 Entitlement is the most destructive force on Earth, and no person, group, or ideology is exempt from its barbaric cruelty. Students demand the right not to be offended, the wealthy contend that they've earned the fruit of their labor, and consumers demand access to products with righteous indignation even as citizens grumble about public benefits. All of us believe that we are entitled to receive, earn, own, produce, and or protect whatever we want, whenever we want it. The worst part is that we all complain that everyone else is entitled itself a sign of our own entitlement. Alas, we turn to the Prophet David for wisdom. Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman keeps awake in vain. It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, and to eat the bread of painful labours, for he gives to his beloved even in his sleep. In other words, in the Bible, human beings do not accomplish or deserve anything. Everything is a free gift. It is the Lord who offends students for their sake. It is the Lord who provides both our employment and our hard work. It is the Lord who fills the land with bounty, and it is the Lord who provides and revokes benefits. Yet, for some reason, that is not enough, humans are not satisfied with sharing in God's generous provision. On the contrary, we want to possess it, to control it, and to hoard it for ourselves. Have you not even read this scripture, the stone which the builders rejected? This became the chief cornerstone. This came about from the Lord. And it is marvelous in our eyes. Richard and I discuss the Gospel of Mark chapter 12 verses 1 to 12. You're listening to the Bible as literature. Hi, this is Father Mark Boulos. And this is Dr. Richard Benton. And you are listening to episode 187 of the Bible as literature podcast. We continue our journey through the Gospel of Mark. We now begin chapter 12. And once again, we see that these pericapies flow one into the other, Richard. Last time we were looking at the metaphor of the fig tree and how the fig tree was not producing fruit. And then the scene where Jesus is driving the money changers from the temple in this kind of prophetic way of destroying the temple because of its internal rottenness. So there is a critique against the scribes and the Pharisees that the internal rottenness is coming from them. And you can see why, because they're not producing fruit, because they're not teaching. There is then the need for Jesus to proclaim how it's all going to have to start over again with the law and with the teaching. We began by emphasizing the work of sowing the seed. And now we're talking constantly about fruit. And here we're talking about working in the vineyard in this morning's story. Mark, as we mentioned many, many times at the beginning of the book, was all about Jesus sowing the seed, Jesus sowing the seed, Jesus sowing the seed, Jesus sowing the seed. It's his father's field. He's sowing it on. So what do you do? After a while you come to collect the fruit. That's why Jesus sees the fig tree that's not producing fruit and he curses it. Because now that he's planted the seed, it's time to collect. And it doesn't belong to the land. It doesn't belong to the guy who plowed. It doesn't belong to the guy who hodled. It belongs to the guy who owns the land and who bought the seed, the one who made the investment in the beginning. God is the possessor. It's the dominant theme. It's so difficult because capitalism and individualism is so ingrained in us that we are trained from a very early age not to take assistance from others, not to accept grace and to take pride in what we've earned. That's what our culture is all about. It's fine, I guess, as an economic system, but in terms of God's teaching, it's a disaster. Because if everything belongs to God, including the land in which you sow seed, how can you claim that you've earned anything? And he began to speak to them in parables. A man planted a vineyard and put a wall around it and dug a vat under the wine press and built a tower and rented it out to vine growers and went on a journey. Let me just say before we dig into this first, Richard, that Mark is alluding to Isaiah chapter 5, in which a vineyard is planted and the Lord wants that vineyard to bear fruit. And in Isaiah there's a tower put in the middle of the vineyard and then the Lord expects a result on his hard work. Justice and righteousness. So you plant the seed of righteousness, then you expect the fruit of righteousness. But there's a subtle difference and that is that in Mark, the vineyard does produce something. Another question is, what to do with what the vineyard produces? At the harvest time he sent a slave to the vine growers in order to receive some of the produce of the vineyard from the vine growers. So here, the master, the owner, who's God the Father. He doesn't say, I did all the work, I own the land, I own the vineyard, now give me its produce. He's very generous. He says, just give me a portion, you can have the rest. That's the rent. So this is exactly how grace works. The human being thinks they are coworkers with God, but God owns everything and he makes everything possible. And then, despite the fact that everything should go back to him, what does he do? He shares it. The fruit is there. In Isaiah chapter 5, in the scene of the fig tree, it wasn't producing fruit. But here we have an instance where it actually is producing fruit. So finally, after all that work we've had of 11 chapters of Mark. You know, here's some seed that's actually producing fruit. Wonderful. So now it's God is happy. He's got some fruit from the land that he invested in. Now what's going to happen when he comes to collect the fruit? If you view these characters as functional and you think about the scribes and the Pharisees being indignant at Jesus and frustrated with him for preaching with authority, which stemmed from their frustration that he walked into the temple and disrupted their business deals and their profits. They're angry because they were trying to use the temple to take as much profit for themselves as possible. Now Jesus is telling a story about them using, you know, Michal. I mean, he's not saying the scribes and the elders and the Pharisees. He's saying the people to whom the vineyard was rented. It's clearly a metaphor for Jerusalem and for the temple. They were given the opportunity to inhabit the land with God's teaching. And they've been trying to take all of the profit for themselves. Now, do we think in Mark that they're going to give up that profit and give something back to God by loving the Gentiles, by loving their enemies? Let's see now what happens. They took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Now the slave of God the Father in this example is the prophet of the Lord. And we know that God sent prophets to Israel to announce the destruction of Jerusalem repeatedly in the Old Testament because the people were acting exactly the way the characters in the story who are living in the land act as ungrateful recipients of God's generosity. The prophet isn't only coming in order to destroy. The prophet's coming to reap what's due to the Lord to collect the fruit and to come check on the people who are taking care of the field. Instead, the prophets are spending all their time talking about why is there no fruit? But you have a choice when the prophet appears, the slave of God. You have a choice. You can hear the word of the prophet unto instruction or unto destruction. But here's the trick. If you receive it unto instruction, it will still destroy you in your mind because the instruction is telling you to share what you have with the nations. But you're trying to prepare for the long winter and you know that if you share you will lose. But in Scripture, everyone's going to face death. Everyone's going to face destruction. Everyone's going to face extinction. This is what I mean when I say the prophet brings the destruction of Jerusalem. The question you have to answer then, is my destruction going to be unto life or unto death? So the choice between instruction and destruction is really no choice at all. It's like the choice in Genesis between slavery to Pharaoh and slavery to God. In worldly terms, it's still slavery. In worldly terms, you're still going to lose. But what will your loss produce? That is what is at the heart of the matter of the seed and death and fruit in the Gospel of Mark. Again, he sent them another slave and they wounded him in the head and treated him shamefully. Would that even today Israel knew the things that make for peace? Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets. You can hear the lamentation of Jesus against Jerusalem rising up from this story. I keep sending you my prophets to teach you to keep killing them. Why can't you just accept that all of this is about love and humility and submission? This establishes the pattern. It wasn't that there was a bad generation, there were some bad people who got a hold of the first guy, the first slave. The one who comes to collect the fruit is the one who gets mistreated. But he's coming there on behalf of the one who rented out the land, the one who owns the land. So a strike against the one who comes to collect the fruit is not just a breaking of the deal, but here they're treating him shamefully, which is then an insult in addition to the one who owns the land. And so they're not only rejecting the deal that was made, but they're rejecting the one who made the deal through shaming him through his slave. Shame is an important function of Scripture. We've talked about it many times in Deuteronomy. You take the one who is cursed under the law and you hang him on a tree publicly so that passers-by will see what happens when you don't obey God's instruction. Remember, instruction, destruction. In Mark, Jesus will be hung on a tree fulfilling the teaching of Deuteronomy and put to shame and passers-by will wag their heads at him and they will see the shame that befalls those who are cursed under the law. But what they won't see is what we're saying here, that the destruction of Jesus in Mark is unto life. The destruction of those who reject the words of the prophets, of the slaves of God. Those who reject that teaching will be destroyed in the same way, but on that day they will be raised and condemned and judged. There's a resurrection unto judgment and there's a resurrection unto life. Instruction and destruction. And he sent another and that one they killed and so with many others beating some and killing others from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. It's the same teaching in Matthew. It's the same point that every generation rejects the teaching. Who wants to be told that their country, their culture, their community, their family, their religion, their tribe, their personal behaviors are wrong? Who wants to be told that? Who would buy a self-help book or a New York Times bestseller that systematically tells the reader you are the problem? No one's going to buy that. If you preach that, you're not going to build a mega church. You're not going to make millions of dollars. Nobody wants to hear that the point of all this is your destruction unto life. That's not appealing. Of course any rational community is going to reject the prophet. That's why Scripture knows that every generation will reject Scripture. And that's why in 1 Corinthians God chooses those who are