They Will Respect My Son!

Friday, March 21, 2025

Gen 37:3-4, 12-13, 17-28; Mt 21:33-43, 45-46

Today’s Gospel highlights how human sinfulness offends the generosity of God. 

The parable of the wicked tenants shows the exploitative nature of human wickedness that begins with profound disrespect and ends with a forceful elimination of God from our lives. 

The description of the landowner’s property and the efforts he puts in to make it productive facilitates our understanding that the vineyard was his cherished possession. Words like ‘planting,’ ‘putting a hedge around,’ ‘digging a wine press,’ and ‘building of tower’ help us understand that the landowner took care of the property with utmost attention so that it would yield its produce in good amounts and at the right time.

It is this property that the landowner parts with for a contract, and this shows the goodwill and trust he extends toward the tenants.

Jesus shows that the wickedness of the tenants is twofold: they extort the property from the landowner despite knowing that he cherished it so much and they never hesitate to breach the trust which also takes a violent form by not only maltreating the landowner’s servants twice but also killing the son, the heir to the property that they had set their eyes on, in deliberate violation of the contract. 

By giving this parable, Jesus helps us discover the attributes of God. 

1.Through the person of the landowner, Jesus demonstrates the goodness and patience of God whose generosity is unconditional.

2. Jesus helps us understand that God’s goodness consists in the way He places His trust in the inherent human goodness. Though the wicked tenants misbehave with his servants twice, he still chooses to trust them because they were created in His image and likeness. Nevertheless, the repetition of their offense shows that their sin against the landowner (God) was premeditated, deliberate, and willful in turn for His everlasting patience. 

3. When Goodness is God’s nature, betrayal seems to be the pattern that human wickedness follows. God’s trust is returned with repeated betrayal. In the parable, for all the goodness of the landowner, the wicked tenants only return him profound disrespect, bitter hostility, and brutal killing of his son as represented by the words ‘seizing,’ ‘throwing out,’ and ‘killing.’ Jesus shows that the tenants are wicked because they push the landowner to extremes and exhaust him of his patience by their deliberate and intentional misbehavior.

4. Above all, we would be grossly mistaken if we believed that the landowner (God) judged the wicked tenants in the end. Instead, Jesus helps us conclude for ourselves that the wicked tenants punish themselves by rising against God. This is why we understand that hell is when we remove ourselves from the embrace and presence of God. 

Let us pray that our love for God may be nurtured by our fidelity and love.

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar