When Jesus entered the temple, the chief priests and elders of the people came to him as he was teaching. They asked, “What kind of authority do you have for doing these things? Who gave you this authority?”
24 Jesus replied, “I have a question for you. If you tell me the answer, I’ll tell you what kind of authority I have to do these things. 25 Where did John get his authority to baptize? Did he get it from heaven or from humans?”
They argued among themselves, “If we say ‘from heaven,’ he’ll say to us, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ 26 But we can’t say ‘from humans’ because we’re afraid of the crowd, since everyone thinks John was a prophet.” 27 Then they replied, “We don’t know.”
Jesus also said to them, “Neither will I tell you what kind of authority I have to do these things.
28 “What do you think? A man had two sons. Now he came to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’
29 “‘No, I don’t want to,’ he replied. But later he changed his mind and went.
30 “The father said the same thing to the other son, who replied, ‘Yes, sir.’ But he didn’t go.
31 “Which one of these two did his father’s will?”
They said, “The first one.”
Jesus said to them, “I assure you that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering God’s kingdom ahead of you. 32 For John came to you on the righteous road, and you didn’t believe him. But tax collectors and prostitutes believed him. Yet even after you saw this, you didn’t change your hearts and lives and you didn’t believe him. (Common English Bible)
“The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers: Jesus Teaches at the Temple,” Week One
Members, visitors, and guests of Olympia First Christian Church, thank you for having me. It is a blessing to be invited here as your preacher for these several Sundays together in the stead of Pastor Amy during her well-earned sabbatical, and I am grateful for the assistance of Kate Ayers in orientating me for my brief time here.
The famous rabbi Hillel the Elder, who predated Jesus’s public ministry by only a few decades, was once approached by a skeptical Gentile who challenged the rabbit to recite the entire Law while standing on one foot.
Mind you, the Torah consists of 613 laws, many of them complex in their origins and nuances. The Gentile challenger clearly thought he was issuing to the rabbi an impossible task. But Rabbi Hillel got up on one foot, recited, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; now, go and learn.”
I tell you this anecdote partially as a pre-emptive bar-lowering exercise for my humble self, but also as an important story about the nature, basis, and, indeed, genesis of authority. Rabbi Hillel’s own authority radiates in that story, but from whence does authority issue? How is it later revoked? And how are we to respect it, if authority in turn does not respect the humanity of those who’re under it?
All of these questions, and more, form the basis of the sermon series that I will be spending these several weeks unpacking with you, which I have entitled “The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers.” Jesus teaching at the temple is a scene that happens twice in the chronology of His life—once when He is an adolescent, in the Gospel of Luke, and again during Holy Week when He is an adult.
The back-and-forth debate between the adult Jesus and the temple authorities as depicted in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is, at a glance, the sort of stuff that evangelical dreams are made of: a chance to publicly debate your theological opponents in the grandest square ever, and for all the marbles! It’s the entire basis of the God’s Not Dead franchise, and the premise behind so many other Christian stories, books, even radio adventures.
Naturally, there is quite a bit more to the picture than that. And that is what we will spend this first installment of this sermon series talking about. In many ways, it will be setting the table for the rest of the series. So if you feel like this first part of the series is incomplete—well, that is partially by design. Matthew’s version of the Passion is a lengthy narrative, only portions of which we will cover here, and even then, we will be doing so very slowly in order to do Matthew’s words justice—and, hopefully, to keep you engaged and interested in what he has to share about what Jesus had to say.
One of the most critical things to do in this task of setting the table for a series like this one is to frame it within its context—not the context we may wish for it, or the context that is necessarily the most dramatic, but the context that illuminates the most truth upon an ancient and faraway text.
That context is that Jesus is in the last few days of His life before He is executed in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire as a disgraced rebel against the Roman Empire. Try as Pontius Pilate did to literally wash his hands of the execution, the buck still stopped with him, and, by extension, with Rome.
The nature of how Rome exercised its imperial authority varied somewhat from territory to territory within the empire, depending on a number of variables, including geographic proximity, strategic value, and exactly how troublesome to Rome the inhabitants were. The Roman Empire at its peak stretched from Iberia to the Middle East, and from North Africa to Great Britain. Israel, as a territory geographically distant to Rome, but one that also had a proclivity towards rebelling against its imperial overlords, had to be governed not just by Roman prefects and garrisons, but with a certain degree of cooperation from local authorities like the kings of Judea, the Herods (Herod the Great at the time of Christ’s birth, and Herod Antipas at the time of Holy Week).
