Jesus in Matthew 21:33-34 is sharing a parable with a group of chief priests and scribes in Jerusalem: A landowner prepares a plot of land and leases it to a group of tenants. In exchange for being able to live on the land, the owner expects a share of what the tenants successfully grow. But the tenants decide to break the agreement, and claim the land and everything on it as their own. They go so far as to murder first the workers that the landowner sends to claim his share, and then—thinking that surely they would do to his son what they did to his workers—he sends his son. But the tenants think they if they kill the son, they would become the rightful inheritors of the land. So they kill the son.
Jesus then asks the leaders what they think would happen when the owner himself arrives. They respond that, of course, the owner would exert deadly retribution on the scheming tenants and lease the land to others who would keep their word.
Jesus responds first by quoting from Psalms 118:
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing;
it is marvelous in our eyes
He then concludes with a warning: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”
We are all on leased land. I think of how the United States is built on land that belonged to Indigenous peoples and was literally murderously seized by European immigrants who called it theirs. But the Indigenous tribes were leaseholders themselves, and there is abundant evidence that their culture reflected their instinctive understanding that the land they occupied did not belong to them; it belonged to a divine landowner.
The sooner we reorient our systems and ideologies around the principle that we are only tenants on this earth, here to care for and nurture its resources for a higher purpose, the sooner we will avoid a reckoning that will mean that in our system’s greed-driven desire to claim ownership of what’s not really ours, we will end up losing everything.