And when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and take possession of his inheritance.”
These words of the tenants symbolize humanity’s greatest injustice: the conspiracy against the Son of God. They understood that the Son has the Lord’s authority and the right of inheritance, yet out of envy and an obsession with preserving their own power, they decided to destroy Him. In this way Jesus prophetically reveals the intention of the Jewish religious leaders: to kill Him so that they would not lose their position and influence. But their plot in fact shows the depth of human sin, when a person proclaims himself the owner of the Lord’s vineyard. This parable is not only a historical foretelling of Christ’s crucifixion, but also a spiritual warning to all generations: every time a person rejects God’s authority over his life, he repeats that same tragic word: “Come, let us kill the heir.” Here the ongoing struggle between love and pride is revealed, where the Son of God reconciles with love, while the human being, in pride, reserves for himself the right to take what in truth belongs to God.