Mark 11:27-12:12
Who Do You Say that I Am • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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When we introduced this book we highlighted that it is a book full of question. As Jesus traveled about doing the work of His ministry, people were shocked and amazed, and filled with wonder and that wonder many times came out in question form.
Who is this that can forgive sins, give sight to the blind, heal people with lame legs?
Who is this that winds and waves obey Him?
Questions pepper the landscape of this Gospel and in the middle of this account, Jesus poses a question for everyone reading this narrative.
Who do you say that I am?
We all better come up with the right answer for that one.
In the text today, Jesus and His actions are once again the source of bewilderment. The religious authorities are going to ask a straightforward question hoping that He might say something that they could use to implicate Him, but He brilliantly responds to their question by asking a question.
His question forces their own foolishness to the surface.
In order to save face with the people they were failing to lead and because of fear, they are forced to say, “We don’t know.”
Yikes. Their “We don’t know” response reveals why the temple and it’s authorities were under just judgement, just like a fruit bearing fig tree.
And then following up their “none answer,” Jesus tells a plain parable that doesn’t take many brain cells exercising the powers of discernment to know who is being implicated for their failure to live up to God’s intentions.
This is a powerful passage and sobering as well.
And to understand the weightiness of these matters, we need remind ourselves of how Grammar works because there is a highlighted grammatical point that happens twice in the text.
Languages often attach what is called “mood” to it’s verbs.
The "mood" of a verb refers to the speaker's attitude or intention they are conveying through the verb form.
So a speaker could be stating a fact, like “The dog ran.” (indicative mood) - meaning the dog I am referring to is running. It is simple a statement.
Or maybe someone says, “the dog is chasing you, RUN!” That person isn’t simply stating a fact, they are demanding that you heed what is being said for your own good. Imperative mood.
There are two “imperative” verbs in this passage, but the same imperative verb is used twice, which indicates to me that we better have ears to hear and use all our powers of discernment to hear what is being commanded of us.
27 And they came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him,
28 and they said to him, “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them?”
29 Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. 30 Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man? Answer me.”
31 And they discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 32 But shall we say, ‘From man’?”—they were afraid of the people, for they all held that John really was a prophet.
33 So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”
1 And he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country.
2 When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard.
3 And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 4 Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully.
5 And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed. 6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
7 But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ 8 And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.
9 What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.
10 Have you not read this Scripture: “ ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; 11 this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”
12 And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them. So they left him and went away.
Pray
Did you pick out the “imperative verbs?”
Answer me! The people in this passage had the all-seeing, Almighty, Holy, Creator God of the universe looking them dead in the eye after they had failed to live up to His intentions for them and then commanded them to give an answer to Him.
This is intense. We will have to stand before Him someday. This will be the reality for every single one of us.
We will give an account for our words.
Matthew 12:36 (ESV)
36 I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak,
And our actions…
Romans 14:12 (ESV)
12 So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.
For believers…
2 Corinthians 5:10 (ESV)
10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
And for the unbelievers in this room, or within earshot of this message as it is streaming now or in the future,
God will render to each person according to their deeds.
John 5:22 (ESV)
22 For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son,
Matthew 16:27 (ESV)
27 For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.
Jesus, as Just Judge will either condemn or justify each one of us.
Hear me when I say that, there is an awful judgement that awaits those who are unsaved.
1 Peter 4:5 (ESV)
5 but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.
You may die, but that won’t be your end. He will rise you up out of the tomb someday and you will have to appear before Him and answer to Him before He banishes you to hell.
Oh sinner, consider the fearful danger that you are in
It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over by the hand of God. - Edwards
Answer me! Sobering enough? Is your heart pounding a little? Do you feel nervous to swallow? Good, then we are listening to the message rightly today.
Everyone will answer to Jesus.
Everyone will answer to Jesus.
All authority has been given to Him.
We will either receive His blessing, of come under the crushing weight of His curse.
We will either be organically connected with Him allowing His fruit to be born in us or we will have the roots of our lives wither up under His condemnation.
Let’s set the scene…
Mark 11:27–28 (ESV)
27 And they came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him, 28 and they said to him, “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them?”
