Graham Greene writes in one of his novels, "If a man loves a place enough he doesn’t need to possess it; it’s enough for him to know that it is safe and unaltered...." (The Tenth Man, New York, Pocket Books, 1986, p. 89.)

The trouble is that we never seem to be able to love quite enough, at least not enough to be delivered from the unhappy desire to own our lives and almost everything that touches them. It seems so often that nothing pleases some people more than the feeling that life is like putty in their hands, ready for whatever molding and shaping they desire at the moment. Unfortunately, as the Parable of the Wicked Tenants illustrates, the inevitable end to this deadly desire is some kind of self-destruction.

Imagine it in the way Jesus told it in his parable. The tenants of the v…