The parable of the vineyard, first told by the prophet Isaiah, becomes in the mouth of the Lord Jesus the summation of all sacred history. The Lord makes it clear that the whole history of the Almighty's attempts to proclaim His will and His truth to humanity was a history of resistance. The messengers through whom God addresses people were 'sometimes beaten, sometimes killed.' In this series the Lord also speaks of the final Messenger - of Himself, who, according to the word of the prophets, came into the world to open to people the possibility of salvation - a possibility that did not exist before and does not exist outside Christ.

The bitter words of Christ expose the religious leaders who constantly resisted the saving action of the Creator for the sake of their own quite base interests - and here we, too, have something to think about. After all, this is not about some pagans who are 'darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart,' as the apostle Paul writes in today's passage from Ephesians. It is not even only about bishops, theologians, and ascetics, as we might render 'chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees' in our own terms. All who are called by God, all who have taken upon themselves the responsibility of being His people, turn out to be wicked workers in God's vineyard.

That is why today's words of the apostle are so important, calling us to 'be renewed in the spirit of our mind,' so that we do not become the same kind of worthless workers.

The parable of the vineyard that we find in today's passage occurs in the Gospel more than once. Evidently, by repeating it again and again, the evangelists wanted to tell us something very important for us. Of course, Jesus Himself directs this parable first of all against His contemporaries, some of whom belonged to the religious brotherhood of the Pharisees, while others held prominent positions as ministers of the Temple or well-known theologians, teachers of the Law. But if the matter concerned only the affairs of a long-vanished past, it would hardly be worth paying so much attention to this parable today. After all, we are not Pharisees, not Old Testament priests, and not teachers of the Law. And if we found ourselves in the place of the tenants in the parable, we, of course, would not reject those who had been sent: we are Christians, and we have made our choice, or so it would appear.

But here is the question: why did those to whom the Savior first addressed Himself not accept Him? They did not need to "convert" anywhere in order to do so: Jesus was not offering anyone any new religion. He offered something else: the Kingdom of God. Christianity is not a religion at all: Jesus left us neither a new religious teaching, nor a religious organization such as, for example, that same Pharisaic brotherhood, nor a rule or moral code that we were to follow. He left in the world only a community of His disciples, to whom He gave one commandment only: to live in the Kingdom. Christianity is this life in the Kingdom. Of course, over the years and centuries it inevitably had to clothe itself in religious forms, which cannot be wholly abandoned before the second coming of Christ and the full transformation of the world. And Christian life clothed itself in many religious garments: Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, diverse as all life is diverse, and all the more the life of the Kingdom.

But if we Christians have acquired our own Christian religiosity over time, sooner or later we will inevitably encounter religious problems, the same kind as those faced in Gospel times by the Pharisees, temple priests, and teachers of the Law. And the main problem, as is clear from the parable, turned out to be the desire to take possession of the vineyard that belongs to God alone, and in which each of us can at best be only a worker. For a believer, such a desire would appear at the very least strange. But such a seizure does not at all have to be malicious from the beginning. As a rule, it happens under all sorts of respectable pretexts, most often under the pretext of protecting the vineyard from outsiders, from thieves and destroyers.

And here religiosity proves extremely convenient: when it is necessary to separate one people from all the rest, or one part of a people from another, to fence off a community from destructive influences, whatever those influences may be and from whomever they may come, religion can prove very useful. Religion is always connected with a certain set of more or less rigid norms, rules, and forms that regulate all or many sides of life, and such regulation in itself protects well against outside influences. And if we remember that every religion is also a set of certain rules of life and religious obligations, it turns out that it not only protects but also disciplines both individual people and whole communities.

And yet any religion, even one based on revelation given by God, remains the work of human hands. For people express and embody in life the revelation given by God, adapting it to their human limitation. Therefore any revelation is always greater than any religion, and the Kingdom does not fit within any religious framework. Then one has to choose between familiar, established, time-tested, honored religiosity and the Kingdom. And having chosen, one must leave familiar religion for Christ. Or, remaining with one's own, kill the One who brings the Kingdom. Kill Him because otherwise those who want to remain with their own will have no peaceful life. For religion always takes hold of the whole person, entirely and completely, defining his life from beginning to end, and for a religious person the very thought is unbearable that there can be something in the world over which his religion has no power.

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.