No man was braver than our Lord Jesus. Right to their face and at the risk of His life, He exposed the evil intentions of the self-engrossed leaders of the people of God in His generation. Ironically, our passage ends with these chief priests seeking to arrest Him (Matt. 21:45–46), thereby practicing precisely the kind of hard-hearted grasping that Jesus condemned in the story. Jesus’ strong actions (driving vendors from the temple) and words of coming judgment (the neighboring stories of the cursing of the fig tree and the parables of the two sons and the wedding feast) are weapons in the battle against the religious establishment He had been fighting since He entered Jerusalem.

Jesus’ parable is rooted particularly in Isaiah’s teaching and is unusually allegorical. The owner of the vineyard is God—“the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel” (Isa. 5:7); the ungrateful tenants in Jesus’ crosshairs are the leaders—“the LORD will enter into judgment with the elders and princes of his people” (3:14); and the servants sent by the master refer to the prophets (Jesus makes the same reference in Matthew 23:37 as He weeps over Jerusalem). These servants include John the Baptist, killed at the hands of the wicked rulers over Israel (Matt. 21:25). Jesus ends His parable with the sharecroppers outrageously treating the master’s son like a criminal. In verse 45, the masses listening draw out the implications of verses 41–44—“[The master] will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons,” and particularly Jesus’ coup de grâce in verse 43: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.” Their abusive leadership would soon come to an abrupt end.