Trinity 16
Today’s Gospel brings us to Holy Week, that final week of our Lord’s life that began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and ends with His death and burial, awaiting His great Easter Sunday resurrection. The events of our Gospel happen on Tuesday of Holy Week. That Tuesday was Jesus’ last full “working day” in public. Wednesday was silent and Thursday He was with His disciples. This final full, public “working day” was an extremely busy one for our Lord. Here He was in the temple teaching; He was warning the people; He was calling the nation to repentance. Here on this day He preaches using many of the parables we are familiar with; He pronounces “woes” on the religious leaders; He has parables warning about / describing the Last Day, which fill several chapters.
Our text begins: When [Jesus] entered the temple, the chief priests and elders of the people came up to Him as He was teaching, and said, “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” What are the “these things” that the religious leaders refer? –Probably to what Jesus had just done a few days before—enter Jerusalem exactly like it was prophesied that the Messiah would do; and to Jesus cleansing the temple by throwing out the money changers and sellers of animals for sacrifices. That act, too, showed Jesus to be the Savior. In all fairness, the chief priests and elders of the people had a right to do this and examine Jesus, after all they were entrusted with the spiritual care of the people. But notice their two questions. The first, by what authority are You doing these things, implies that Jesus has no authority in and of Himself; and the second question, who gave You this authority, implies that Jesus has authority, but it is given to Him by someone else. In any case they come at Jesus in total unbelief and rejection.
But is that a fair judgment/ conclusion that they came to about Jesus? Remember, about 3 years earlier at the very beginning of His public ministry Jesus came to Jerusalem and at that time also cleansed the temple making a whip of cords driving out the oxen and sheep, overturning the money changers tables—the same scene we see Jesus doing in Holy Week. At that time the Jews asked Him: What sign do You show to us, since You do these things? They recognized here that by this cleansing of the temple, Jesus was claiming to be God; and the sign that Jesus pointed them to was the sign of His own bodily resurrection: Destroy this temple [of My Body] and in three days I will raise it up. Now about three years have passed between the first and second cleansing of the temple. What had happened during that time? Certainly Jesus showed Himself to be the true God Himself! He preached and taught it; He confirmed His preaching that He is the Son of God and the Savior of the world by the very miracles He did of casting out demons, healing, raising the dead. There should have been no question as to who Jesus is; there was no need for the questions: “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” But what prompted these questions? Hardened unbelief! They rejected Jesus and no matter what He said or did would change that. Hardened unbelievers never learn; they never look at the evidence.
This comes down to the simple point that Jesus is the great divide. As He says earlier [Mt 12.30]: He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad. St. Simeon foretold the same thing of Jesus to St. Mary when Jesus was brought to the temple as a 40 day old baby [Lk. 2.34]: Behold, this Child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which will be spoken against, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. Dear Christian, the world is confronted with Jesus. The vital question, then, is: What do we do with Him?
In our day and age, certainly in the Western world, people think themselves too “sophisticated” to believe in Christ and instead embrace a secular word view—that is, a view that leaves God out of the picture; they think they don’t need a God and Christ; they reject the very notion of God somehow thinking it is part of the shackles of a superstitious past; they think that now science or reason determine all. And there are those who yearn for something more, yearn for the “spiritual”. But they, too, reject Christ. They want to pick and choose what they want to believe; they believe truth is relative—“what’s true for you is not true for me”. But there is still Jesus! Jesus still confronts people and asks them, like He did the disciples [Mt 16.15]: But who do you say that I am? And as Jesus confronts people, as they come face to face with the word of God, the Gospel; or they are confronted with Jesus when they see the witness of Christians living out their daily lives in the faith and love of God; or when they see a beautiful church or beautiful artwork depicting Christ; or when they see the beauty and majesty of nature and their heart in stirred in them so that they wonder about the possibility that maybe there might be a Creator of all this; or even when—as much as they try to squelch and drown it out—they hear the voice in their heart telling them there is a God, there Jesus confronts them and becomes the great divide. And hearing the claims of Christ—what and who He said He is and demonstrated, most powerfully by His resurrection, people will regard Jesus, as has been said, either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord.
