Monsignor Pope Ping!
Excellent. I especially liked how he deconstructed the Greek text, he’s brilliant!
Writers on the culture and economics of Jesus’s time say that the excuses are all specious. For example, the characters in the parable would never have bought land or oxen without examining them first. Even in our culture, that would just be stupid: “I just bought real estate and a car, sight-unseen, and now I have to rush off and see what I bought.”
One point of the parable is that the leading religious figures who rejected the Messiah’s proclamation of the inbreaking Kingdom of God did so out of dishonest and/or picayune motives.