Scripture Reading: Matthew 21:23-27

What happens when someone like Jesus comes into a city being hailed as king, and then goes to the temple demanding things be different? Debates happen.

After Jesus showed that it was God who was the one in charge, and that he was the embodied representation of that God, he got into debates with the religious leaders—the chief priests and scribes—because when you go around reforming how the temple ought to work and healing people, you have to answer for your actions. So those with an intimate knowledge of the Scriptures came to Jesus demanding he give an account for what he had been doing, not just over the past couple of days, but over the past several years of his life and ministry.

Their questions were simple. Notice I said simple, not honest. They were not coming to Jesus with questions because they were working hard to reframe what they had known about God now with who Jesus claimed to be. They were coming to Jesus in order to trap him. They had enough of him, and one of the ways to put a stop to all this madness and deception (as they saw it) would be to demand he answer for himself in public.

So they asked him, “By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?”

Because, you see, in their minds the things Jesus was doing—reinterpreting the Torah, healing people on the Sabbath, and clearing the garbage out the temple—were things only God, or a God-appointed person, could do. So as far as their wisdom allowed, Jesus needed to satisfy the requirements they had built up about what this God-appointed person, this Messiah, this God-in-the-flesh human being, was able to do. And Jesus, being happy to entertain their question, responds with a couple questions of his own, “John’s baptism—where did it come from? Was it from God, or from human beings?”

The religious leaders know what’s at stake. Jesus has turned the tables on them and, in effect, put the ball in their court. If they will answer his questions, he will be happy to answer theirs. The problem they have, though, is that they know that if they say that John’s baptism came from God Jesus will ask them to explain why they didn’t believe what had come from God. They’re the religious leaders for goodness sake. If anyone ought to accept that which comes from God, they ought to be first in line. They also know that if they say it wasn’t from God but from man, then their own people would come after them—they would make them answer for that—because they held that John the Baptist was a prophet.

We would call this being stuck between a rock and hard place.

And so, they say nothing. They can’t afford to have their trust in God put into question, and they can’t afford to have those they were called to shepherd come after their very lives. Jesus then, in turn, doesn’t answer their questions. “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”

The debates continue, but this is quite enough to get a flavor of what’s going on. There are people with questions for Jesus, but they aren’t real questions. They’re fueled by human “wisdom”, which of course, is brought to nothing by the true wisdom of God.

The only thing left for those who think they’re really running the show is to come up with a plan to end this whole thing—to take Jesus’s life—which, brings us to Wednesday.