Luke 20:9 · World English Bible
Luke 20:9 Meaning He Began to Tell the People This
He began to tell the people this parable. “A man planted a vineyard, and rented it out to some farmers, and went into another country for a long time.
What does Luke 20:9 mean?
The mind was given everything, a whole field of life placed in its keeping, and then left free to tend it as its own. The seeming absence of the giver is not abandonment but the freedom love must grant, for what is entrusted cannot at the same time be controlled.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Luke 20:9 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
The mind was given everything, a whole field of life placed in its keeping, and then left free to tend it as its own. The seeming absence of the giver is not abandonment but the freedom love must grant, for what is entrusted cannot at the same time be controlled. A mind imagines itself alone with its holdings and forgets they were ever a gift.
In that forgetting the trouble begins, for the tenant starts to believe he is the owner. The far country is not a distance love has traveled but the distance the mind has placed between itself and the source it will not remember. Everything it has, it still holds only in trust.
Vineyard: the mind's whole life and gifts, the fruitful ground given freely into its keeping. Husbandmen: the aspects of the mind set to tend what was given, the caretakers who forget they were entrusted and begin to claim ownership. Far country: the distance the mind imagines between itself and its source, the seeming absence that is really only forgetting.
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Live Luke 20:9 today
- On the commute or in the grocery line, pick one ordinary thing you treat as simply yours, your health, your job, your home, and sit for a minute with the thought that it was given.
- Tell one person today that you are glad for something they gave you that you had stopped mentioning. The lift of a borrowed thing is that it has a giver.
- When you feel the grip tighten over something at work, your project, your title, your credit, loosen the hand a little and keep working anyway. Tending it well and owning it are not the same job.
What in my life have I quietly started calling mine that was handed to me?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching
The way gives everything and claims nothing. It does its work and does not stand over the result, which is exactly why the result lasts.
Stoicism · Epictetus
Nothing you have is yours. Your body, your work, the people you love: these are on loan, and the loan is kind. Treat them as borrowed and you will handle them with more care, not less.
Judaism · Pirkei Avot
You were handed something to tend, not something to own. The work is yours to do and was never yours to keep.
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