Luke 20:1–19 | God's Authority, Patience, and Justice

In this episode of Jim Cantelon Today Podcast, Jim Cantelon explores Luke 20:1–19, revealing a side of God's character that is often overlooked. As Jesus confronts the religious leaders through His authority and the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, discover how God's patience is accompanied by His holiness and justice. Learn why responding to His authority with faith and obedience is essential to a life that honours Him.

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Transcript

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Stacey 0:02

You're listening to Jim Cantelon from Jim Cantelon Today. Today's message comes from Luke 20: 1 - 19.

Jim Cantelon 0:13

So, friends, we're at the 20th chapter of Luke. Can you believe it? Making remarkable progress, kind of like the tortoise, much more so than the hare. But I really believe in taking time with the scriptures. You know, it's not... the scriptures are not fast food by any stretch. They are full of nutrition and they need a lot of time to digest. And so I take that time. We're in chapter 20 of Luke, and we'll look at the first few verses. One day, as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple courts and proclaiming the good news, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, together with the elders, came up to him. Tell us by what authority you're doing these things, they said. Who gave you this authority? He replied, I'll also ask you a question. Tell me. John's baptism, was it from heaven or of human origin? They discussed it among themselves and said, If we say from heaven, he'll ask, Why didn't you believe him? If we say of human origin, all the people will stone us because they're persuaded that John was a prophet. So they answered, We don't know where it was from. And Jesus said, Neither will I tell you by what authority I'm doing these things. The Sanhedrin was a council of 71. Some sources say 72, but I think it was 71. Men comprised mainly of chief priests, the Sadducees, scribes, the sort of the Jewish keepers of the flame in terms of the Torah and the scripture and the oral law. They were like the spiritual lawyers. And then you had the elders, who in the main were Pharisees. And this Sanhedrin governed civil society with legislative, executive, and judiciary authority. And its judgments were like those of a Supreme Court, and it was sometimes referred to in Hebrew as the Beit Din Hagadol, which means great house of justice. And for those who saw it as the ultimate arbiter of social and uh religious law, it was called Knesset Hagadullah, meaning the great synagogue. In Jerusalem, today there is a huge synagogue in the main city, the main center of town, and it's called the Great Synagogue, but it's just it's not the Sanhedrin by any stretch. Anyway, Jews of Israelite descent were members of this august body. A Gentile never was. And two of those members of the Sanhedrin figured prominently in the life and the death of Jesus, one of them being Nicodemus, John chapter 3, and Joseph Arimathea, the story of Jesus' burial. Joseph was from Arimathea, and there was a Sanhedrin there, and so he was a member of that adjunct Sanhedrin, but when he was in Jerusalem, he was a part of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. And of course, the Sanhedrin as such was the ultimate authority as far as Jewish law was concerned in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. By the way, the Romans, even though they were a powerful force, were very lenient with the people that they subjugated. As long as they were peaceful, they let them live under their own law and under their own administration, and they basically had a good life under the Romans. And so, even though they were an authority, the Sanhedrin, the Romans were the ultimate political authority. And this may have been the root of the question here. It was a double-pronged question, political authority, spiritual authority, whatever. Tell us by what authority you do these things, or who is it that gave you this authority? You know, are you from heaven? You from the Romans? You know, you have authority. Where do you get it? Undoubtedly, they were still reeling after Jesus had been cleansing the temple the day or so before, and they knew in their hearts that the Sadducean commercialization of God's house was wrong. The Sadducees were the party of the high priests. They were the elite, they were the well-moneyed people. They lived in the big houses. They controlled the temple. The temple was the generator of income. You know, sometimes you'll go into a city and say, what's the essential income generator for this region? It'll be steel, or it'll be agriculture, or it'll be high tech or whatever. The generator of income for Jerusalem was the temple. And the Sadducees, they managed it, they administered it, and they made a lot of money doing it, authority. The Sanhedrin were empowered to both keep the peace and maintain the traditions of the elders through the oral law. Jesus, you know, was a threat to both of them in their eyes. And so they're trying to trap him here, either in terms of some insurrection politically, so that they could charge him before the Roman procurator, Pilate, or failing that, they hope to ensnare him in some kind of heresy or blasphemy to undermine his authority with the people. So, what does Jesus do? He answers this question with a question. Now, he wasn't being Socratic. You know, you know, the Socratic method is to answer a question with a question, right? He was being rabbinical with this question for a question technique. To this day, and I speak from personal experience, because I lived in Jerusalem for seven years with my wife and my three kids, and in our neighborhood were several, we we would call them seminaries or Bible colleges. In Jerusalem, they're