This is so bold. Do you remember what He did the day before? He flipped over tables, drove people out, gave a tongue lashing to nearly everyone. It was a wild, disruptive to the status quo scene. This wasn’t Jesus cleansing the temple, it was Him cursing it and creating chaos and then leaving.
And now He is back the next day? You would think the security cameras and the security detail would have picked up on Him. But Jesus strolls in, unafraid and more embolden than ever to let His truth be known.
He walks back into the temple, knowing it will create a stir, but the stir created will be a lot more than the day before because the rulers of the temple will be called out in parable form for committing the worst cosmic crime in all history.
The chief priest, the scribes and the elders were the ones with the highest authority in the land and they didn’t authorize Jesus words or actions the day before so, they question Him about His derived “authority.”
The only ones that could supersede their authority would be a king coming from the Line of David's as the Messiah.
Their question is likely an indirect way of asking if He is God's Anointed One.
They knew that the Lord of Host said through His prophet Zechariah that…
Zechariah 6:12–13 (ESV)
12 ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Behold, the man whose name is the Branch: for he shall branch out from his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord. 13 It is he who shall build the temple of the Lord and shall bear royal honor, and shall sit and rule on his throne.
They are wondering if Jesus, by His actions is claiming to be this coming one. They are hoping He will take their bait so that the could go about destroying Him for blasphemy, but Jesus is smart enough to discern their motives and He poses a question to His questioners.
Mark 11:29–30 (ESV)
29 Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. 30 Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man? Answer me.”
Jesus is challenging their authority, by asserting His own. Jesus is so bold here.
I imagine the leaders thinking, “Who do YOU think YOU are, questioning US.”
But, Jesus doesn’t sidestep their question, He sets up a situation that will expose their lack of authority and justify His ability to ask questions of them!
Depends on they respond to His authority will determines how He might respond to theirs.
I can’t stress how brilliant and bold this is. They ask Jesus two questions and He respond by demanding that they answer the one question He asks them to answer and He demands that they answer twice.
Answer me! Answer me!
The religious leaders are in an embarrassing dilemma.
Mark 11:31–32 (ESV)
31 And they discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 32 But shall we say, ‘From man’?”—they were afraid of the people, for they all held that John really was a prophet.
Here is the dilemma, if they acknowledged John’s prophetic authority was from God they would expose themselves to the charge of unbelief.
If John was from God, why did they not listen to Him?
They didn’t want to expose their failure, so they decide to conceal it and double down on it and therefore added to it.
It reminds me of…
Proverbs 28:13 (ESV)
13 Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.
They chose to conceal their failures to recognize John as one of God’s sent prophets and they attempted to maintain their false front of living up to the intentions God’s had for them as leaders and shepherds of the nation.
Also, they deduce that if they say that John’s authority was from man, their authority will be questioned by everyone overhearing this exchange that they initiated because the people understood John and Jesus to be genuine prophets of God.
They decide to not to answer because they feared “the people.”
Side note: When we fear people more than we fear God, we make a whole bunch of mistakes that have long term impacts on our lives and the lives of the people we love.
So instead of giving the right answer, they give a political one.
Mark 11:33 (ESV)
33 So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.”
Driven by fear, they take a mental poll on the situation and try to figure out what might be best for them instead of stating what is apparently obvious to everyone.
They try to save face so they can keep up their appearance of piety and so they plead ignorance and fail to “answer” Jesus question.
Mark 11:33 (ESV)
33 So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”
They don’t give a definitive answer and fail to acknowlege the truth and so Jesus conceals the truth from them and then proceeds to share a parable based out of the writings of Isaiah the prophet from chapter 5 of the book that bears his name.
It was a famous passage of Scripture that they would have had memorized and one that doesn’t really take a lot of work to interpret.
Mark 12:1 (ESV)
1 And he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country.
Mark 12:2 (ESV)
2 When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard.
The owner of the vineyard rightfully expected a harvest of fruit (kind of like the fig tree in the last passage), and so “He sent a servant” to “get from them (the tenants of the vineyard) some of the “fruit of the vineyard.”
