Parable of the Tenants: Leadership is all about stewardship

It Is Not Your Vineyard

There is a question that sits underneath almost every leadership role, whether it is running a business, managing a team, raising a family, or leading a church. The question is this: who does this actually belong to?

John Harding, senior pastor of Frontline Church in Liverpool, tackled that question head-on through one of Jesus's most confrontational parables — the Parable of the Tenants from Mark chapter 12. And the answer he landed on might be uncomfortable for anyone who has ever felt a sense of ownership over the people or projects they lead.

A Story Designed to Provoke

Jesus told parables — stories with hidden meaning — as a way of forcing people to choose a response. As John put it, "Parables are stories designed to provoke a response. You can either think, well nice story, thank you Jesus, and then move on. Or you can engage with the story and work out where you fit in that story and what it means for you today."

The Parable of the Tenants works on a familiar economic model. A landowner plants a vineyard, sets it up with everything it needs — walls, a wine press, a watchtower — then rents it out to tenant farmers and goes away. At harvest time, he sends servants to collect his share of the fruit. The tenants beat the first servant, strike the second on the head, and kill the third. More servants come. More are beaten or killed.

Finally, the landowner sends his son, thinking surely the tenants will respect him. Instead, they kill the son too, reasoning that with the heir dead, the inheritance will be theirs.

Who Is Who in This Story

John unpacked the layers carefully. God is the landowner. Humanity — specifically the Jewish nation in Jesus's immediate context — is the vineyard. And the tenants? They are the leaders.

"The tenants are the leaders. That is a big idea," John said. "Because it means for us today, at our level, that nothing and no one that we ever lead are truly ours. They belong to God. We are only ever merely stewards of what God has entrusted to us."

He drew from his own experience as a former school teacher. "My classes, those pupils — they weren't ever really mine. Not really. They belonged to God first and foremost. They were his. And that is a very powerful idea. It means God cared for them and loved them more than I could ever care for them. And he had merely appointed me as a steward over them."

The same principle scales to anything: a family, a business, a team, a nation. "Imagine if we saw them not as there for us, as ours to produce fruit and resources for our benefit, to serve us. But imagine if we saw them as belonging to God — belonging to a God who loves and cares for them and is deeply, deeply interested in their well-being. Imagine how that might impact your leadership. Or perhaps rather, I should say, your stewardship."

The Point of Leadership Is Fruitfulness

If leaders are tenants and not owners, then the job description changes. The purpose of leadership, according to this parable, is not to accumulate power or resources for yourself. It is to nurture the people entrusted to you into fruitfulness.

John explored what fruitfulness looks like on several levels. On a practical level, it means investing in people so they can thrive — helping your team, your family, or your community be their best. On a spiritual level, the Bible describes human fruitfulness with words like love, joy, peace, patience, and self-control. These are what Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit.

But at the deepest level, John suggested that the fruit Jesus was primarily talking about was repentance. "Repentance — tricky word, religious word. It simply means to recognise where your thinking is faulty, where your thinking doesn't line up with God's thinking, and to change your thinking to align with God's."

That is a course correction, not a punishment. And it is the foundation for everything else. "You can't really produce spiritual fruit like peace or joy without repentance, without a change of thinking, without aligning how you think with how God thinks as revealed in the Bible."

What Happens When Leaders Forget

The parable does not end well for the tenants. When the landowner sent servants to collect the fruit that was due, the tenants rejected them. They beat them, mistreated them, killed them. These servants, John explained, represent the prophets throughout history who challenged leaders to change direction — people who gave "unrequested feedback and criticism."

"The powers that be have always silenced their prophets," John observed. He pointed to John the Baptist, who was arrested and beheaded for calling out hypocrisy. And he drew the line forward to modern figures: Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela — "people who were silenced or even killed. Of course, they were never truly silenced."

The pattern is clear. When leaders start treating what they lead as their own — when they stop seeing themselves as stewards and start acting as owners — they become hostile to anyone who challenges them. The feedback that could save them becomes the threat they try to eliminate.

The Son Who Was Sent

The climax of the parable is devastating. The landowner sends his own son, and the tenants kill him too. Jesus was, of course, talking about himself — "his divine nature as the unique beloved son of God" and "the sort of death that he would die at the hands of sinful men."

It is a story about the lengths God will go to in pursuit of the fruit he desires from humanity. He does not give up after the first rejection, or the second, or the tenth. He sends his own son. And even when that son is killed, the story does not end there. The resurrection changes everything.

The Challenge That Remains

John brought the parable back to the personal with a memory from his teaching days. "You'd from time to time have the sort of really annoying kid in class who'd be just so disruptive... and you're about to sort of lose it... and I would just find myself saying to myself, John, that boy is loved by God. He is precious to God. He belongs to God."

That mental shift — from "this is my problem to deal with" to "this person belongs to God and I am stewarding them" — changed his emotional response and his behaviour every time.

The parable challenges everyone in a position of influence to ask three questions. First, do you see the people you lead as God's, or as yours? Second, are you nurturing them towards fruitfulness, or using them for your own benefit? And third, when someone challenges you — when a prophet shows up with uncomfortable truth — do you listen, or do you try to silence them?

"I said at the start that these stories are designed to provoke a response," John concluded. "We can either think, well nice story Jesus, thanks for that today... or we can engage with the story and we can work out where we are in the story and what that means for us today."

The vineyard is not yours. The people are not yours. The question is whether you will steward what you have been given — or whether you will act as though it all belongs to you.

What area of your life have you been leading as an owner rather than a steward?