Queen's Road Cell

4. What is Jesus trying to tell the crowd in 20:9-16? God owns the vineyard (Isa 5:1-7, Jer 12:10, Ez 19:10) . The Israelites are only tenants. The tenants are wicked and greedy: they have killed the prophets, and they will kill the son. The vineyard will be given to others. The tenants are the people ("he looked directly at them") Jesus is the cornerstone (Is 28:16, Eph 2:20, 1 Pet 2:7) : rejected, validated, precious, dangerous. Jesus quotes Ps 118:22. This part of the parable is also not hard to understand. In Acts 4:8-12 after being arrested for healing the lame man at the Temple, Peter interprets the second half of this parable for the Jewish leaders who had condemned Jesus just some months earlier. He says: “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a cripple, by what means this man has been healed, be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you cruc...

7. What prompted Jesus to tell this parable (19:11)? "Because he was near to Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately" (cf.7:51)   Jericho was 17 miles from Jerusalem - Jesus' journey would climax soon, but not in the way the crowds expected.  Jerusalem was the political capital, where any change of regime by the Messiah would be expected.   8. How does the returning king reward his servants who have multiplied their minas tenfold and fivefold (19:15-19) The first 2 servants do not claim credit, but ascribe their success to the money left by the master. Both are rewarded and promoted to greater responsibility. The reward is not rest, but opportunity for wider service (Morris). We are not told what happens to the 7 other servants! The rounded number 10 may mean that this teaching applies to all Jesus' followers.   The unusually high 500- 1000% profit by the first and second servants represent unusual wisdom and faithfulne...

We looked today at the gospel writers' accounts of the empty tomb and noted that they differed slightly but were not in direct conflict with one another. So the first verses of Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24 and John 20 all have details that differ, but which are not impossible to harmonize. So the number of women who went in the early morning is different and the number of angels was different. But 3 gospels (except Matthew) make it clear that the stone was rolled away by the time the women arrived. They rushed back to tell Peter, who ran with John to the tomb. When the 2 men left, Jesus then appeared to Mary Magdalene, who had stayed behind. The gospels often differ in details, for many possible reasons. These include the fact that eyewitnesses to the same event may pick up different details, the different target readers of the  4 writers, and the fact that Jesus was an itinerant preacher who would almost certainly have repeated slightly different variations of the same teaching...