Mark 12:1

‘And he began to speak to them in parables, “A man planted a vineyard, and set a hedge about it, and dug a pit for the winepress, and built a tower and let it out to tenant farmers and went into another country.’

‘He began to speak to them.’ In context this clearly means to the deputation from the Sanhedrin (see Mark 12:12). But as the whole incident had taken place in front of crowds of people it also included the crowds all around (see also Mark 12:12; Luke 20:9).

‘In parables.’ That is ‘parabolically’, in a riddle, here a story with a hidden meaning.

The owner planted a vineyard, and then in anticipation of its fruitfulness gave it a protective hedge, dug a pit in the rock where the grapes could be trodden to produce the wine, the juice flowing into a specially prepared cavity, and built a tower as a store room and to be used as a useful watchtower so that the vineyard could be well protected against jackals and thieves. Then he let it out to tenants. This detail would remind His hearers of the similar detail in Isaiah 5:0, where Isaiah demonstrated that the vineyard was Israel, that the owner was God Himself and that its fruit would be ‘wild grapes’, although the grapes are not taken up in this story. By Jesus the responsibility is put on the vinedressers. His concern here was with the behaviour of those who oversaw the vineyard, and the crowd were actually on His side.

The initial detail of the parable was in order to stress that God had made full provision for His people. We can take the lesson for ourselves that when God begins a work He makes ample provision for it. Any failure can therefore only be blamed on those who misuse it.

In the Targum of Isaiah (the Aramaic paraphrase of the Hebrew Scriptures) the tower is interpreted as the Temple. Thus many of His listeners would recognise the association of what He was saying with the Temple, and that His words thus included those who ran the Temple.