The Fruit of Love

A journey through Mark 11 and 12 reveals what Jesus sought beneath all the religious activity: a relationship with the Father and a life bearing the fruit of love.

Standing in the Heart of the Temple

Come sit with me for a minute.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee, because I want to show you something I discovered as I crossed the bridge between Mark 11 and Mark 12.

Slowing down has allowed me to notice things I miss when I am simply trying to get through a chapter. One story leads into another. A word catches my attention and sends me back to something Jesus said a few verses earlier. And suddenly stories I have read separately for years begin connecting like threads.

That happened here.

Jesus is standing in the heart of the religious system.

He is in the temple.

He has looked around and seen what His Father’s house has become, and then He starts moving things.

Tables are overturned. Chairs are moved. Business stops.

I can almost feel the disruption of it.

This is not a quiet correction around the edges. Jesus has walked into a system that has been carefully established and says, essentially, This isn’t what My Father’s house was meant to be.

“My house shall be called a house of prayer.”

I keep coming back to those words.

A house of prayer.

Not simply another religious activity to add to all the others. Not another meeting or obligation or something to check off the list.

Prayer is relationship.

It is bringing my actual life to God. My questions and fears. My needs and desires. The things I understand and the things I don’t. It is listening and wrestling and receiving and trusting. It is living my life with Him instead of building a system around Him.

And here is Jesus standing in His Father’s house, surrounded by religious activity, calling it back to relationship.

The Vineyard

Then He tells them a story.

There is a vineyard.

The owner has taken great care with it. He plants it, surrounds it with a hedge, digs a place for the winepress and builds a tower. He doesn’t leave a barren piece of ground and tell someone else to make something of it.

He establishes the vineyard.

He protects it.

He prepares it for fruit.

And then he places it into the hands of tenants.

Tenants.

That word changes the story for me.

They have real responsibility. They are meant to tend the vineyard, care for it and cultivate what has been entrusted to them.

But it isn’t theirs.

The vineyard represents Israel, God’s people, and Jesus is telling this story to the very people who have been entrusted with caring for them.

When harvest comes, the owner sends a servant to receive some of the fruit.

The tenants beat him.

The owner sends another.

They mistreat him too.

More are sent. Some are beaten. Some are killed.

Finally, the owner sends his beloved son.

Surely they will receive him.

But when the tenants see the son coming, they don’t think, The owner’s son is here. Let’s receive him. Let’s hear what he has to say. Let’s rearrange whatever needs rearranging because this vineyard belongs to his father.

Instead they say:

“This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.”

And there it is.

Somewhere along the way, they stopped thinking like tenants and started thinking like owners.

Tenants or Owners?

They had become comfortable in the vineyard.

They knew how it worked. They knew their positions. They knew the rules. They had built an entire life inside it.

And now the Son has arrived and He is touching things.

Moving things.

Overturning things.

And everything in them seems to be saying:

Don’t touch this. We know how this works.

While Jesus is standing there saying:

But it belongs to My Father.

The religious leaders know the story is about them.

Mark tells us they realize it.

And then something happens that I had never really stopped to consider.

They begin coming to Jesus with questions.

Different groups, one after another.

And I started wondering: If I believed someone was a false teacher, someone who was threatening the things I believed and the system I had given my life to, and I had one question with which to expose Him, what would I ask?

Because their questions aren’t random.

Each group brings Jesus the question that seems to sit right at the edge of its own worldview.

Image

The Pharisees and Herodians ask about Caesar.

Should we pay the tax or shouldn’t we?

It is a trap, but underneath it is a question about authority.

Jesus asks them to bring Him a coin.

He holds it up.

“Whose image and inscription is this?”

Caesar’s.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

I have heard those words my entire life, but this time I got stuck on one word.

Image.

The coin bears Caesar’s image.

And I bear God’s.

We were created in the image of God.

Suddenly Jesus’ answer felt so much bigger than taxes.

Give Caesar what bears Caesar’s image.

And give God what bears His.

Me.

“You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.” 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

It is another reminder of belonging.

I am not the Owner.

I belong to Someone.

Comfortably Boxed In

Then the Sadducees come with their question, and of course they ask about resurrection because they don’t believe in it.

They create this elaborate scenario about a woman who marries seven brothers and ask Jesus whose wife she will be in the resurrection.

Jesus tells them they don’t understand the Scriptures or the power of God.

And I can almost feel Him stretching the walls they have built around God.

You have decided what is possible based on what you can understand.

I know something about that.

There is safety in a system.

If I can determine what is right and what is wrong, what God will do and what He won’t do, what obedience should produce and what blessing should look like, I have something solid to hold onto.

It reminds me so much of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Give me the knowledge and I can determine the outcome.

But relationship asks something different of me.

Relationship asks me to trust a Person I cannot control.

The Fruit is Love

Then a scribe comes to Jesus and asks which commandment matters most.

Jesus tells him to love God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love his neighbor as himself.

And something beautiful happens.

The scribe hears Him.

He says that loving God and loving our neighbor is more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.

And this is where the whole vineyard opened up for me.

There is the fruit.

