Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“I have a Question” — Reflection by Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Philippians 2:1-13/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 21:23-32/NRSVUE)
After spending the past week with the passage from Matthew’s Gospel you just heard, I realized that I had a lot of questions; and I mean that literally. In the span of just nine verses I counted six of them, and they lead to all sorts of other ones. So many questions.
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” is what the chief priests and elders ask Jesus as he enters the temple at the beginning of our passage; and it’s a sentence that actually gives us two questions for the price of one question mark. But before we consider these questions, there’s another one we probably should answer first: What are “these things” that Jesus has been doing?
As weird as this might seem given that we’re gathered here today on the first weekend of fall, today’s story takes place right after Palm Sunday, in the middle of Holy Week.
A few days earlier, Jesus arrived in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey as a large crowd spread branches on the road before him. The “whole city,” as Matthew tells us, “was in turmoil” as Jesus was greeted with a parade, and things didn’t get any quieter once he got there; to be fair, though he really wasn’t trying to calm things down or be inconspicuous.
Not long after he rode into town, Jesus went to the temple and threw out all the folks who were defiling this house of prayer by doing business there; he loudly chastised the money changers and the sellers of doves in front of everyone, and flipped over their tables and chairs in order to make his disdain for what they were doing — what they were allowed to do — crystal clear.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before everyone heard that Jesus was in town and, since he had established quite a reputation for healing people, folks showed up in droves so that he could cure them of what ailed them. This whole scene got so overwhelming that Jesus decided to spend the night at Bethany, a few miles east of Jerusalem, to get away from it all for bit.
So, these are the things that Jesus has been doing, which is what leads to this latest confrontation with the powers that be.
You see, the chief priests, who were the religious authority in that place and time, and the elders of the people, who were the civil authority, also have heard about all the amazing things that Jesus has been doing — how could they not have, really? They’ve heard all about the children crying out to him in praise; “Hosanna to the Son of David,” is what the kids shouted at Jesus on Palm Sunday. “Save us, Son of David,” is what it means; they’ve heard all about the miraculous healings; they’ve heard all about him flipping over the tables in the temple.
And these chief priests and the elders are not very happy about any of this because it represents a clear challenge to their power. After all, they are leaders in this society that folks want to be saved from, they aren’t providing the poor and the sick with what they needed to survive, and they’re the ones who let the merchants and the moneychangers do what they’ve doing in the temple.
So when Jesus returns to the temple from Bethany the next day, the priests and elders are there waiting for him; they interrupt him as he is teaching and confront him with their question: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
But before we deal with that question, I’ve got one of my own. Given that Jesus had just raised a big public ruckus right there in the temple less than twenty-four hours earlier, why did these people who were in charge of the temple actually let him return? Maybe it’s because they know how popular Jesus is with the crowd and don’t want to cause a riot by banishing him? Maybe they want to humiliate Jesus publicly to even the score after he did that to them? Maybe they really do believe that Jesus might be who he says he is? It’s tough to say.
In any event, Jesus goes to the temple, so let the questions continue — and as questions go, the one the chief priests and elders ask Jesus is about as loaded as it gets. There is no good answer, no response that Jesus can give that’s not going to cause a whole lot of trouble for him. And that’s exactly why they ask it.
On the one hand, if Jesus were to say that God gave him his authority, then the chief priests would accuse him of blasphemy; and truth be told, they’d have a pretty good case. After all, the Hebrew Scriptures unequivocally state that these priests are the ones with authority — which was granted to them by God way back in Moses’s day and passed down from generation to generation ever since.
On the other hand, if Jesus were to try to beat a blasphemy charge by saying that his authority has been granted by humans, than he’d not only be undermining his own divine status in front of the crowds that had come to see him because he’s claimed to be the Messiah, he’d also be lying, which is not something that Jesus does. Oh, he’d also be calling into question the status of the elders, who were the human authority in that place and time.
So Jesus, being quick on his feet, does the only thing he really can do; he deflects the question by asking the priests and elders a question of his own, telling them that he will only answer their question if and when they answer his: “Did the baptism of John come from heaven or was it of human origin?” is what he asks them. And there’s no good answer to this one either.
