When they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away.
Jesus has just told a group of religious leaders a parable about the winemaker. The winemaker prepares the vineyard, and puts in the winepress. Once the harvest was ready, the man sends a slave to get his share, and the tenants kill the slave. The owner sends another, who’s also killed. Finally he sends his son, thinking his son will be safe. Alas, his son is killed also. So what does the owner do? He returns to the vineyard, throws out the current tenants and gives the vineyard to others. That’s when the audience hearing Jesus’ story realizes it’s a story about them and want to arrest him.
It says they wanted to arrest him, but feared the crowds, so they left. There’s a lot of this, towards the end of Jesus’ life. They almost arrest him. They almost throw him off a cliff. They almost end it all. Instead they walk away.
Meanwhile their anger mounts. Every little insult, every untimely miracle, and overturned table, their conviction that Jesus must go increases. They’ve got a narrative and a story in their head, and everything Jesus does proves them right.
That’s a familiar thing for me. We get narratives or stories and then the world conspires to prove them right. We see the mounting ‘evidence’, proving our point. In my experience, when I get in one of those ruts, I can absolutely see the evidence, proving my truth. But in hindsight, I overlook a whole lot of the story that would disprove it. The inconvenient parts of reality get waved away, while little bits are cobbled together to prove me right.
Eventually, the religious and political leaders of Jesus’ time had enough evidence that they tried him, tortured him, and killed him. Luckily, I don’t have sufficient power over anyone else, that this would be the unfortunate outcome of my constructed truth. But when I do it, it’s just as damaging, and it paints an equally lopsided and misrepresentative truth. To be clear, every ‘fact’ I use in my argument is accurate, and when my brain brilliantly strings them together in an argument, it’s a pretty good one, because every piece is true. But what’s missing are all the inconvenient parts.
For Jesus, the religious leaders could have seen more of Jesus’ healing, consistent with the faith they loved. The political leaders could have figured out that Jesus wasn’t there to unseat political leaders of the earth. There’s room for both. But they couldn’t see this, because their theory about the threat of Jesus was already proven by their cobbled together facts.
This morning I’m thinking about the ‘truths’ in my life, and the conclusions I’ve drawn about those around me, based on my convenient editing of the facts. I want to pause when I jump to those conclusions and try to see the other possibilities. If I look for them, for the truths that disprove my truth, I’ll likely find them. I do not want to be responsible for my version of what the religious and political leaders of Jesus’ time did. 
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