This is Jesus’ final time entering the temple before His
impending Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
Soon he will face the chief priests and elders as they gather to
interrogate and judge Him, but for now they try to trap him with a question:
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this
authority?” It’s clear in Matthew that
“these things” that the chief priests and the elders of the people are so
worked up about are Jesus’ teachings, because they approach him “as he was
teaching.” And the way our Gospel
reading is ended today we are led to believe that Jesus refuses to give them an
answer, but Jesus spends the next two and half chapters proving His authority
over and over again when confronted with similar questions designed to trap
Him.
But first, Jesus asks them whether the message of John the
Baptist came from heaven or from human thinking. Matthew tells us that the chief priests and
elders smell the trap, they say, “If we say from heaven then he will ask why we
didn’t believe him; and if we say ‘of human origin’ the crowds will turn on us
because they believe John was a prophet.”
So, instead, they say, “We don’t know.”
Too simple, their only possible answers were ‘from heaven’ or
‘of human origins.” So Jesus tells them
a little parable. A father asks one son
to go work in the fields - he says no, but then changes his mind and goes. The second son says that he will to out into
the fields, and then doesn’t. Which one
did what the father asked? See, they
can’t say, “we don’t know” without looking like fools - Jesus has set his own
little trap.
This kind of parable, the kind used to point out their own
error to those in power, has been used before.
In 2 Samuel the prophet Nathan tells a parable to King David about a rich man who
steals the only little lamb of a poor man to feed an unexpected traveler
because he doesn’t want to slaughter one of his own lambs to be wasted on this
traveler. When the King is
incensed against the man and says, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done
this deserves to die” and declares that the man had no pity, Nathan comes back
with, “You are the man!” Nathan used the
parable to show David his sin in taking Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the
Hittite, and then having Uriah killed.
That’s what Jesus is doing in this parable. His accusers respond, of course, “The first,”
because the first son is the only one that actually went to work. Jesus then goes on to point out that many of
them went out to hear John preach, but then went away without believing - like
the second son; while those who’re considered sinners, the tax collectors and
the prostitutes, who through their sins had refused John’s message on its face
had, after hearing his message first hand, believed and been baptized. Even after seeing those conversions, the
chief priests and elders still failed to believe!
It’s all about intentions. You see the priests and elders had gone out
to hear John preach intending to hear, but they closed their ears to the truth
of John’s message. The tax collectors
and prostitutes had gone out probably intending to mock and heckle John, but
their ears had been open and they believed.
The old saying, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” is
talking about this.
How often have we intended to do something
good and failed. How many of us have
told someone that we would pray for them, and then gotten too distracted or
forgotten and didn’t? It wasn’t done out
of malice, at least I hope it wasn’t - that’s a whole different
conversation. How many have said to
themselves, “I want to get involved in some of the good work being done in
Jacksonville by my brothers and sisters at St. John’s...but never do? How many of us have been confused when we see
a brother or sister whose faith was once an inspiration to us start to drift
away from the community, and their spiritual life die, and we intended to reach
out to them - to call or stop by - but never have? We all have good intentions. But Jesus says in today’s gospel reading that
our intentions don’t really matter - it’s our actions that are rooted in and
flow from our relationship with God that really count.
Often, our intentions never come to
fruition because we don’t think we can
do those kinds of things. What will I
say, who am I? We forget that we don’t
do any of these things ourselves. Your
baptism gave you a permanent connection to God in Christ, like a pipeline of
mercy and grace that is always flowing. It is only God’s mercy that makes us
members of the Body of Christ. I know
that you’ve heard me say this before, and I’m only saying it again because it
is so important! That pipeline though,
it only remains freely flowing if we pour out that mercy. When we fail to share the grace through
reaching out to one another and putting our faith into action, the pipeline
gets stopped up, it gets clogged.
Tell me if it isn’t true. How many times have you known someone who
only gives lip-service to their faith, then after a while they seem
disinterested, bored, and drift away from the community. The people around us who have a vibrant and
lively faith are the ones who are serving, inside the church and outside the
church. They let that gift of grace and
mercy flow through them and then on to others. Like the first son who ended up
living his life faithfully; he didn’t just talk about it or just say whatever
he needed to say to appease his father.
We, too, are called to live our lives
faithfully. God has given us the gift of
life, and the gift of new life in Christ, and we are called to respond. We are to be good stewards of our lives,
spreading the love of God that has been given to us to others. We’re not perfect, I’m certainly far from it,
but God calls us very pointedly through the message and example of Jesus to be
different. Stephen Colbert said once,
“Either we’ve got to acknowledge that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or
we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the
needy without condition; and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
We have a tendency to think of ourselves as the good son in
this parable of the two sons, just as we have a tendency to identify with the
prodigal son in his parable; when, in truth, we’re much more like the older son
who stomped off in a huff when the father welcomed the prodigal back with open
arms. If we’re honest with ourselves,
we’re much more like the son who says he’ll go, just to get dad off our backs,
then we are the son who has a change of heart and goes to the vineyard. The pipeline of grace is open and flowing -
we can choose to serve, knowing that the power to do it comes from our
relationship with Jesus. As St. Paul
reminded the Philippians, it is God who
is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
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