Mark 12:2-5

“And at the season he sent a servant to the tenant farmers so that he might receive from the tenant farmers some of the fruit of the vineyard. And they took him and beat him, and sent him away with nothing. And again he sent to them another servant, and they wounded him in the head and handled him shamefully. And he sent another, and him they killed. And he sent many others, and some they beat and some they killed.”

Jesus now built up a picture of the growing animosity and sinfulness of the tenant farmers as servants were sent to collect the owner’s share of the produce, his ‘rent’, and their treatment of them grew worse and worse - ‘beat -- wounded in the head -- handled shamefully -- killed’ - until it became a habit and was carried on almost randomly. No one listening would doubt that the prophets and other such men of God were in mind, including John the Baptiser whose fairly recent death would be still well remembered. They too had come to call men to account for what they owed to God, and had been shamefully treated.

‘Sent a servant.’ See Jeremiah 7:25-26 - ‘I have sent unto you all my servants the prophets -- but they made their neck stiff and did worse than their fathers’, and 2 Chronicles 24:19 - ‘yet He sent prophets to them to bring them again to the Lord’. (See also Matthew 23:30-36). For the maltreatment of successive men of God see also 1 Kings 18:13; 1 Kings 22:27; 2Ch 24:20-21 ; 2 Chronicles 36:15-16; Nehemiah 9:26. The consequences that followed are also clearly described.

There is here then the basic lesson of God’s patience. He did not just send one or two He sent many. He gave the leaders of Israel every opportunity to rethink their position, but all they did as a consequence was to add to their crimes.