Pentecost XVII (Proper 21 A) [Matthew 21:23-32] (1-Oct-2017)

This sermon was preached at St Matthew's Lutheran Church, Maryborough, 8.15am, and Grace Lutheran Church, Childers, 10.30am.

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.

The baptism of John, from where did it come? From heaven or from man?

Prayer: Dear Lord Jesus, send us your Holy Spirit, to me that I may preach well, and to all of us that we may hear well. Amen.

Our Gospel reading today comes from Matthew 21, which is a very significant chapter. It begins with the history about Palm Sunday, where Jesus entered into Jerusalem on a donkey exactly one week before Easter Sunday. In the church year, we always celebrate Palm Sunday a week before Easter Sunday, because if you go through the gospels and work it all out, Jesus actually did ride into Jerusalem a week before he rose from the dead. So in the church, we have always referred to this week as Holy Week, because it is the week where our holy Lamb of God and made a holy sacrifice and atonement of his body and blood on the cross. So everything that happens in our reading today, happened in the week when Jesus died.

Our reading today, then, finds Jesus going to the temple to teach. It’s amazing that in this last week before Jesus dies, he does panic and fret, but calmly goes to the temple and teaches. And in teaching, Jesus demonstrates all of his power and glory and authority. And so, what happens is that the chief priests and the elders go to Jesus and they challenge his authority to teach. We read: When [Jesus] entered the temple, the chief priests and the 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?”

The chief priests and the scribes understood something well, which all of God’s people always had understood, which Jesus understood, and which the whole Christian church has always understood, that no one is allowed to teach without a call from God. Actually, the Augsburg Confession, which was the first Lutheran confession of faith made in public in the year 1530, says this very clearly, and this is still our confession of faith today. It says: Our churches teach that no one should publicly teach in the Church, or administer the Sacraments, without a rightly ordered call.

So what’s the biblical basis for this teaching? Well, firstly, in Jeremiah 23:21, God says: I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. This passage is talking about prophets who ran out into the world, and went about prophesying, and yet God says that he didn’t send them. So it’s important that when someone claims to speak God’s word, that they also were sent by God to do it. Romans 10:15 says: How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? You see, it’s absolutely vital that when preachers preach, that they are also sent by God, and they did not simply push themselves forward. Hebrews 5:4 also says this: No one takes this honour for himself, but only when called by God, just as Aaron was. Preachers (or in this case, we are talking about high priests, who were also teachers and preachers) are not allowed to push themselves forward, but must be called by God, just like Aaron. I remember on my first day at seminary, one of our lecturers sat us all down, and said: Listen, you’re not called to be pastors yet. At the moment, you’re called to be students, and then after the church tests you and examines you, then it will approve you, and then you can serve as a pastor. But there was one student in the class, who immediately snapped back and said: “I don’t agree. I’m called to a pastor, and you’re here to make me one.” Funnily enough, that man was the only student in our class who never completed his studies, and he didn’t become a pastor.

Now there are two ways in which God calls people to the public ministry of teaching the word. The first way is where God simply comes straight to the person, gives them a vision or a dream, and calls them to preach. This is what is called a “call from God without means”. God simply calls the person straight from heaven. Examples of this are Moses, the prophets and the apostles. John the Baptist and even Jesus himself are also in this category.

The second way in which God calls a person is through means, or we might say, “through the church”. Examples of this are people like Timothy, Stephen the martyr, Titus, Sosthenes, and Silas. You can read about these men in the book of Acts, and they are mentioned in some of Paul’s letters. So they were approved by the church, and then they had a ceremony where they laid hands on them and prayed for a special blessing of the Holy Spirit (this is what we call “ordination”), and then they went out and preached. This is also how I came to be a pastor: I went to seminary, I studied theology, I was watched and observed to see if I was suitable, I did field work in local congregations and got to practice things like preaching and bible studies and visiting and teaching, and then I was approved by the church and I was given a call to a parish and ordained. Then you, the people in this parish, had call meetings, and then I was installed as your pastor. This is an example of how God calls pastors and preachers through means, through the church.

