The Wicked Tenants
Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went away. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first, and they treated them in the same way. Then he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.' But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.' So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said to him, He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.
Matthew 21:33-41
Days before the cross, Jesus told the temple leadership their own history: prophets rejected, and now the Son standing before them. They understood, and it hardened their plot.
Everything in the vineyard was provided by the owner. The tenants' crime was treating a stewardship like an ownership. And at the center of the parable Jesus quietly reveals who he is: not another servant, but the beloved Son, sent last.
Hold everything you have with open hands and give God the fruit of what was always his. The question is not whether the owner will come, but what he will find when he does.