Rejecting Jesus

All three of the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—recount the parable Jesus told about the landowner who rented out some property to a group of vine-growers. At harvest time he sent a servant to collect what was due him—likely a percentage of the proceeds.

Instead of paying up, the renters beat the servant and sent him away empty handed. The landowner sent another servant and another and more. Some, those vine-growers beat, some they even killed. At last the owner decided to send his son in hopes that the tenants would respect the son.

They didn’t.

Instead they thought they saw an opportunity. If they killed the son, they reasoned, the inheritance would be theirs.

The key points here are these: the people listening to Jesus tell this story, recognized themselves as the bad guys who killed the son; they also missed the part about what happened to the tenants after they killed the son.

First, those corrupt religious leaders who wanted to kill Jesus, and who finally succeeded in manipulating Pilate into declaring the death sentence upon a man he had determined to be innocent, knew they were the vine-growers in the story, making Jesus either a servant or the son they were planning to kill. In other words, they knew Jesus had come from God, and they didn’t care!

That’s the ultimate rejection.

In dealing with Jesus, people can respond in a variety of ways”

• Jesus? Who’s Jesus?
• I’ve heard of Jesus, and he’s a good man, but I follow _____.
• Jesus is not a real person.
• Jesus is the Son of God, and God is a tyrant. What does that make Jesus?
• Jesus is the Son of God, and I bow before Him in humble submission and repentance.

Likely there are others, but only the latter is the response of the follower, the person who wants to be brought into relationship with God. The others, if they go nowhere else, are simply forms of rejecting Jesus.

The thing is, there’s no reason for the person who asks, Who is Jesus? to stay in a place of ignorance. There’s no reason for the person who thinks Jesus is a myth not to learn the truth about Him instead. In reality, it’s the person who has his eyes wide open, who hears the truth, who understands the truth, and then who denies the truth, that is digging himself a hole he may never be able to climb out of.

That position is the same as those wicked religious leaders of Jesus’s day. Not only did they not want to respect the Son or give Him what was due, they did what they could to prevent others from believing in Him and following Him. That’s why they plotted against Him and had Him killed. They mistakenly thought that would bring an end to their problem.

But it didn’t. Rejecting Jesus was just the beginning of their real problem.

“When the vine-growers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’ They took him, and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Therefore when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vine-growers?”

They said to Him, “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and will rent out the vineyard to other vine-growers who will pay him the proceeds at the proper seasons.” (Matt. 21:38-41)

The crowd listening to Jesus tell this story actually supplied the ending. Jesus simply confirmed what they said, tying it with Scripture:

” ‘THE STONE WHICH THE BUILDERS REJECTED,
THIS BECAME THE CHIEF CORNER stone;
THIS CAME ABOUT FROM THE LORD,
AND IT IS MARVELOUS IN OUR EYES’?
“Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people, producing the fruit of it. And he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will scatter him like dust.” (Matt. 21:42b-44)

This story reminds me of Adam. He knew that God had told Him not to eat of the fruit from the special tree, but he ignored God and did what he wanted instead. He rejected Him just as surely as those religious leaders rejected Jesus knowing that He was in fact the messiah.

In fact, what did they tell Pilate during Jesus’s final public trial? We have no king but Caesar. In other words, Messiah who is to come and reign is not over us; God is not over us. That was their way of taking the Son out and killing Him in the hope that they’d get the prize—they’d get to keep the power and authority they had taken for themselves.

Today people reject Jesus so they can keep their own rule and authority over their little lives. They don’t want God to tell them what to do, so they reject the Son in hopes that the kingdom of their heart will be all their own.

News flash: It won’t be.