We talked a while back about Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and about His ministry in Jerusalem throughout the last days of His life on earth. So today, I would like to focus on the questions that Jesus fields from the religious leaders. While today I am referring to a very particular section of of Luke 20 in which the religious leaders are challenging the authority of Jesus, I think that most of the questions from the religious leaders towards Jesus would fit into this category save those from Nicodemus in the book of John.
So Jesus has entered the city of Jerusalem in a rather humbly triumphant manner and has gone into the Temple and cleansed it, driving out all of the people that were in there buying and selling, cheating many for the sake of religion. The religious leaders did not like this so they devised a way to trap Jesus by “asking” Him a question. Their motive? To try and trap Jesus publicly so that they could “de-frock” Him and thus remove Him from prominence. There is an even deeper goal here I think, and its one that we often share with these religious leaders. This goal is also one that is shared by those that are not believers, in order to trick Christians into saying specific things. What is this goal? They want to be right… or at the very least for Jesus to be wrong. They want to catch Jesus to prove that the way they believe is correct.
You may be thinking to yourself, “I don’t do that at all.” But I think that if we are honest with ourselves, we do this with God all the time. Whether we read our Bibles or just go to worship on Sunday mornings, we want to know that what we are doing is good (or at the very least okay). If we read in the Bible or hear the pastor say that we should not hate our brother because it is just like murdering our brother, do we not often say, “well its not exactly like murder” or “I don’t really hate them, I just strongly dislike them.” We justify our actions as a way of making ourselves feel okay about the way we are living. We don’t want to feel guilty and we certainly don’t want to change, so we justify ourselves in our own minds.
We often do this with pastors as well. In come classes that I have taken at seminary, I have witnessed some of my peers try to justify their own beliefs in front of pastors and professors by twisting their words or tweaking their statements so that they will be okay with what is being said. In the same way, I have seen people go to their pastor and even had people come to be that try to justify their sinful actions by talking about how the context of a particular passage clearly means that what they did in the present is not what the Bible meant. What they want to hear is that their sinful actions, their way of believing is good enough… what they want is cheap discipleship… cheap faith.
I think the greater world does this a lot too, posing questions like the ones Jesus is asked to the Church in an effort to somehow get a religious pass for immoral or unjust action. To be honest, I think that the Church has long been silent about a lot of things, refusing to answer and thus affirming the direction that culture is going. Sure we speak up every now and then on hot-button issues, but do we really care about the deep day-to-day living of those around us? Do we really want to stand idly by while our friends and neighbors plunge deeper into darkness? We need to have an answer for these questions… we need to have an answer for the culture.
What is Jesus’ answer here? Well, He turns the question on its head and throws it back at the religious leaders. He is well aware of their intent and traps them in their trap. However, earlier and later in His ministry, even in our reading today, Jesus references time and again the words of Scripture in His answers. Jesus doesn’t need to come up with a new and creative answer for the time because He has the Word of God inside of Him. It is close to His heart and deep in His mind and at any time He can pull it out at any time. Not just His favorite verses that have little meaning, but all of Scripture at all times. Are we familiar with the Word of God in this way? Do we have answers for the questions that the world poses to us? Do we have answers to the simple questions? Can we back them up with Scripture? Are these words truly our life, as Moses says to the people of Israel in Deuteronomy, or are they just idle words that pass in and out of our ears. We need to recover the Word of God in our hearts and on our minds that we may answer the questions for ourselves and for others!
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