Now, if someone is called without means to preach, then God sends them out with miracles and signs. This is the way in which God wants to show to people that He called them. But also, more important than the miracles, is their teaching. Are they teaching God’s word in its truth and purity? In Deuteronomy 13, we read: If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the LORD your God is testing you, to know whether you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

So when God sent Moses, He sent him with special miracles. These miracles were turning his stick into a snake, making his hand become diseased with leprosy, and pouring out the water from the Nile so that it became blood. Jesus also performed many miracles: The blind receive[d] their sight and the lame walk[ed], lepers [were] cleansed and the deaf [began to] hear, and the dead [were] raised up, and the list goes on. Do you see that Moses performed miracles that were frightening—involving snakes, leprosy, blood—but Jesus performed miracles that were comforting—healing, raising the dead, and so forth. Now not all miracles are from God—even though God gave miracles, they don’t necessarily prove that the person speaks from God, unless they speak God’s word truthfully and without errors. For example, in Exodus, we also read about the Egyptian magicians who also turned sticks into snakes using witchcraft, and so Pharaoh wasn’t convinced by Moses. But we also read that Moses’ snake gobbled up magicians’ snakes!

So in our reading the chief priests and the scribes comes up to Jesus and question his authority to teach. They say: By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority? Either Jesus should have been called through means, or “through the church” like these priests and elders were, or it needed to be clear that God had actually called him from heaven. Now, this had actually happened. At Jesus’ baptism, God had said: This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. And the Holy Spirit came upon him in the form of a dove. You can’t get any clearer than that! And then Jesus went around and performed all kinds of wonderful miracles. And the most amazing miracle of all is that on the third day he rose from the dead!

But, when the chief priest and elders went to Jesus, they weren’t actually interested in Jesus’ answer. Let’s say, Jesus had simply answered them, “My authority is from man! My authority is nothing but human authority! I just decided that I want to preach!” Then the chief priests would have every right to throw him out of the temple. But if Jesus said to them, “I was sent by God!” then the priests would have said, “How dare you claim such a thing?” and they would have thrown him out anyway. The chief priests and the elders wanted to trap Jesus.

So Jesus exposes the trap. Jesus says: 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? Jesus asks this question about John the Baptist to expose their motives.

Now, what happens? We read that the chief priests and the elders are not able to give Jesus a straight answer. We read: 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.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

The chief priests and the elders didn’t believe in John’s ministry, and they would like to have said that John’s ministry was just from man, but they didn’t want to say that, because they were afraid of the crowd. They weren’t prepared to give a straight answer, because they didn’t want to get in trouble. So they weaselled out of it, and said: We don’t know. This was a lie. What they really meant was: We don’t really want to say. They didn’t want to say, “from heaven”, and be convicted of their sin of rejecting John, but they also didn’t want to say “from man”, and offend the crowd and make them angry. So Jesus also gives them no answer, and he refuses to play their games, and to bow to their tricks.

Now, let’s go back to the chief priests and the elders for a minute, and let’s examine ourselves a bit, because this is a very important passage. We Christians today might know the bible well and come to church, but what if we had lived in those times, and this man John the Baptist came along? Here is a man who had old parents, had lived out in the wilderness, and he is dressed in camel’s hair and eats nothing but locusts and wild honey. In Aussie-talk, we would say he was a real “bushwacker”! Would you have listened to a preacher like this? Would you have gone to the river Jordan and been baptised by him?

The problem with the chief priests is that fear people rather than God. They were not prepared to listen to John and test his words, because of his appearances. Sometimes we have pastors in our church like that, who are a bit rough around the edges, and don’t quite fit the mould. We have to look past the crusty exterior and test their words! Also, the problem with the priests is that they are only prepared to believe what is easy. They want to go along with the spirit of the age, rather than to stake their lives on God’s truth.

