Who reads this moving parable for the first time, can hardly imagine how closely this story resembles reality.
God Who created the earth is compared to a landowner who planted a vineyard. God entrusted the care of the earth to the people He created for that purpose, but the people became self-willed and did not think anymore about the rights God had to the earth, and to the people He had created. Again and again God has sent prophets who reminded us of the rights of God, but it annoys us to be reminded of the fact that God has the rights to our lives and to the work of our hands. The prophets were killed, or at least abused and despised. That is the way it was, the way it is, and the way it always will be.
But God so loved the world that He finally sent His Son to earth, to enable us to lead a meaningful life. Yet, when Jesus spoke about the reality of God’s plan, the people got so angry that they lost their mind and could only think, ‘How can we silence Him?’ That is not so strange, for we all have this inclination!
We do not listen to what God wants to say to us. We prefer to talk so much and so long about what God might say, that we start believing that He has actually said it.
How deep have we fallen, how far have we strayed from God!
But God does not reject us. He is looking for us. And while the enraged people put Jesus to death outside the city gate, God used precisely this to grant us life.