To the question about His authority our Lord answers the chief priests and the elders of the people by inquiring their thought of John's baptism. He appeals neither to miracles nor prophecy, but to conscience. How evident the accomplishment of the ancient oracles in His person, life, ministry! How full the testimony of signs and wonders wrought by Him! Yet their question showed how vain all had been, as His question showed either their dishonesty or their incompetency. In either case, who were they to judge? Little did they think that they and every other class in Israel, who successively sought to canvass the Lord of glory, were in truth but discovering their own distance and alienation from God. So indeed it ever is. Our judgments of others and of all things, above all of what concerns Christ, are the unfailing gauge of our own condition; and equally are we laid bare, whether right or wrong, by our refusal to judge. In this instance (ver. 23-27) the want of conscience was manifest—nowhere so fatal as in religious guides. “They reasoned within themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say unto us, Why did ye not then believe him! But if we shall say, Of men; we fear the people; for all hold John as a prophet.” God was not in their thoughts; and thus all was false and wrong. And if God be not the object, self is the idol, and what more debasing? These chief priests were, at the bottom of their hearts, the abject slaves of the people over whose faith or superstition they had dominion. “We fear the people.” This at least was true. “And they answered Jesus and said, We cannot tell.” This was as clearly false, the merest shift of men who preferred to allege their incapacity to judge in their own sphere rather than own what they knew must convict them of fighting against God. They could tell but would not, because of the felt consequences. In the hands of Satan they are the main energy of evil and enemy of good, their private interests being always opposed to the real interests of God's people. Blind guides by their own acknowledgment! Infinitely worse the blindness, which, governed by no motive higher than present advantage and self-importance, overlooked God manifest in the flesh, and threw away, as incredulity ever does, riches greater by far than the treasures in Egypt! To such as these the Lord with ineffable dignity declines to render an account of His authority: He had often borne witness to it before. To ask it of Him—now furnished of itself the best proof that an answer was useless. How explain color to men who never saw I to men who would not see, if they could But our Lord does more. In the parable of the two sons commanded to work in the vineyard (ver. 22-32) He convicts these religious leaders of being worse before God than the most despised classes in the land. “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not,” &c. Decent lip-homage forms— “I go, sir, and went not” —such was the religion of those who stood highest in the world's estimate of that day. Self-will was unbroken and unjudged. As for those who disgraced the decencies of society in riotous or otherwise disreputable ways, they were more accessible to the stirring, searching appeals of John. Their very open and unrestrained evil exposed them to his righteous rebuke; and, in fact, they, not the respectable devotees, “believed him.” Such as made a fair show in the flesh were not prepared to withdraw the veil of a fair reputation without from a godless, self-pleasing course and character within; and as they rejected the counsel of God against themselves at John's summons, so they would not follow the example of the poor outcasts now repentant. Deaf to the call of righteousness, they were just as hardened against the operations of God's grace, even where it was most conspicuous. “And ye, when he had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him.” Repentance awakens the sense of relationship to God as the One sinned against. The resolutions of nature begin and end in “I go, sir.” The Spirit of God produces the deep and overwhelming conviction that all has been evil against Him, with neither room for, nor desire of, excuse. But it is lost for worldly religion, which, resisting alike God's testimony and the evidence of conversion in others, sinks into increasing darkness and hostility to God. The ordained Judge of living and dead pronounces these proud, self-complacent men worse than those they deemed the worst. They were no judges now: nay, they were judged.
But next the Lord sets forth, not merely man's conduct toward God, but God's dealing with man, and this in a two-fold form: first, in view of human responsibility as under law: and secondly, in view of God's grace under the kingdom of heaven. The former is developed in the parable of the householder (ver. 33-41), the latter in that of the king's marriage-feast for his son. (Chap. 22:1-14). Of these let us now look at the first.
