poor, but everyone's!
The love that changed the ancient world — this Christian love — was a love that was willing to be seen failing. It had to be, because the God at the center of it disclosed Himself in a public execution. If we require love to be vindicated by results before we'll call it love, we're testifying to some other god. Ours lost, visibly, at the hands of professionals, and we have spent two thousand years refusing to call it a setback and instead have preached the impossible story of that same man having come back from the dead.
But I don't want to leave you with a letter about the beauty of trying.
The parable ends in judgment. The owner comes and destroys those tenants and gives the vineyard to others. Isaiah's song ends with the fence taken down and the wall broken open.
The love that stays is still the love that has a verdict. The tenants aren't spared by the owner's patience — they're exposed by it. Every servant he sent was a mercy and also a summons, and the more he sent, the less they could say they hadn't known.
And we are the tenants. That's the uncomfortable arithmetic here. We are holding something that was planted by someone else, and we have grown accustomed to calling it our own.
And still. He sends the son last of all, and there is no one after the son, because after the son there is nothing left to send.
The stone the builders threw out has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing, Mark says, and it is astonishing to look at.
~
Now, the word I greeted you with.
Maranatha is Aramaic. It is one of the oldest surviving words of Christian prayer, older than the books it appears in. Paul puts it at the very end of a letter to a Greek-speaking congregation, untranslated, with no explanation, in the closing lines where he takes the pen from his secretary and writes in his own hand. He expects them to know it already.
I find that worth sitting with. The first time this word reached a congregation, it reached them the way it's reaching you — at the end of a letter, read aloud, from someone who couldn't be there.
It came down to us as one unbroken string of letters with no spaces in it, and there are two places you can cut it.
Cut it one way and it's marana thā: our Lord, come.
Cut it the other and it's maran ʾathā: our Lord has come.
The same letters. Opposite tense. A petition and a confession, and no one can tell you with finality which one the apostles meant.
I'll be straight with you: the weight of the early evidence favors the request. But I've stopped thinking of the ambiguity as a flaw in the record. I think it's an accurate description of where those men were standing. They had seen him. They were asking to see him again. And they did not have two words for that. They had one.
The last page of our scriptures in Revelation does it in two voices instead. He says, I am coming soon. And the Church answers, come, Lord Jesus. He's already on the way; she is asking him to hurry.
So I greeted you in a language none of us speak, and I'll leave you in it.
We have seen it. We cannot unsee it. We are waiting to see it again.
Maran atha. Our Lord has come.
And when you've said that to yourselves, say the other half back to him:
Come, Lord Jesus.
+ In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen +