And in our arrogance we believe the lie and choose the path of moral defiance rather than moral obedience (see Genesis 3:1–6).
In this respect the Jews' rejection of the prophets is not essentially different from our human rejection of God generally. Paul argues that very point in his letter to the Romans. Deep down, he says, we all know enough of our responsibility to God to submit our lives to his rule. The Jew has the Bible, the Gentile has his conscience. We are all without excuse. We are all sinners. We are all tenants in arrears with the rent (see Romans 1–3). And that's why the owner intervenes in our lives. And when he does, that's why our immediate reaction, like the tenants in the parable, is not one of surprise but of resistance.
Jesus would surely have us realize that in our twentieth century, exactly the same kind of illegitimate bid for moral autonomy that led to the failure of Israel is leading to the failure of our secular vision for a better world.
Here's the root of those ecological disasters of which ecologists are constantly reminding us. Having thrown off our proper sense of stewardship for this world God has given us, we think we can do what we like with his creation, abusing it in any way with impunity.
Here is the cause of all those failed socialist dreams, of which the collapse of the Communist bloc is the most recent and tragic example. We human beings are just too greedy, too selfish, too lazy, too corrupt to make such utopian dreams of economic cooperation come true. Here is the spark from which the fire of revolutionary violence spreads its cruel terrorism around our world today, the anarchism which is convinced that somehow it's nobler and more dignified to blow up representatives of authority than to submit to them.
Here too is the soil from which the awful spectre of tyranny continues to haunt the human race, armed now with all the weaponry of psychological manipulation and computerized surveillance with which modern science
147
