Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

There’s a lovely story doing the rounds in various military establishments about a group of military boffins who succeed in building a super-duper computer capable of solving any strategic or tactical problem you can imagine.  According to the experts this is going to save billions of pounds and save many lives.  So the Generals turn up for a demonstration of this fabulous machine, and the boffin in charge asks them to feed into the computer a difficult tactical problem so the computer could solve it.  The computer made all sorts of strange noises for about an hour and printed the one word answer “YES”.  The Generals were not impressed and so put into the computer the question, “YES WHAT?”  Immediately the computer printed out the message “YES SIR”.

The moral of that little story is that the Chief Priests and the Elders of the Temple in Jerusalem, just like those Generals were used to people saying “YES SIR”, to them.  They were the religious authorities, and used to being treated as such without question. But now they were faced down by Jesus who questioned them about authority. 

This scene in Matthew takes place during ‘Holy Week’, just after Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem, triumphantly greeted by the crowds who lined the way. Crowds were spreading their cloaks on the road, others were cutting branches off the trees and spreading them on the road, as they would for a king or emperor. ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’

A tumultuous welcome which could hardly have escaped the eyes of the chief priests, the Scribes and Pharisees, or the Roman rulers,  But of course, that’s exactly what Jesus wanted, he wanted these people to know he had arrived in the city of Jerusalem, the power house of the Jewish nation, and he came with authority from God.

We have to try and imagine the scene, Jerusalem is overflowing with hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims from all over the then known world, who have come to celebrate the Feast of the Passover. So when Jesus came riding into town, just like a conquering hero, it must have raised the temperature to boiling point. To say that the Jewish Religious leaders were not impressed would be an under-statement, they became very angry and decided they needed to get rid of him, this confrontation takes place in what is becoming for Jesus an increasingly tense and dangerous few days which will culminate on the Cross on Good Friday, but of course Jesus is only too well aware of this, after all this is what he has come to Jerusalem for.  This week he will lay down his life and make the perfect sacrifice to save us from our sins, and give us new hope, new life. He is going to play them at their own game and show them up to be the bigoted, corrupt people they really are.

As soon as Jesus enters the temple the religious folk, the chief priests and the elders jump on him with questions about his teaching.  ‘By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?’ The real question they want to ask is, “Do you think you are the Messiah?” They have seen him teaching, preaching and healing people, acting like the Messiah, and now this itinerant preacher is in the Temple, the Jews Holiest Shrine, acting as if he owned the place. Who really is this Jesus, who is he working for, who gives him the authority to do what he does, because they certainly haven’t given him the authority and they are the religious authority!! They act for God here on earth, or so they think!!

Yes, they want an answer from him, but really they want him to incriminate himself so they can do away with him. Remove this threat to their authority as they have done before with other would be Messiah’s that have proclaimed themselves God’s anointed.   Jesus responds with his own trick question, ‘Did the baptism of John the Baptist come from heaven, or was it of human origin?’

The leaders see they are trapped, knowing which ever way they answer will land them in trouble, either with God or with the crowds who regard John the Baptist as a prophet from God, so they give a typically political answer, ‘We do not know’, hoping it will get them out of this tricky situation Jesus has put them in.  But it doesn’t work and Jesus tells them in that case he will not tell them by what authority he is doing these things.

To make his point, Jesus asks what they think about the two sons who are asked to work in their father’s vineyard. One says no, but later changes his mind and goes and works there, but the other says yes, but never shows up.  ‘Which of the two did the will of his father?’ Jesus asked them, and they answer the first one, who refused but then did has his father asked him.

The punch line from Jesus is to compare the chief priests, the Scribes and the Pharisees with tax collectors and prostitutes when they heard John the Baptists message of repentance.  The chief priest and that lot didn’t believe John when he told them that they needed to repent and turn to God, what did they need to repent about? They were God’s anointed here on earth, they made the decisions, they were beyond reproach.  But all those sinners, the tax collectors, the prostitutes did believe John and his message of repentance. They turned away from their old ways, repented and became followers of Christ.

‘The tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you’, Jesus warns them.

The truth is that we are so often like the son who says he will work in the vineyard, but then makes every excuse not to do it.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions, we are told, and it’s certainly true.  We all do it, we commit to something, say we’ll take care of it, put it on our ‘to do’ list, and forget it, or do something else which we think is more important.

So the meaning of the parable is crystal clear, even if it is hidden from us because of our own shortcomings.  The Jewish leaders are the people who said they would obey God, but then didn’t, instead they obeyed petty rules and regulations that had replaced God’s commandments in their worship.  The tax collectors and the prostitutes are those who said they wouldn’t follow God, they wanted to go their own way, live their own lives, knowing they were outside normal society, but then heard God’s call to repentance and answered that call, repented and turned their lives around.

It’s a difficult parable for us to fully understand, because over the course of our lives, we can be like both sons, be like the chief priests, and the elders, be like the tax collectors, and Jesus knows that about us, after all God created us and he looks into our hearts and knows our thoughts., as Psalm 139 tells us, ‘O Lord, you have searched me and know me. You knit me together in my mother’s womb’.

Knowing us inside out, Jesus sees us as God’s children, with all our failings and faults, he knows we fail him when other things become more important in our lives, when as Christians we care more about petty things than about the people who need our love outside the walls of this church.  You see what matters to God is our words and actions, how we live our lives following Christ, how we treat each other and our neighbours, how we treat those in our community, not just our Christian community, that’s what we are measured by.  Do we walk the walk as well as talk the talk?

Going back to the chief priests and the Scribes and the Pharisees, they had a lot to say about what was right and wrong, they professed to study the scriptures, spent their lives in the temple, and told others how to live their lives according to the scriptures and the religious laws, a form of ideology not religious belief, and they refused to examine their own lives to see if they were living what they taught, practicing what they preached.  And more importantly, when John the Baptist showed up, they ignored his message, saw no need to repent and truly follow God. Jesus was entirely different, he didn’t talk about an ideology, but a community founded on the simplest principal of love for one another. We are that community in this place now, we are the Church.

We can often deceive ourselves into thinking we are saying yes to God, and then live as if we are saying no.  Not intentional perhaps, we think we are being good Christians.

Jesus says it is those who are prepared to examine their lives, who are prepared to turn their lives around and truly repent who will be first into heaven.

If we are to do the will of God, we need to let our hearts be open and become a people transformed, forgiven and renewed.  God expects us to live in a way that reflects His love for all creation.

Until we open our hearts and allow ourselves to be truly transformed, we will not be changed.  We, the people of God, are resurrection people, and are meant to be transformed by all that Jesus did and taught us.  The tax collectors and other sinners were transformed, we can be transformed as well, if we truly let Christ into our lives and begin to live as a child of God.  Amen.