Jesus’ teaching was often controversial. When He applied God’s Law to people it was done powerfully, and they felt the burden of it. Reading Mark 12 it strikes me that this is especially the case when He is dealing with people who are trying to test Him; people who should know the truth.
This is all taking place in the last full week before Jesus’ death. Jesus is strongly engaged to point out the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of the day, but also to declare that He has come to bring a clear message of God’s truth – that God loves sinners and is providing salvation and He is the promised Savior.
He begins with a parable about a land owner who leases the land to tenants. When the time is right he comes to collect the rent – paid not in money, but it fruit. But the tenants reject the land owners right to collect the fruit. They mistreat, beat, and even kill his messengers, and when he sends his beloved son they kill him too. It’s a picture of the history of Israel. God chose them and gave them the Promised Land, and as He looked for fruit from them they rejected him and worshipped false god and engaged in a wide variety of activities that amounted to them rejecting God’s right to collect the fruit of transformed lives from them. So God sent prophets to declare the Word of the Lord to them: repent, turn back, don’t harden your hearts. And many of the prophets were treated with contempt, beaten and even killed. But God so loved the world, and these people in the world, that He gave His only begotten beloved Son. And the tenants killed him, too.
But here is where the mystery of God asserts itself. While it is clear that the tenants’ rejection of the son is their destruction, the rejection and death of God’s Son is the way of our salvation. The inheritance of love, forgiveness, hope and peace is ours because the Son died for us. And Jesus’ resurrection seals the deal, life overcoming death so that the power of Jesus love transforms our lives.
So, later in the chapter when we are called to love the Lord our God and our neighbor as ourselves this is really the result of God’s work in us. We love because God loved us so much as to give us Jesus. We receive His love and are filled with it, and then it overflows in our response to God and in our love for one another.
My prayer is that the love that I have received from Jesus transforms my life to such an extent that it changes my priorities and my willingness to give, not a part of my life back to Him, but all of it. Much as the widow, who gave her two small copper coins, the fruit that I desire to give back to God is a life overflowing with God’s love given so that others can know His love too.
This is all taking place in the last full week before Jesus’ death. Jesus is strongly engaged to point out the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of the day, but also to declare that He has come to bring a clear message of God’s truth – that God loves sinners and is providing salvation and He is the promised Savior.
He begins with a parable about a land owner who leases the land to tenants. When the time is right he comes to collect the rent – paid not in money, but it fruit. But the tenants reject the land owners right to collect the fruit. They mistreat, beat, and even kill his messengers, and when he sends his beloved son they kill him too. It’s a picture of the history of Israel. God chose them and gave them the Promised Land, and as He looked for fruit from them they rejected him and worshipped false god and engaged in a wide variety of activities that amounted to them rejecting God’s right to collect the fruit of transformed lives from them. So God sent prophets to declare the Word of the Lord to them: repent, turn back, don’t harden your hearts. And many of the prophets were treated with contempt, beaten and even killed. But God so loved the world, and these people in the world, that He gave His only begotten beloved Son. And the tenants killed him, too.
But here is where the mystery of God asserts itself. While it is clear that the tenants’ rejection of the son is their destruction, the rejection and death of God’s Son is the way of our salvation. The inheritance of love, forgiveness, hope and peace is ours because the Son died for us. And Jesus’ resurrection seals the deal, life overcoming death so that the power of Jesus love transforms our lives.
So, later in the chapter when we are called to love the Lord our God and our neighbor as ourselves this is really the result of God’s work in us. We love because God loved us so much as to give us Jesus. We receive His love and are filled with it, and then it overflows in our response to God and in our love for one another.
My prayer is that the love that I have received from Jesus transforms my life to such an extent that it changes my priorities and my willingness to give, not a part of my life back to Him, but all of it. Much as the widow, who gave her two small copper coins, the fruit that I desire to give back to God is a life overflowing with God’s love given so that others can know His love too.
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