This power-sharing arrangement relieved Rome of at least some of the logistical headache of administering its more distant and troublesome lands while still maintaining a strong show of military might as a deterrent against future rebellions. Crucifixion worked in much the same way—as hideously torturous and highly public executions, they were expressly intended to deter future would-be rebels.
This also means, however, that we have to approach the role of the temple authorities in the stories within these series with care and precision. Passion plays have historically been staged to incite antisemitism, and far too often (and I include earlier versions of my own interpretation of Scripture in this), we still reduce the temple authorities to caricatures, cartoon villains, or slurs, rather than seeing them as a part of what is an old Jewish practice of rabbis of differing schools and interpretations debating one another.
Fundamentally, that is what is occurring in these texts. It is critical to remember that Jesus is Himself viewed by His followers as a rabbi, and so would be apt to engage in public debate with other religious teachers. There are elements of stagecraft involved—the presence of the crowd gives Jesus some protection against the political power differential between Him and the temple authorities, and His use of the denarius in next week’s story is brilliant in its minimalism, but what we have here are, at their core, a series of debates.
We open these debates with a question of authority. By whose authority does Jesus do the things He does? Jesus answers the question with another question: by whose authority did John the Baptist do the things he did? While the temple authorities decline to answer, and thus Jesus too declines to answer, the question posed to us by this pair of questions is that of why we choose to recognize authority, and of whose authority we choose to recognize.
Recognition of authority is, and should be seen as, an act of vulnerability. It is a ceding of certain autonomies to a higher or wider body, be it a government, church, family, employer, anything. Recognition of, and respect for, authority is a part of the social contract that has governed civilization for years and years.
But a crucial part of that social contract is the moral and just use of that authority. Which brings us from Jerusalem in the year 30 to the United States in the year 2018, and the nature of the authority claimed by the executive branch of our federal government.
It is here where I will do that which preachers are told that they are never supposed to do when guest preaching, especially for the first time at a particular community: I’m going to reach for a handful of brimstone.
This past Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 decision in the case of Trump v. Hawaii, ruling that the Muslim travel ban passed constitutional muster because the five justices in the majority were happy to willfully ignore the scads of evidence of Islamophobic animus from the president, even as one untoward comment from a Colorado state official was deemed sufficient evidence to prove anti-Christian animus in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
Their authority to make such decisions, no matter how disconnected from reality, is enshrined in our Constitution. The Supreme Court kept its authority after every other disastrous decision of its existence, from Dred Scott v. Sanford to Plessy v. Ferguson to Korematsu v. United States. The state’s authority to guarantee its own existence into perpetuity is not going anywhere anytime soon.
But, like Jesus, we must be continuously questioning the moral basis of that authority every single day, because we, like the parent’s child in his parable in this passage, we are called to do God’s will whether or not the governments of people demand undue and unjust authority over us.
If we do not—if we abdicate that crucial responsibility to interrogate the morality of the authority under which we live—then we too will find ourselves stuck in the back of the line while the “undesirables” we have striven to keep out of this country will, like the tax collectors and the prostitutes of Jesus’s time, enter the kingdom of heaven before we do.
Because like the United States, heaven has an immigration policy. But unlike the United States, that immigration policy is not based on whether you are from Norway or a “shithole country.” Heaven’s immigration policy is based on whether you create goodness or have a shithole of a heart, and on that singular, fundamental basis, we have, like the Babylonian king Belshazzar, been weighed, measured, and found wanting.
We cannot, then, see these two anecdotes within today’s Scripture passage in isolation. They are inextricably intertwined. The first, the discourse with the temple authorities, concerns the nature of authority and its origins. The second, the story of the sons, concerns the practical consequences and impacts of authority, and of abdicating our commitment to God’s authority in favor of our own iniquities, bigotries, and prejudices.
It is a cautionary tale, and we should take it as such. But it is also exactly that—a caution. If we heed it, our collective redemption may well still remain within the realm of the possible, even if it does not feel that way in the present moment—or, indeed, has felt that way at all for vast swaths of our history. Yet, as Jesus hastens to remind us in Luke 18:27, what is impossible for us by ourselves remains possible with God.
Let us then pursue that collective redemption, far off from us though it may be, with the vigor and energy that our faith in God as revealed through Jesus Christ demands of us.
For in these times, nothing less shall do.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Olympia, Washington
July 1, 2018