called the yeshiva, and the plural is yeshivot. In my years in Jerusalem, I walked everywhere, and many times I'd walk past these yeshivot, and there would always be sound like argument coming out of the open windows. Why? A rabbinical student never learns alone. He or she must have a foil, another student who argues the other side of an interpretive truth, with the expectation that clarity will emerge out of the this dynamic tension. So, in the Jewish cultural slash spiritual world, belief is communal. indeed, you can't even pray in a synagogue service if a minion has not been established. And what is a minion? A minion is ten men. Shortly after Kathy and our children arrived in Jerusalem back in 1981, we made some very quick friends on the journey to Israel who became our lifelong friends, wonderful, wonderful Israelis. And early on they invited us to their oldest son's bar mitzvah. And they were conservative Jews, so we went to this conservative synagogue. They told us 9.30. We went 9.30, and the place was locked, windows closed, nobody was there. We actually thought that maybe we'd got it wrong. But we waited and we waited about half hour later. Caretaker shows up, opens the door, the windows open, and then slowly people start filtering in, and about an hour and a half after the allotted time, they were all there. So we're going in and we're expecting the service to start. It's not starting because the president of the synagogue is running around, and we knew him. I'll tell you his first name. His name was Alan, and he finally comes up to me. Alan, what's going on? He said, Jim, Jim, he said, I'm establishing the minion. We need 10 men. I have only gotten nine. I need you. Would you be a part of the minion? I said, Alan, uh I'm I'm I'm not Jewish. I do have a kippah, and I says, put your kippah on. And he said, I'll get you a prayer shawl, a tallit, and you join the minion. And so I did it. Maybe in the history of Bar mitzvahs, I may be the only Gentile that's ever participated in a minion. But without the ten men, there's no prayer. The service cannot proceed. And what's interesting is that now, all these years later, 40 plus years later, this young man who is now in his middle ages is a leading pediatrician in North America, and from time to time we contact him and he contacts us. And there's a great bond there because I was a part of the ten men who blessed his bar mitzvah. Pretty cool, eh? But Jesus' answer is was John's baptism from heaven or not? Well, of course, the men knew they couldn't answer that one, and because they couldn't answer it, because either way they'd lose, Jesus said, Well, if you won't give me the answer to my question, I won't give you the answer to my question. Pretty sharp. You know, Jesus had a head on his shoulders, and he was not intimidated by anybody or anything. And sometimes he could be very direct, and sometimes even quite blunt and harsh, even. But uh, these guys got the point and they slunk away, but they begin to mutter among themselves, we gotta kill this guy before we're destroyed. So after tête-à-tête with the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, Jesus moves on and tells another parable. And he's telling these parables because he's surrounded by people, you know. And most of these people would have been semi-literate, if literate at all. Most of them would be not read, not well read, certainly. And Jesus didn't give them theological discourses, he looked around at nature around them, the buildings around them in the city, and so on, and things came to mind, and he told them stories that related to what they could see visually. Pretty sharp way of teaching, actually. So here's a parable, and it's a it's a disturbing parable. Verse 9 of chapter 20. He went on to tell the people this parable. A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers, went away for a long time. At harvest time, he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard, but the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully, and sent away empty-handed. He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out. Then the owner of the vineyard said, What shall I do? I'll send my son, whom I love. Perhaps they'll respect him. But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. This is the heir, they said, Let's kill him. The inheritance will be ours. So they threw him out of the vineyard, killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants, give the vineyard to others. When the people heard this, they said, God forbid. Jesus looked directly at them and asked, When then what is the meaning of that which is written? The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces. Anyone on whom it falls will be crushed. The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people. I've mentioned this before with Jesus' parables. He's speaking to a very primitive culture. In Hebrew, we have an expression, meod primitivi, which means very primitive. Very primitive culture, very severe punishments dealt on those who disobey the law or disappoint their slave masters or run afoul of the culture, beheadings, stonings, uh crucifixions when the Romans were there, you name it. Horrible way to die. And Jesus does not endorse that when he tells these stories where there's reference to people killing and being killed. He's just simply addressing the culture with a made-up story, but that story has a very profound truth. So there's no need for me to interpret this parable of the wicked tenants. The delegation from the Sanhedrin made an immediate application. They said, he's talking about us. They knew, Luke says, they knew he had spoken this parable against them. And offended and afraid, they sought for a way to arrest him immediately. The point being, arrest him and kill him. And fueling their urgency was the troubling shadow of Isaiah's prophetic