foolish to represent his teaching and who appear as weak because they're the only ones that have nothing to lose by accepting their destruction because they're already walking the plank. In verse 7, Isaiah, he looked for justice but behold bloodshed for righteousness but behold a cry of distress. There's a dichotomy. It's either righteousness or it's bloodshed. Now give me a portion of your fruits of righteousness. It undermines the person who claims, ah, this is all righteousness. If it is truly righteousness, then you would naturally offer up a portion to God, the one who allowed you to grow this fruit. And so that's the real question. It's not whether it's bloodshed or righteousness simply, but of that fruit of righteousness, are you willing to render God his portion? And that's the tricky bit because a lot of times we're self-righteous. We cannot by definition give any of it to God because it's about us and what we accomplished and what we did. And these vine growers slip then into the opposite of righteousness, which is bloodshed. This is where we have to question our own righteousness. I am the problem. What I thought was righteousness, what I thought was handing over to God was in fact bloodshed. This is the problem with religion and I beg everyone to hear what I'm saying. You receive scripture and you build your churches and your communities around scripture and you benefit from scripture. But if you are not bleeding for your enemies, literally and metaphorically, if you are not constantly allowing scripture to remind you of your shortcomings, not for the sake of your group, but for the sake of those whom you fear, despise or neglect, then you will have the same judgment fall on you. There's one group of people in this pre-Kathy who is correct, who is obedient, and those are the servants. The servant who gets sent to be beaten because he's there to reap the seed that God sowed. The servants who are killed, the servants who are humiliated, who are abused. Those are the only ones who are obedient and they are the ones who do God's will. People very rarely talk about these very faithful servants, who just saw a string of a dozen other servants just get killed by these same people going in obediently to ask again for the fruit one more time. And the word zulos is technical because Paul introduces himself always as the slave of Christ Jesus. The slave of Christ Jesus. The prophets then are the slaves of Christ Jesus, Paul being the last of the prophets so to speak. They just do what they're told. Again, Mark is all about Ezekiel. The Lord puts the scroll in the mouth of his slave, the prophet, so that the prophet would never speak anything out of his own personal experience or out of his own opinions or formulations. He only speaks what God puts in his mouth to speak. The Eucharist is the word of God which is put in your mouth so that when you leave the church, when you open your mouth to speak, you wouldn't speak but you would repeat what you heard in the liturgy of the word before the scroll was put in your mouth in the body and blood of the Lord. That's what slavery is. That's what it means to be liberated from the tyranny of human oppression because the first oppressor in your life is you. You are a slave to your own impulses and your own ego and Scripture liberates you from that. Following chapter 5 of Isaiah that we've been mentioning is Isaiah 6 where the prophet is prepared by the Lord to go out as his messenger to go and speak and the Lord has to purify his mouth before he goes out to preach. So I encourage readers to look at Isaiah 5 and Isaiah 6. And as our teacher would remind us, look at Isaiah 5 and 6 with your ears, not your eyes. He had one more descend of the beloved son. He sent him last of all to them saying, they will respect my son. This landowner is so naive in his trust that these people would have some kind of shame. They just killed how many of his servants, how many of his slaves. Oh, well maybe there's a shred of dignity and of shame left in these people which shines light on what it means that God sent his son, Jesus Christ. I mean, the naive hope that there's a shred of decency but he has to do it. He has to do it because he has to bring the fruits in. He has to harvest the fruit. God's grace in sending Jesus Christ when you read it in this sense is hopelessly naive because how could this guy have any trust that there's any decency left in these people? We should feel at least a little bit of shame that he would see some kind of decency in a people that has shown no decency generation after generation. This is why scripture speaks of the loving kindness of God. This is why in scripture the only victim is God. No human being can claim to be a victim. Only God has a right to execute justice. There are no other victims except God. This is the meaning of that beautiful prayer during Holy Week. Glory to thy long-suffering, O Lord. Because the way human beings justify injuring the other party, you see yourself as the victim of your enemy. You talk to any party in any conflict. They are the victim of the other party. In comes the teaching of the cross that only God is the victim. Suddenly everyone loses their excuse to hurt each other. And they realize suddenly that when they lash out against the other because they feel as though they've been injured, they're actually abusing God. But those vine growers said to one another, this is the air. Come, let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours. They took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine growers and will give the vineyard to others. This is Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy. As God is bringing you into the land, He's showing you all