NOTES for Mar 12:1-12
The Savior's parable about the vineyard and the tenants who do not want to give the harvest to the owner was quite transparent, transparent and understandable enough that the representatives of religious authority who heard it immediately wanted to seize Him and deal with Him. Usually it is understood in the historical context of the Gospel era, reducing everything to the conflict of the Messiah and the new revelation He brought into the world with the traditional Jewish establishment. In reality, however, the conflict here is more universal, and as such it goes far beyond the concrete history of the Gospel era.
It is the age-old conflict of religious consciousness, and the religiosity it produces, with living Revelation, and ultimately with the Kingdom as the fullness of Revelation. It is no accident that the parable contains not only the figure of the owner's son, but also the figures of the servants whom the owner sends for the harvest even before he sends his own son into the vineyard. This image emphasizes the inner unity of Revelation, which includes the whole history of the Covenant and all of God's servants connected with it. It is completed by the coming of the Messiah, whom the tenants working the vineyard are nevertheless ready to kill just as they had previously killed the servants who were sent.
What is most striking here is the arrogance and self-confidence of the workers: why, exactly, could they hope to become owners of the vineyard after killing the owner's son? Was it not clear to them what would follow this murder? From the parable it turns out that it was not. Here we see a clear distortion of perception, one characteristic precisely of religious consciousness. Religiosity in itself is total; it includes the whole person and wholly subordinates him to itself, if the person agrees to this. Having agreed to such subordination, the person begins to perceive the whole world, and even God, through the prism of his religiosity, at the center of which there is always not God but the person himself, or rather that religious quasi-personality that has replaced his true "I." Here distortions of perception are not only possible but even inevitable, and any attempts to destroy the religious quasi-personality will inevitably meet the most resolute resistance. Meanwhile every living revelation, once received by a person, proves absolutely destructive to his religious quasi-personality, so it is no surprise that religious consciousness rejects every bearer of such revelation.
It is no accident that religious people in every age have treated prophets at least with suspicion, and more often simply hated them and wished them dead: their very existence, not to mention their witness, devalues the religiosity of religious people, so that for them it would be better if the prophet disappeared without a trace and his prophecies were forgotten as quickly as possible. This is a spiritual dead end, both for an individual person and for an entire people, a dead end to which the Savior points His listeners.