“Hear another parable: There was a certain householder which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country: and when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it.” It is a picture founded on, and filling up the sketch in, Isa. 5—a picture of God's painstaking dealings in Israel. “What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it?” Then He looked for fruit. All had been settled by His directions, every outward advantage afforded by His goodness and power under Moses, Joshua, &c. There was definite arrangement, abundant blessing, ample protection, and adequate assertion of His rights by the prophets. “And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another.” There was full patience too. “Again, he sent other servants more than the first; and they did unto them likewise.” Was there a single possibility that remained, a hope however forlorn? “Last of all, he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son.” Alas! it was but the crowning of their iniquity and the occasion of bringing out their guilt and hopeless ruin. For “when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir: come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him.” They recognized the Messiah then, but only so as to provoke their malice and worldly lusts. “Let us kill him and let us seize on his inheritance.” It was not only lack of fruit, persistent refusal of all the just claims of God and robbing Him of every due return, but the fullest outbreak of rebellious hatred, when tested by the presence of the Son of God in their midst. Probation is over; the question of man's state and of God's efforts to get fruit from His vineyard is at an end. The death of the rejected Messiah has closed this book. Man—the Jew—ought to have made a becoming answer to God for the benefits so lavishly showered on him; but his answer was—the cross. It is too late to talk of what men should be. Tried by God under the most favorable circumstances, they betrayed and shed the innocent blood; they killed the heir to seize on his inheritance. Hence judgment is now the only portion man under law has to expect. “When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen?” Seared as the poor Jews were, they could not but confess the sad truth: “He will miserably destroy those wicked men,” &c. The wickedness of the husbandmen failed to achieve its own selfish end, as surely as it had never rendered fruits meet for Him whose provident care left men without excuse. But the rights of the householder were intact; and if there was still “the lord of the vineyard,” was He indifferent to the accumulated guilt of wronged servants and of His outraged Son? It could not be. He must, themselves being the witnesses, avenge the more summarily, because of His long patience and incomparable love so shamefully spurned and defied. Others would have the vineyard let to them, who should render Him the fruits in their seasons.
Thus the death of Christ is viewed in this parable, not as the groundwork of the counsels of God, but as the climax of man's sin and the closing scene of his responsibility. Whether law or prophets or Christ sought fruit for God, all was vain, not because God's claim was not righteous, but because man—aye, favored man, with every conceivable help—was incorrigible. In this aspect the rejection of the Messiah had the most solemn meaning; for it demonstrated, beyond appeal, that man, the Jew, was good for nothing if weighed in divine scales. It was not only that he was evil and unrighteous, but he could not endure perfect love and goodness in the person of Christ. Had there been a single particle of divine light or love in men's hearts, they would have reverenced the Son; but now the full proof stood out, that human nature as such is hopelessly bad; and that the presence of a divine person, who deigned in love to be of themselves as man, gave only the final opportunity to strike the most malicious and insulting blow at God Himself. In a word, man was now shown and pronounced to be LOST. “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloak for their sin. He that hateth me hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father.” Christ's death was the grand turning point in the ways of God; the moral history of man, in the most important sense, terminates there.
“Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the Scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in his eyes.” (Ver. 42.) It was the revealed conduct of those who took the lead in Israel—so revealed in their own Scriptures. Marvelous doing on the Lord's part!—in manifest reversal of such as set themselves up, and were accepted, as acting in His name: yet to be marvelous in Israel's eyes, when the now-hidden but exalted Savior comes forth, the joy of the people, who shall then welcome and forever bless their once rejected King: for truly His mercy endures forever. Meanwhile His lips utter the sentence of sure rejection from their high estate: “therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God (not of heaven, for this they had not) shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” Nor was this all: for “whosoever shall fall on this stone (Himself in humiliation) shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall (i.e., consequent on His exaltation), it will grind him to powder.” Thus, He sets forth the then ensuing stumbles of unbelief; and further, the positive execution of destructive judgment, whether individual or national, Jewish or Gentile, at His appearing in glory. (Comp. Dan. 2)
It is in all respects a notable scene, and the Lord, now drawing to the conclusion of His testimony, speaks with piercing decision. So that, spiritually impotent and dull as the chief priests and Pharisees might be, and couched as His words were in parables, the drift and aim was distinctly felt. And yet, whatever their murderous will, they could do nothing till His hour was come; for the people in a measure bowed to His word, and took Him for a prophet. He brought God in presence of their conscience, and their awe feebly answered to His words of coming woe!