Luke 20:13-16 (NIV) “Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.’
“But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
“What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.”
When the people heard this, they said, “May this never be!”
In this parable of Jesus, the good owner of the vineyard, God Himself, seems to despair of ever being able to reach the tenant farmers to whom He has leased the vineyard so that He can claim the fruit that is rightfully His. Every servant, small or great, that He has sent to them so far, every prophet that He has sent to deliver His message to them, has been shamefully mistreated and sent away empty handed.
Finally the vineyard owner strikes upon what He hopes will be an effective solution: He will send the Son that He loves as a final, most authoritative emissary. Surely the lessees will respect the authority of the Son!
But the results are exactly what the owner fears most. Driven by greed and rebelling against the wishes and authority of the vineyard owner, those who are charged with making the vineyard productive for the benefit of the owner set themselves to assassinate the Son, and to take over the vineyard for themselves. Of course this brings down the wrath of the owner on their heads, with the death of the usurpers opening the door for the vineyard to be given to others who will faithfully produce its fruit and deliver it to Him as they have been charged to do.
The people listening to Jesus understood right away the picture that Jesus was painting. A vineyard was a symbol that God had used repeatedly for the Jewish people from ancient times. And the lessees could only be the Jewish leaders who were rejecting Jesus’ authority as the Son of the Owner. They saw it foretelling the last chance that the leaders were going to have to get it right. They clearly saw that Jesus was prophesying the destruction of the leaders and the delivery of the kingdom of God into the hands of others if the current trajectory didn’t change. This realization was what wrenched the anguished cry from their lips: “May this never be!”
Father, it is sad that, even though the people clearly saw Jesus’ meaning and clearly understood the prophecy, which was ultimately fulfilled in AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by Rome, they were powerless to change the trajectory, powerless to stop the destruction that was being earned by those who were actively plotting to take Jesus’ life even as He spoke. Lord, the leaders turned a deaf ear to Your clear warning, and figured that they could get away with it, because they were able to pressure the government to sanction their sin against Your Son. Help us to not be so stubborn, so self-righteous, so stiff-necked that we ourselves refuse to repent and turn from those things that will earn Your condemnation as surely as they did. Amen.