This is a really important message for us in the church today. As Christians, we can’t fear the crowd like the chief priests. We need to stick with God and his word. It’s not for us to weasel our way out of God’s word, just because everyone around us thinks differently. For example, today many people think that there is no such thing as “gender”, as male and female. But in Genesis 1, it says: Male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”, and so on. In this month of October, we remember the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, and Luther understood this well, and engaged with the important issues of his day. St Paul went right into the Athens, and engaged with the people about their worship of idols. So when the world, and human ideas, and human philosophy, starts to “move the goalposts”, the church can’t move. It has to make a stand and give a faithful witness, otherwise it starts to stop being the church and becomes no different from the world. In 2015, when I visited Kenya, I remember seeing an old Catholic church on the side of road, way out in the middle of nowhere, built by Italian prisoners of war. And on the tower there was an inscription that said: The world goes around, but the cross stands still. As Jesus says in Luke 18:8: When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth?

Now, in the last part of our reading today, Jesus gives a very simple parable about a father who sends both his sons to work in his vineyard. The first one says: I will not, but afterward he changed his mind and went. And the second son says: I go, sir, but did not go. Both these sons did something wrong, but only the first son did what his father asked him to do, even though he had to change his mind before going and doing it.

And Jesus compares these chief priests and elders from our reading today, these most respectable people, with the tax collectors and prostitutes of the world, the world’s least respectable people. The first son is like the tax-collectors and prostitutes. They are sinners, and at first refused to obey God their father, but then later changed their mind. There’s a sense in which tax-collectors and prostitutes threw all their principles down the sink in order to make a living. Tax-collectors were Jews that worked for the Romans, the invaders. Could you imagine during the Second World War, if a Jewish man decided to go and work for the Nazis? Or if an American and Australian went to work for the Japanese? Maybe they were desperate for cash, but principles are principles, aren’t they? And sure, a woman might be desperate for cash, and to make a living, but principles are principles, aren’t they? You wouldn’t go and sell your body to a bunch of unfaithful, lustful men? And yet, when John came preaching and was pointing to Jesus—and when Jesus came preaching—they knew that there was something that Jesus could give that no-one else in the world could give. All that anyone else could give them was judgment, condemnation. But Jesus gave them something else: He gave them forgiveness. They came to John to be baptised, confessing their sins, and they trusted in the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Now, if we don’t come to Jesus like this, like a tax-collector or a prostitute in complete need for forgiveness, then we haven’t met Jesus yet. It’s like we don’t really know who He is yet.

The second son, who says, “Yes, I go”, but doesn’t go, is like the chief priests and elders. They give an appearance of being a good boy, but they reject their father and hate him and disobey him. The prophet Samuel said: Man looks at the outward appearance but God looks at the heart. Do you think you’re a good little boy, or a good little girl? Do you think that you have ticked all of God’s boxes, and put on a good show? Sorry—but if that’s the case, then you’re still in the kingdom of darkness, the kingdom of appearances, the kingdom of show-and-tell. That’s the kingdom where the person in change says: You will not die, but you will be like God. But the kingdom of heaven has Jesus as its king, who says: You are a sinner, you are a tax-collector, you are a prostitute. You will die for your sins. But you have a Saviour. This Saviour is Jesus and he calls you by your name, just like he called Mary Magdalene on Easter Sunday, just like he said to Matthew and the other disciples: Follow me!

Jesus says: John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him. The Christian life, the baptised life, the life of the kingdom of Jesus, is the one that is described in this verse. Christians are the people who have seen who we are, who see who Jesus is, and who change our minds and believe the preaching of him. And every day, there is something new to learn in God’s word. Every day is a day of changing our minds. Changing our minds is repentance. When Luther wrote the 95 Theses 500 years ago this year, the first thing he wrote was: When our Lord Jesus said, Repent, he meant that the whole of our lives should be one of repentance. Repentance is when we acknowledge that God is right and we are wrong. We change our minds: we see that up till now we were dead, we had wrong opinions, we did wrong things, our whole minds and hearts are completely wrong. And we realise that there is no hope in us at all, but that there is eternal hope, eternal joy, eternal happiness only in Jesus, in Jesus alone! He is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Him. He is our Saviour, our hope, our life, and our joy! Amen.

Dear Jesus, we thank you for calling us through the preaching of your word. Change our minds by your Holy Spirit, and enable and empower us to trust in you in every way possible as our Saviour, our Lord and our King. Amen.