The Gospels say little about the purpose of Jesus’s death. They devote effort instead to ushering readers into the drama. We observe. We participate. We grieve and repent. As a result, we learn.
Mark, in particular, presses us to experience Jesus’s death through a series of contrasts and irony. The crucifixion finally unveils Jesus’s true identity as a humiliated and isolated “king of the Jews,” while at the same time it exposes the vicious politics that culminate in an execution designed to dehumanize. If we are to grasp the reign of God, Mark implies, we must observe, confront, and turn away from those politics. Because Jesus’s way is decidedly different.
The contrasts and the manifestations of cruelty occur throughout Mark’s story, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. For example, in Mark 10:41–45 Jesus explicitly warns about people who use coercion, threats, and tyranny to become “great.” There he sets Roman virtues of domination and virility in clear opposition to the road that he and his followers will travel.
In this week’s passage, Mark vividly illustrates the kind of resistance Jesus is up against. In 12:1–12 Jesus again contrasts his path to a path of selfishness and violence. We see it in how Mark narrates a parable about tenants who decide that committing murder will help them seize power.
The parable as commentary
It’s no accident that the parable is located here, within a series of disputes between Jesus and authorities, which will result in the Jerusalem aristocracy’s determination to deliver him to Pontius Pilate (Mark 14:2). The parable provides commentary on the overarching conflict and its theological dimensions. Jesus’s inventive tale about a leased vineyard indicts a group of very powerful people in the story while allowing us readers to peer deeper into the action.
- Jesus’s manner of describing the vineyard, with several connections to Isaiah 5:1–2, invites us to understand the parable as a story about Israel—not a concept, but a group of people with a particular, holy calling.1
- The parable continues Jesus’s answer to a question that a group of Jerusalem’s chief priests, scribes, and elders put to him. They want to know where his authority comes from (Mark 11:27–33). Where do his vision and ethos about a new “reign” (“kingdom”) come from? Who authorized him to go public with all of it? Who is he to act and speak so compellingly for Israel’s well-being?
- The “beloved son” of the vineyard owner draws our attention to Jesus. Accordingly, given the use of “beloved” (agapētos) also in 1:11 and 9:7, we should see the owner as an allegorical stand-in for God.
- Nothing promises the destruction of the vineyard, only that its current custodians will be replaced. After all, the vineyard itself seems to be doing just fine in Jesus’s parable.
- Mark’s description of how Jesus’s hearers interpret the parable, as a lesson told “against them,” points the finger at the chief priests, scribes, and elders who entered the scene in Mark 11:27 (see also 8:31; 10:33; 11:18). This reiterates that the parable denounces specific leaders, not other Jews in general, for refusing to honor God and acknowledge Jesus’s authority.
- Despite the naked villainy of the tenants, the parable refrains from commenting on the wisdom of their plan. How could exterminating the owner’s son wind up in freeing them from having to render to the owner what belongs to the owner? Evidently they think the owner is impotent. Or not serious. Or maybe they believe the owner will somehow admire them for their pluck, in seizing power for themselves by any means necessary. Risky business.
Shirking accountability
In Mark, Jesus suffers rejection from everyone in view, from his closest followers (14:50) all the way up the social ladder to Pilate, the province’s supreme guardian of Roman values and prerogatives. Even God abandons him (15:34). When we let the parable shape our perspective, we have to grant that Mark is not claiming a mistake was made about Jesus’s identity and authority. Mark is describing a world—a whole world of people—that views following Jesus as too costly. Humanity would rather protect what we think is rightly ours than embrace a way of love, justice, belonging, and mutuality. Risky business, given what God has revealed.
The parable doesn’t tell or explain the whole story of Jesus’s rejection, but it does ask us to consider how that rejection is a form of rebellion against God and God’s intentions for the flourishing of all humanity. As mentioned, the parable doesn’t explain how the tenants of the vineyard think they’ll be able to get away with it. It narrates a story about people who simply think they won’t be held accountable.
The long history of Christian anti-Judaism nudges me to note again that Mark’s presentation of the parable explicitly calls out the priestly aristocracy. They were highly influential leaders, caretakers of the Jerusalem temple and its rituals, and partners in an uneasy alliance with Roman authority. Rome allowed the chief priests and their associates to maintain their own religious and civil authority and institutions. But in return, they had to satisfy the empire’s demands and make sure the population did as well. Jesus tells the parable as part of his larger criticism of those arrangements. Apparently he thinks that the leadership of his day suppressed their sense of their accountability to God. Yet he is not on a crusade to discredit or reject Judaism.
We Christians should read the parable, today, as an invitation to examine our own ways of navigating formal and unspoken agreements about how our religion exists within and props up political realities. Where have we come to prize respectability over discipleship? When does the allure of strength override our obligation to love our neighbor? What kinds of horrors ensue when we think accountability to God is something optional, or worth sacrificing because it strikes us as too costly to live out?
Where has the church chosen to make itself accountable instead to a political litmus test, eagerly cutting deals, securing our influence, or recklessly propping up abuses?
Live generously; Tell the truth
Let’s not be naïve. Often life presents us with tough circumstances that defy simple, painless solutions. Leaders have to make difficult decisions. No one’s hands are unstained. We all stray from the path Jesus walks.
Even as we confess and correct our course, Jesus guides the way. His journey rejects the temptation to seize dominance and intimidation, because he travels to a cross. The journey there concludes in a mysterious display of divine solidarity with the crucified of the world—the folks considered discardable and wretched. He asks us to join him in that solidarity (8:34). He asks us to do so with love for God and for neighbors (12:28–34) as the hallmarks of our lives. He implies that our accountability to the well-being of our neighbors—whether they are familiar to us or not (Leviticus 19:18, 34)—is a means of expressing our accountability to God.
That’s good news. That’s the God to whom we are accountable, whose values we are called to share and enjoy. Anything else—any other motivations for pursuing and seizing some kind of greatness for ourselves or for a nation—is a false god.
False gods are liars and bullies. Jesus rejects them on his Palm Sunday Path. He summons us to a better way.
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This commentary is a piece of a larger series. The preaching series “Walking the Palm Sunday Path in Lent” can be helpful to congregations looking for instruction and motivation to participate in the Palm Sunday Path. That’s a movement calling Christians to put their faith into visible action, processing together during the afternoon of Palm Sunday (March 29, 2026) in state capitals and other cities across the United States. That and other scheduled events will allow believers to join their Christian kin in a hope-filled, visible proclamation of Jesus, who rejected the false glory of domination and retribution and declared that God has a better way, a path of love. You can learn more about the movement on the Palm Sunday Path’s soon-to-be-launched website; around the end of January, search online for “Palm Sunday 2026” or direct your browser to palmsunday2026.com.
Notes
- In light of Jesus’s protest in Mark 11:15–17, it’s also possible that Mark urges readers to see the vineyard as representative of the Jerusalem temple. Obviously, it can evoke associations with more than one thing.