One thing that I want us all to notice as we talk through this parable is the incredible amount of longsuffering and patience displayed by the owner of the vineyard.
Mark 12:3–4 (ESV)
3 And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 4 Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully.
They treated the servant “shamefully,” but it was their behavior that was incredibly shameful.
Servants came to collect, and the tenants beat them, struck them and killed them.
And Jesus continues on with the story.
Mark 12:5 (ESV)
5 And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed.
This is almost absurd. He sent another and “many others.”
It makes me want to write a letter:
“Dear vineyard owner, do you see what is happening? Stop sending your precious people to these pathetic pariahs. They are bent on evil and care nothing about you and only about themselves.”
And yet Jesus keeps telling the story.
Mark 12:6 (ESV)
6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
Can we see the longsuffering, and patience and others centered love that was compelling this vineyard owner to send a “beloved son,” to do the work of fruit collection?
It’s pretty clear how determined and patience this vineyard owner is, but sadly we almost don’t even need to finish the parable to figure out what the tenants were going to do to with this Beloved Son.
But Jesus continues the story by saying,
Mark 12:7–8 (ESV)
7 But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ 8 And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.
It goes from “almost” absurd to “completely” absurd. The behavior is absolutely contrary to all reason and common sense. There is no way these tenants will get away with this.
There will be hell to pay, and Jesus finishes the story by asking yet another question to those who questioned His authority, but this time He doesn’t ask them to answer the question, He uses all His God given authority as God in the Flesh and definitively answers the question for them. He says:
Mark 12:9 (ESV)
9 What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.
In the last chapter the leaders of the temple were trying to figure out how they might “destroy Jesus,” but in telling this parable, in this way, in this public setting, Jesus just “destroyed” them.
“The whole parable…is a short summary of the grand story of the Bible. God chose Israel out of the world to be his own people. He cared for and protected them. He sent his prophets to proclaim his word to them…but so often throughout Israels history the leaders of God's people rejected, persecuted, and even killed the prophets. Finally, God loved his people so much, that even though they had rebelled against him, he sent his own beloved Son. But then the unthinkable happened. The irrational. The inexplicable. God's people killed God's own Son.”
The story ends with the owner of the vineyard being vindicated through the judgement and destruction of those wicked tenants.
Then Jesus follows up this penetrating parable with a quote from Psalm 118, which is a passage that the crowds were shouting a few days earlier as He was presented as a humble king riding into Jerusalem.
They were quoting verses 25-26
25 Save us, we pray, O Lord! O Lord, we pray, give us success! 26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! We bless you from the house of the Lord.
But Jesus quotes the context of those verses starting at verse 22.
22 The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. 23 This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
But even though they were the religious leaders, they failed to see and marvel at the majesty of the man right in front of them.
And Mark tells us,
Mark 12:12 (ESV)
12 And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them. So they left him and went away.
They are perceptive enough to know He is using His authority to call them out, but here, once again, Mark says that due to their clearly misplaced fear, they fail to bend their knees to His authority.
They are fearing the wrong set of persons. They feared the crowd in the temple that day, but they should have been fearing the Triune God, especially since one of its members who had tore the place up the day before was standing in their midst.
The long and the short of this parable is this: those who reject Jesus will be destroyed while those who accept Him will share in His inheritance both now and forever.
Everyone will answer to Jesus.
Everyone will answer to Jesus.
Don’t be defiant toward Him. With brazen boldness He will question everyone of us who questions His authority.
Everyone of us will have to answer the question He poses in the very middle of this book:
Mark 8:29 (ESV)
29 And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Pray
Songs of Response
Benediction
Jesus is not a useless stone that you can throw away and bury somewhere in the backyard when you are done constructing your house. He is not superfluous. He is the permanent foundation stone
11 For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.
Are their any areas of life that Jesus might call into question? What are they? What might He expect to be different?
The religious leaders feared people instead of God and that fear made them foolish. Are there people in your life that are platformed to high in your mind causing you to disobey God?
If Jesus came back today would you be eager to give an account to Him for your words and actions from the last 24 hours?
What are the implications of Proverbs 28:13 - “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”