As Jesus confronts people with His word, those who are hardened in their unbelief will come back at Him like the religious leaders of the Jews that first Holy Tuesday: “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” But precisely here with these words we see that unbelief is immoral and objectionable. With these words, we see that the Jews who came upon Jesus that day were not coming with a humble request for truth; they had overwhelming evidence by Jesus’ words and works, but they had hardened their hearts against that evidence and Him. Jesus answered them, I also will ask you one question, and if you tell Me the answer, then I also will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, from where did it come? From heaven or from man?” And they discussed it among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From man,’ we are afraid of the crowd, for they all hold that John was a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” You see, they knew the answer—John and his baptism was from God—but if they admitted it, they would have to admit, too, that Jesus was from God because John pointed to and preached Jesus as Savior. Those who are honest and of good will and say “We do not know” and are actually looking for the truth, they are happy when they find it. These religious leaders of the Jews knew the answer but were unwilling to say it. These never continued to look into the question.
Isn’t that the case with so many unbelievers today? They just simply outright dismiss Christ and His teaching; they outright reject Scripture. Oh, there will be excuses—the bible is outdated, the church is full of hypocrites, how can Jesus and the Church claim a monopoly on the truth, etc. etc.—but Scripture and Jesus and His claims are not examined. There’s a lesson for us here. It’s this: That’s the world we live in, a world hostile to Christ. That means we should not expect any favors from it. And we should be very careful about trusting what it says; we must be wary of adopting its ways of thinking. Here is a call for us to be all the more in the word of God hearing what He says, seeing in it Jesus, our Savior, getting our bearings on the truth, which is so much under attack and even denied. When we come to the answer: “We do not know”, let us go into the Scriptures; let us there see the Face of Christ. Let us there believe what our Lord tells us so that we may understand. As we believe first, then we will begin to understand and grow in divine truth.
The thing is, belief, faith is not something we can create/ conjure up in ourselves. Faith is a gift of God—a gift that He works in us by the Holy Spirit in the Word and Sacrament. So the more that we are in church, the more we read and study Scripture, the more we meditate on the word of God, there is the Holy Spirit mightily at work creating and strengthening and preserving us in the faith so that we believe. You see, faith is not some sort of leap into the dark; instead faith is a divinely worked certainty based on the word of God. Faith is a trust/ reliance on God and His word and promise. When we hold to God and His word and believe and trust it, then we can grow in our understanding. Then with that foundation we can see how beautifully Scripture and her doctrines fit together and we grow in our understanding of the will and ways of God. Then we come to see the face and heart of Jesus all the more brilliantly and clearly.
How vital this is as we live in a world that rejects Christ and wants to destroy our divinely worked faith. And don’t forget, we have still within us our old sinful nature that hates God and wants to serve sin. Very often, when things go badly for us, when we face various trials and sufferings our old sinful nature rises up and so we are very quick to say: “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” We at times challenge God’s authority and judge Him—the almighty and gracious God according to our frail, corrupt human standards. We read of that in the OT reading as the Israelites were accusing God of being and acting “unfair”: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But when we find ourselves doing that, dear Christian, judging God—let us recognize and repent of that sin. And instead let us go back to the word of God and hear His promises and see His loving Face and merciful heart. Let us believe all what the Lord says and reveals in His word and then we understand who He is and what He is doing. There we will see that He is acting in love and mercy toward us and that He is working everything, everything in grace for our eternal good.
When we get stumped on a certain doctrine that doesn’t make sense to us—maybe, for example, how Jesus can be present in the holy Sacrament giving us His very body and blood—just believe. Believe is the language of the Church. And as we believe in simple faith what the Lord tells us there—and do not let our reason trip us up—we will grow in our understanding. We believe in order to understand. We will see how wonderfully everything in Scripture fits together. This does not mean that we become irrational, that faith is irrational. Rather faith is super-rational—it is above reason; reason has to catch up to what faith believes.
Will we ever understand everything in Scripture, every way that the Lord is working in our lives? Never! Some things—most things will probably remain a mystery. And that’s a good thing! Because it means that yes, faith is believing it and at the same time the heart/ mind of our faith is seeking understanding in and through the word. That’s how our faith grows and becomes more firmly established. As we are searching the Scriptures and in faith seeking further and deeper understanding, faith becomes more established and all the harder for the devil, the world, and our own sinful nature to knock off. And notice Jesus’ words at the end of the Gospel: So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And He said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” They did not understand because they did not believe. By their unbelief/ rejection they shut themselves off from the Lord. The Lord could not open to them because they did not knock. Even if Jesus had said to them His authority is from God, that He’s the Son of God and Savior of the world; had He explained every divine mystery to them they would still reject. St. Thomas Aquinas said: "To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." Faith receives and grows, deepens and develops and seeks further understanding. We believe in order to understand. INJ