The owner had established this beautiful vineyard and entrusted it to tenants because He was looking for fruit.

And suddenly one of the people inside the religious system sees it.

The system isn’t the fruit.

The sacrifices aren’t the fruit.

The activity isn’t the fruit.

Knowing the right things isn’t the fruit.

The fruit is love.

Love the Father with everything in you.

Love the person in front of you.

Jesus looks at this scribe and says, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

I love that moment.

In the middle of all the confrontation, there is this glimpse of tenderness.

Yes. You’re seeing it.

This is what I’ve been talking about.

And then nobody dares ask Him another question.

Who Am I?

So Jesus begins asking His own.

They have been trying to determine whether He has the right answers, whether His theology fits, whether His politics are acceptable.

But Jesus turns their attention toward a much larger question.

Do you actually know who is standing in front of you?

The Son has come into the vineyard.

The heir is standing right there.

And they are so busy deciding whether He fits into their system that they cannot see that the whole system was meant to arrange itself around Him.

The Son Examins the Fruit

Then Jesus looks at what their system has produced.

He warns about scribes who love long robes, respectful greetings, important seats and places of honor.

They have become comfortable with what comes from having a position in the vineyard.

And then He says something that I had never connected to the story that follows.

They “devour widows’ houses.”

And then a widow walks into the story.

She approaches the treasury and drops in two tiny coins.

Everything she has to live on.

For most of my life, I have heard this story as an example of sacrificial giving, and there is certainly something beautiful about the way Jesus sees her. Others see two nearly worthless coins. Jesus sees what they cost her.

But I can’t separate her from the words Jesus has just spoken.

They devour widows’ houses.

And now a widow has given her entire livelihood into the system.

Entrusted to Love

I wonder if Jesus is showing us both things.

The beauty of a woman who gives from her heart and the tragedy of a religious system that has forgotten the very people it was entrusted to tend.

The temple is busy.

Offerings are being collected.

Sacrifices are being made.

Teachers are teaching.

People are praying long prayers.

Everything appears to be functioning.

But the Owner has come looking for fruit.

And that is where all these threads from Mark 11 and 12 came together for me.

Jesus overturns the tables because His Father’s house was meant to be a house of prayer.

He tells the tenants that the vineyard belongs to Someone else.

He holds up a coin and asks whose image it bears.

He stretches the Sadducees beyond the God they have made manageable.

He tells the scribe what fruit the Owner is actually looking for.

Love God.

Love people.

And then He points toward a vulnerable widow and exposes what can happen when maintaining a religious system becomes more important than the people we were entrusted to love.

I sat with all of that for a while.

Because suddenly I wasn’t looking at a group of religious leaders two thousand years ago anymore.

I was looking at myself.

I Am His Temple

The New Testament says that I am His temple now.

I bear His image.

I belong to Him.

And I have spent much of my life learning how easily I can trade relationship for a system.

A system tells me what to do.

Relationship asks me to come close.

A system gives me formulas.

Relationship asks me to trust.

A system can give me the illusion that if I understand enough and do everything correctly, I can control what happens next.

Relationship keeps reminding me that I am not the Source.

And maybe this is why those words from the temple have become so beautiful to me:

“My house shall be called a house of prayer.”

The Fruit He is Looking For

I don’t hear Jesus asking me for more religious activity.

I hear an invitation.

Come live your life with Me.

Bring Me the thing you don’t know how to fix.

Bring Me the question that doesn’t have an answer yet.

Bring Me your family and your finances and your dreams and your disappointment.

Bring Me the parts of your life you keep trying to hold together.

You don’t have to own the vineyard.

You don’t have to make yourself the source.

You don’t have to figure Me out so that you can feel safe.

You bear My image.

You belong to Me.

Come close.

And from that relationship, fruit grows.

We love Him because we have been loved.

And when we live loved, that love begins spilling over onto the people around us.

Maybe that was the fruit He was looking for all along.

An Invitation to Come Close

So I wonder if you might sit here for another minute before you move on with your day.

These are some of the questions Mark has been asking me. Maybe one of them is an invitation for you too.

Where have I exchanged relationship with God for a system that feels safer?

What am I trying to hold together that was never mine to hold?

What has God entrusted to me that I have slowly begun treating as though I own it?

Have I become so attached to the way I believe God should work that I might struggle to recognize Him if He came differently than I expected?

Is the life I am cultivating producing the fruit Jesus said mattered most—loving God and loving the people around me?

And maybe most of all:

What would change if I really believed that I bear His image and belong to Him?

You don’t have to figure out the answers.

Maybe that’s the point.

Bring the questions to Him.

Let them become prayer.

Father, I am Yours.

Everything You have entrusted to me is Yours.

I don’t have to hold it all together.

When I reach for a system because relationship feels vulnerable, draw me close again.

Teach me what it means to live my whole life with You.

Let me know Your love so deeply that loving You and loving the people around me becomes the natural fruit of being with You.

And when I forget whose vineyard this is, help me remember.

Maybe that is where a house of prayer begins.

In everything you do -eat, play, and love- may it always be seasoned with Joy!