warning, adding weight to Jesus' parable. Now, follow this with me. I want to read this Isaiah passage. It's chapter 51, verses 1 to 7. I will sing for the one I love, a song about his vineyard. My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up, cleared it of stones, planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a wine press as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. Now, you dwellers in Jerusalem, people of Judea or of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have not done for it? When I look for good grapes, why did it yield only bad? Now I tell you, what am I going to do to my vineyard? I'll take away its hedge, it'll be destroyed. I'll break down its wall, it'll be destroyed. I'll break down its wall, it'll be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briars and thorns will grow there. I will commend command the clouds not to rain on it. The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the nation of Israel. In the people of Judah are the vines he delighted in, and he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. That's why these biblically literate guys, the Sadducees, the scribes, and the Pharisees, knew exactly what Jesus was doing with this parable of the of the of the of the tenants. He was directly addressing them because they knew this Isaiah passage. They were more than aware of not only Isaiah's but also Daniel's and the psalmist's warnings of what would happen to those who thwarted God's plan for mankind. The prospect of being broken, crushed, ground into powder by gentle Jesus, meek and mild was galling. So they fulminated and plotted, neutralizing him became their obsession. You know, this is the side of God's character that you don't often hear preached about or taught in your church, in your church. And I understand I'm a pastor too. Um you don't want to be a bible-, you don't want to be a Bible thumper, you don't want to be, you know, hell and fire and brimstone and damnation, uh, sermon after sermon is sermon. But there is something in the scripture about God's nature that we must never ignore, and that is he's not only loving, he's also just and his justice, like his grace, is inflexible when he applies his grace to a life, he applies his grace to a life, and he will not be altered in his application. But the same thing is true with justice. What is justice? Making wrongs right. And God looks at his creatures whom he has created in his own image, and he sees them going astray. All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone in his own way, to his own way, and the Lord, you know, the Lord's aware of this. There is none righteous, no, not one. We are all sinners. And in being sinful, we're offside with our Maker. We, you know, He wants to be in fellowship with us, but we don't want to be in fellowship with Him. Because there's something in us that does not want to be accountable, and we do not want to be under authority. Much easier to say, God does not exist. As soon as you say that, sigh of relief. Now I'm no longer under authority and I'm no longer accountable. I'm just my own judge. I'm my own court of appeal. Uh I make my own rules. And I have my own truth, okay? And there is no truth that I need to submit myself to other than my own truth. Well, that's very freeing in the short term. Very binding in the long term. And those of you who've gone that way for most of your life, you know exactly how your sins have bound you up, how dysfunction has destroyed your life. You know, you know that. God requires that the wrongs be righted. But we cannot come up with anything good to do that will right or wrong. The Bible says, not by works of righteousness you've done, but according to his mercy he saved us. And so our only approach to God can be and must be our sinfulness. We must, like the tax collector in one of Jesus' parables in the temple, saying on our faces, God be merciful to me. I'm a sinner. That's language God understands. If we say, I thank you, I'm not as other men are. Jesus' parable, the same parable. The Pharisee in this case, you know, I tithe, I wash my hands before I eat, I raise my children in the nurture and administer of the Lord. I attend synagogue three times a week. I fast twice a week. I'm faithful to my wife. I'm a faithful father to my children. Okay, that's all good. All good. That doesn't win any traction with God as it relates to the forgiveness of sin. He is the ultimate judge, he is the ultimate dispenser of justice, and he says, You are a sinner, and your sin must be dealt with. And how does he deal with sin? In the Old Testament, through sacrificial offerings, where a pure and spotless lamb was given on the altar, and his blood was the giver's blood. He was a representative of the one who gave it, and thereby his sins were atoned for. Without the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sin, the scripture says. But in this case, in our case, God's own Son shed his blood on Calvary's tree in order that we might live. In order that the justice of God might be satisfied. And with that satisfaction, then God imputes righteousness to us, sanctifies us, declares us holy, declares us his. And he will even go so far as to say, I know those who are mine. I pray that you're one of his. I pray that I'm one of his. And by God's grace, as we come with our sin and confess it to him, we are his sons.

Stacey 20:33

You've been listening to Jim Cantelon from Jim Cantelon Today. This episode first aired on July 19th, 2026, on Jim Cantelon Today.

Jim Cantelon 20:44

Hi, Jim Cantelon here from Jim Cantelon Today. I'm the founder of Working for Orphans and Widows, and I'm committed to being the hands and feet of Jesus to dying and at risk orphans and widows in Africa and India.

Stacey 20:55

To learn more about Jim Cantelon and WOW - Working for Orphans and Widows, visit WOWMission.com.