The parable of the vineyard, like all parables of this kind, concerns above all the people of God: in the prophetic tradition they are usually symbolically called the vineyard. In this context the meaning of the parable becomes entirely clear, and everyone listening to Jesus understands it. More than that: those whom what He said directly concerned understood perfectly that it concerned them; the cry "May this never be!" is the best proof.

The Savior's answer to this "May this never be!" is also unambiguous enough: He reminds those listening to Him about the cornerstone. The image of the cornerstone appears constantly in Jesus' parables, and its meaning lies in the fact that such stones, used in building a house as the corner elements of a strip foundation, were good for nothing except the purpose for which they were intended. There is no doubt that, in speaking of the cornerstone, Jesus has Himself in mind, thereby making His listeners characters in the parable He has told. As we can see, He wants to make those listening to Him understand that each of them stands before a choice from which there is no escape.

Many people would have liked Jesus to turn out to be one among many - prophets, preachers, teachers of the Torah - in short, an ordinary man. Then He could be listened to without really heeding Him, and accepted without truly accepting Him, as we always do when inwardly we disagree with the speaker. In that case, polite, formal acceptance means only agreement with the other person's right to have his own opinion, a point of view different from ours, one that at times is, in essence, of no concern to us. But the one putting forward that point of view must then also recognize our right to our own understanding of truth, different from the one he proposes. He must allow what today is called pluralism, acknowledge the relativity of every truth and every opinion, including his own, and then in turn he will be allowed to speak, like everyone else.

Had Jesus agreed to such rules of the game, He would perhaps not have had to die on the cross. But that is precisely the point: He could in no way agree to them, not because He absolutely had to prove something to someone and win all the disputes into which His listeners drew Him, but because accepting such rules would have been false testimony for Him and the collapse of His mission.

After all, He brought the Kingdom into the world and revealed to the world the fullness of God, and this was no longer simply one opinion among many, or even one revelation among many: He truly revealed to the world the whole fullness of truth and the whole fullness of revelation. All the great sages and prophets who came before Him asked questions and expressed opinions; He did not ask questions, He answered them, and He Himself became the answer to every possible question. And He could be accepted only as such: any other attitude toward Him would be deceit.

Of course, if a person truly does not realize Who is before him, the matter can still be set right: what is not realized today can be realized tomorrow. But if the issue is an unwillingness to accept the obvious, an unwillingness to give up one's own right to an opinion in the face of the living Truth, the situation is a dead end: the Truth cannot stop being truth, no matter how much someone may want it to. What remains is either to accept or to reject. Either to regard this strange Teacher as the One He Himself considers Himself to be, or to treat Him, at best, as a madman, and at worst, as a conscious apostate and blasphemer claiming what no human being can claim. A choice had to be made: there was no third option.

As he concludes his letter to Timothy, Paul reminds his disciple of the main task of a servant of the Church. It is also, however, the main task of every Christian: the task of bearing witness to the Kingdom so that the world may see it, and so that everyone seeking new life may know where to look for it (vv. 11-16).

Returning to the theme of wealth, the apostle, adding to what he has said already, by no means closes the door of the Kingdom to the rich, just as the Savior Himself did not close it when He said that it is hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom, but never claimed that it is impossible. The apostle, as we can see, explains what the difficulty consists in: in order to receive the Kingdom, a rich person must stop thinking of his wealth as something on which he can lean in life (vv. 17-19). The point is not only that, when he dies, the richest and most influential person in the world can take no more wealth with him than a beggar who has lived all his life on alms. Many understood this and spoke about it long before the Savior came into the world. The point, above all, is where the rich person's spiritual attention is focused, toward what his will is directed, or, in Gospel terms, where his treasure and his heart are.

Wealth really does provide support and power in our world that is being transformed, but it provides them precisely to the extent that the world has not yet been transformed. The habit of relying on such support, as well as using such power, can play a cruel trick on the possessor of wealth when it comes to spiritual life in the proper sense of the word, to life in the Kingdom and the relationships that define it. On coming into contact with the Kingdom, everyone discovers his own unreadiness and inadequacy. Yet a person who has already had to experience something similar, a person with the relevant experience, finds it easier to pass through the disappointment, inevitable for fallen human nature, that usually accompanies such an experience, and perhaps even through resentment. Meanwhile, both disappointment and resentment, though not fatal in themselves, can easily drag on and become, at the least, a serious obstacle on the spiritual path, and at the most, turn a person away altogether from the Kingdom and from spiritual life. Paul warns the rich against this mistake, a mistake that can cost them the Kingdom and eternal life.

Such is the difficult fate of Christian revelation: all the time, everyone who could fish something out of it for himself tried to use it for his own purposes. But its true divinity consists in this, that these attempts never succeeded completely, and sooner or later they failed.

Such also is the fate of those who try to present the Christian gospel as a textbook of revolution and Christ as the chief revolutionary of all times and peoples. Such attempts have been made more than once in the history of European culture. Yet precisely to them one can present the words of today's Gospel reading: "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's." The apostles Paul and Peter were probably inspired by these words when they spoke the following words to the people of God. "Therefore be subject to every human authority for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors" (1 Pet 2:13). "Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist have been established by God" (Rom 13:1).

Only in one case is submission to the authorities impossible: when authority appropriates divine powers for itself; what is God's can be given only to God. That is why the early Christians went, on the one hand, against the words of Peter and Paul, but on the other hand, if one looks more deeply at all three quotations mentioned here, it becomes clear that they were walking the only true path.