It may not seem like a terribly provocative question on the surface, but it doesn’t take the chief priests and elders too long to figure out that Jesus has just completely hung them out to dry. You see, since John (who, like Jesus, was a really big hit with the people) claimed to be the one who came to “prepare the way of the Lord,” whatever statement they make regarding John’s authority to proclaim “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” is effectively a statement about Jesus’s own authority.
Realizing they’ve just been had, the panicked priests and elders huddle up to come up with some sort of response, and Matthew brings us right into the huddle with them. “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.”
If their reply to the question regarding whence John the Baptist’s authority comes is “From heaven” (or “From God”), then they are acknowledging that the God-given authority of the priests has been supplanted by the God-given authority of John and, ultimately, of Jesus.
If their reply is that the source of John’s authority is “human,” then they risk either undermining the power of the elders, or provoking the ire of the devoted followers of John and Jesus, upon whom the elders rely to maintain their power. And this is a big deal.
You see, the elders and priests serve a necessary function in this particular society, one that is governed from afar by imperial Rome: they operate there on the ground under the legitimacy of religion, with law in hand to ensure the people are kept in line. And a full-scale revolt by the followers of John and Jesus would be evidence that they weren’t doing a very good job — which the Emperor wouldn’t exactly be overjoyed to hear.
So, the priests and elders they know that their options are quite limited. Neither “God” nor “humans” would be an acceptable answer to Jesus’s question about the source of John’s (and Jesus’s) authority. And they can’t really respond to Jesus’s question about their question with yet another question because this back and forth would just go on for days.
So they end up doing the only thing they really can do in this situation — they don’t give an answer. “We do not know,” is what the chief priests and elders say to Jesus here. From a strategic standpoint it’s kind of a clever play, but let’s call it what it is: a surrender (well, at least for the moment).
In the field of theology, where we seek to understand and speak about God, “We do not know” is a perfectly acceptable answer to all sorts of questions. It is an acknowledgment of the fact that we see through a glass darkly, a declaration of our vulnerability before the great and unfathomable mystery of God. What does God look like? How old will I be in heaven and will I stay the same age forever there? I don’t know. Do you?
But the “We do not know” that the priests and elders come back at Jesus with here is something entirely different. It isn’t a humble admission of their own limitations and inadequacies; it’s an attempt to preserve their own authority. They are so concerned with maintaining their worldly power that they remain completely unable to sense God’s power, even though Emmanuel — God with us — is standing right there in front of them.
Think about how absurd this really is: Jesus is there in the temple tending to actual people in need; Jesus is doing exactly what God has always called us to do — and these guys, instead of joining in (or, at the very least staying out of Jesus’s way) turn the whole thing into an argument over whether he’s got the documentation that authorizes him to be there in the first place.
The priests and elders don’t answer Jesus question so he doesn’t answer theirs either, but there’s really no doubt about who’s won this argument. And then, Jesus, who’s never been one to just let things go, regales his opponents with a parable about two brothers — one who puts up a stink about doing the right thing but then does it anyway, and one who says all the right things about doing the right thing but doesn’t actually do it.
I’ll leave you to figure out which brother is meant to represent the priests and elders in this story (I’m pretty sure they were smart enough to figure it out). As the parable concludes, the powers that be, who were already feeling vulnerable, are feeling even more vulnerable; and, given that it’s Holy Week, we all know where this escalating confrontation is headed next.
But this parable invites us to consider even more questions: Which brother are we? I mean, it kinda seems like Jesus might be calling us to answer that one for ourselves.
As people who claim to be followers and disciples of Christ, are we truly living the kind of lives he’s called us to live? Or are we merely pledging allegiance to God without actually doing what God calls us to do?
Are we loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves?
Are we caring for the least of these?
Are we seeking justice for all God’s people?
Are we being good stewards of creation?
Are we showing more concern for the needs of the world than we do for our own wants?
Because it’s pretty clear that these are the kinds of things that Jesus expects of us.
So many questions.
But when all is said and done, they’re all just different ways of asking one essential question: Are we showing, through our words and deeds, that we’re actually listening to the one we claim to follow?