The owner had sent three servants, and each was mistreated. One was beaten and sent away empty, the next was beaten and "entreated him shamefully," and the third was wounded and cast out (Luke 20:10-12). His question weighs what is left to try. Gill reads it as the owner asking what more could possibly be done for such people. The answer he gives himself shows the spirit of the question: not "How shall I punish them?" but "What might still reach them?" Gill takes the owner to be "the Lord of hosts" and the beloved son to be Christ, "the Son of God, who lay in his bosom."

The owner answers his own question: "I will send my beloved son: it may be they will reverence him when they see him" (Luke 20:13). His hope met the worst possible reply. "When the husbandmen saw him, they reasoned among themselves, saying, This is the heir: come, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours" (Luke 20:14). "So they cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him" (Luke 20:15).

The husbandmen were tenant farmers. The owner let out the vineyard and expected a share of its fruit "at the season" (Luke 20:10). Barnes, writing on the parallel in Matthew 21, says of the servants: "These, doubtless, represent the prophets sent to the Jewish people."

The words "it may be" translate the Greek isos, "perhaps." Thayer calls it "an urbane expression of one's reasonable hope," and it appears only here in the New Testament. Matthew and Mark record the owner saying, "They will reverence my son" (Matthew 21:37; Mark 12:6); only Luke records the owner's question and his "it may be." Barnes explains that "To reverence means to honor, to esteem, to show deference to."

This question gives a window into the heart of God as Jesus pictured Him. The owner does not give up after the first refusal, or the second, or the third. He keeps sending, and finally sends the one closest to him, his "beloved son." Matthew Henry draws the lesson that "those who reject Christ's ministers would reject Christ himself if he should come to them."

The phrase "beloved son" is the same title the voice from heaven gave Jesus at His baptism and on the mountain (Luke 3:22; Luke 9:35). The chief priests and scribes understood that the parable was spoken "against them" (Luke 20:19). Within days, the story Jesus told would happen to Him.