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But when the tenants see the son, they say to themselves,
This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and acquire his inher-
itance
. The situation here is one in which tenants could
realistically expect to inherit the property of an absentee
landlord upon the death of the last heir. Seeing the son,
the tenants in this parable presume (wrongly) that the
landowner is dead, and they kill the son and heir in order
to get the vineyard for themselves—thus taking by violence
what would eventually have been theirs as an inheritance,
or, more to the point, as a kind of gift.
Here we are close to the nature of sin—not only that
of the fallen angels, but also that of Adam and Eve as it is
recounted in the book of Genesis. Indeed, it is precisely the
devil, in the formof the serpent, who suggests to Adam and
Eve the very sin that caused his own downfall. Encouraging
them to eat from the only tree in the garden which God has
forbidden to them, he concludes enticingly:
For God knows
that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will
be like God, knowing good and evil
(cf. Gn 3:5). This pri-
mordial sin of wanting to take from God what could only
be given as a gift is tantamount to a rejection of the gift as
such, the gift that would be nothing less than a share in his
own divine life. Who can have the communion of life with
God as his due? Only the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No
creaturely person—angelic or human—clearly. To become
“like” God in this sense can only come as a gift. The first
sin was not simply the violation of a seemingly arbitrary
command on the part of our first parents—to cite the fre-
quent caricature—but a serious transgression affecting their
relationship with God in a profound way.
To understand why this sin of our first parents had
consequences for them and for us, and why God willed
to take time to remedy these consequences through the
Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of his Only