of the people that He's taking out of the land so that you would never think that the land belongs to you and you would never get comfortable. It's not enough for the ones who work the land to keep all of the fruit. What more do you want? What point is there of having land other than producing fruit? They won't do anything. They won't even spare a life for the sake of this fruit. They'll keep it no matter what. But for some reason they want the deed to the land like this is going to give them something. This is the greed that comes from them. It's not enough. It's not enough until they control the entire situation. And this is the problem in Hosea. The people are not faithful because they want to have the upper hand in case this God doesn't provide for them. They can ask another God. In case neither of those guys can go for another God. They can always find a God then that they can work in order to get what they want so that they can control the situation. It's always the control. And God is saying, is it not enough that you have flax and wool and oil and grapes and wine and barley and wheat? You have everything you need? No, I have to control it. And this is where the human being becomes so wicked because it's not enough to have everything. They want to control the source of things. It's not enough to get water out of the well. You have to own the well and defend the well. And lest you play into any kind of anti-Semitic mentality you cannot pretend that this teaching is saying the Jews had their turn and now it's the Christians. This is horrible. This is completely anti-scriptural. And you're missing the point. God is like a father who has two sons. And when he talks to one son, he says, you're doing terribly. I'm going to throw you out and give everything to your brother. And then he turns and talks to the other son, you're doing terribly. I'm going to throw you out and give everything to your brother. Why, dad? Because your brother is better than you. And then he turns to the other brother and says, because your brother is better than you. You see my point. Not only do you not play favorites, but you don't treat everybody nicely and fairly. You remind everyone that their situation is tenuous because then grace becomes a possibility. You can argue with me till the cows come in. The problem of entitlement is born out of this belief of manifest destiny that I deserve an iPhone. I deserve the land of the Native Americans. I deserve it all. You don't deserve anything. I deserve what my parents give me. I deserve not to be offended. You don't deserve anything. I deserve to have what I earned. You didn't earn it. It belongs to God. Deuteronomy, deuteronomy, deuteronomy. God puts you in the land and he can take you out. And if you remember that, there's a possibility that when you as a Gentile see a Jew, or you as a Jew see a Palestinian, instead of talking about the differences and why you're better, because you have something they don't, you would open your door, invite them to the Lord's table in your house and share the bread of life. When the fig tree is not producing fruit, you destroy the fig tree. Here, the land, the vine, is producing fruit. It doesn't need to destroy that. Who is not producing fruit? The vine workers. Therefore, they need to be destroyed. In Hosea 4, there's three things the Lord was expecting to see. Faithfulness, loving kindness, and knowledge of God. And what did he find? He said he didn't find any. It's not a problem of the land. Oh, I've given them too much food and too much to drink. Therefore, I need to destroy the food and the drink. No, food and the drink, they're producing like they're supposed to. It's the people who having received this are not producing any fruit and the fruit that they're producing is the destruction and killing and shaming of the servants and of the Son. Have you not even read this scripture? The stone which the builders rejected. This became the chief cornerstone. This came about from the Lord and it is marvelous in our eyes. He's quoting Psalm 118. But the point is that the cornerstone in ancient architecture holds together the whole structure. If you pull the cornerstone, everything falls apart. It's essential. And in Psalm 118, it is God who is the builder. And it's marvelous and it's wonderful when we receive it as the work of the Lord and not the work of our own hands. When we receive it as something that we don't control, that we don't earn, but that God provides freely in the land with the important clarification and cautionary warning that it belongs not to the Jews but not to the Greeks who are doing business in the temple exchanging back and forth with each other. There's nothing to buy and sell. It belongs to everyone. And they were seeking to seize him and yet they feared the people for they understood that he spoke the parable against them and so they left him and went away. So here, they're still concerned not with God. This is a dominant theme in Mark. They're not afraid of God. They're afraid of the people even Caesar. That's the joke. Caesar is spending all his energy to figure out the politics and who's with them and who's against him and how to appease the mobs that he can fight his opponents. And here, the ministers and teachers in Israel are doing the same darn thing. It's a scandal that they're afraid of the people. It's extremely shameful. They think they own the temple. They think they own the Torah. They think they own these things. We produced it. It's our temple. It is our land. It is our Torah. It is our fruit. We're not going to render any of it to God. They reject the teaching and they reject the teachers who had come to remind them of this. Ultimately, the Lord Jesus Christ.