Matthew 21:23-32 "Words & Actions"

Every now and then Lisa asks me if I want to do something that I am not at all interested in doing. Now I could just say that I’m not interested but I don’t. Instead, I put a bunch of irony and sarcasm in my voice and say, “oh yeah, I really want to spend they day shopping for clothes!” as I roll my eyes. She knows by the tone of my voice and my actions and my strong aversion to shopping that what I am saying doesn’t line up with what I mean. I am saying one thing and I mean something totally different. Though my mouth says “I really want to spend the day shopping for clothes,” the rest of my being is really saying, “please, please, please don’t make me do it.”

This is an obvious place where my words and my actions don’t line up. But things much less obvious can often arrive as well. Maybe I am saying yes to something that I really don’t want to do, but feel I have to. Therefore my heart really isn’t in it and therefore I don’t put the energy I should into whatever it is. Maybe I have every intention of doing something and therefore say I will, but then don’t actually ever get around to it. I must admit that I have been guilty of that one. Maybe the way my words and actions don’t line up is that I don’t speak up against something or for something when I really should because I am afraid of how people will respond.

Whatever the reason, whatever the method, there is something wrong when our words and our actions are not in line with each other. Today we are going to look at a scripture about people whose words and actions did not line up and we are hopefully going to find a way to make our words and actions line up better.

1. Politics

In today’s scripture the leaders in the church question Jesus’ authority. They decide to play games in the way they question Jesus and we discover that he is able to beat them at their own game. You see, the leaders are intimidated by Jesus. They don’t know quite what to make of him, and he seems to have the people of Israel following him and his teachings. Therefore they ask a question of him not to find out the answer but rather to trap him. They are more interested in playing games than they are in learning something about Jesus. So they ask him what seems like a simple question, they ask whose authority he is doing the things he does by. We need to look back earlier in Matthew 21 to see what things they are talking about. Matthew 21 begins with Jesus entering Jerusalem as a king on a donkey with the people praising him and singing Hosanna! People were calling Jesus the son of David. We celebrate this every year with Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter. And the fact that this comes after Palm Sunday means it is something that happens in the last week of Jesus’ life, and these very same leaders in the temple are the ones who are plotting to do Jesus in.

Immediately after the triumphal entry Jesus goes to the temple, which is the whole reason he has come to Jerusalem, to celebrate Passover and worship God at the temple. And he finds something at the temple that breaks his heart and makes him angry. He runs around the temple and overturns tables where people are selling things because he sees that the temple is being misused by the people. They have turned a house of prayer into a den of robbers.

I’m sure this is precisely the thing that the leaders of the temple are questioning. Here comes someone, a man from the backwoods of Israel, from this small area in the north called Nazareth, and he has come in and put a stop to something that they should have put a stop to long before. They see truth in his words, they see authority in his actions, but they decide that it is better to play politics with him than to learn from him.

And so they ask him a loaded question. It is a question that he will have difficulty answering without looking foolish in their eyes. They ask by whose authority he is doing these things. If he says by his own, they then feel they can dismiss him. If he says by God’s authority, they can say that he is a madman, that he has overreached his bounds. They also, at the same time, are calling his credentials into question. They had been to schools. They had been to seminaries. They had the education and they had the official backing of the temple. He had none of these. Instead, he was merely a wandering teacher who had made his living as a carpenter years earlier.

Jesus knows he cannot win with the question they have asked, so he fires one back at them. He beats them at their own game. He asks them a question that they cannot get away with answering. He asks them about John the Baptist who went before him and who had a difficult relationship with them as well. “Where did John and his baptism come from?” Jesus asked. “From God or from man?” He put them in the same position that they had put him and they did not like it.

What really bothers me about the religious leaders is the discussion they had among themselves. They didn’t talk about whether they believed that what John was doing had any merit. They didn’t compare what John had taught with the scripture they knew. They looked at it purely from a political perspective. How will our answer make us look? If we say that John’s baptism was from God then we’ll look bad for not listening to John. If we say it was from man we’ll look bad for attacking a person the people like. How cynical, how depressing, how sad.

2. Organized Religion

I hear again and again from people who are looking for truth, from people who are seeking to know God, that they think of themselves as spiritual, they want to believe in God and they think there is definitely something more to this world than just the physical. They are looking for meaning to their lives, but they just don’t like organized religion.

Now organized religion can be a scapegoat for them. It may be that they don’t like the idea of God or anybody else telling them how they should live or act or what they should do. Sometimes people allow their dislike for organized religion be an excuse to avoid truly following where God is leading them. But at the same time, organized religion does sometimes make a good bad guy. They see it as a structure that is more interested in the structure than in truth, more interested in money and power than in helping those it shepherds. When we get organized in our faith and set up a structure, some things are lost that Jesus taught. All of a sudden there is a hierarchy that Jesus doesn’t seem very interested in. All of a sudden there is someone above you that is telling you what to believe so that you don’t need to figure it out for yourself.

The interesting thing for me, here, is that it seems that Jesus didn’t have much to do with organized religion himself. He didn’t find priests and prophets to have as the leaders of his church. He didn’t have the Pharisees and Sadducees and teachers of the law as his primary followers. It seems that they were too interested in power and in trying to put him in his place to really hear what it was he had to say. Instead, Jesus took tax collectors and fishermen and ordinary people and had them become his first disciples and then watched them grow into the leaders of his church.

There was a book series that I read in high school called Joshua. It was written by a catholic priest and therefore had some messed up ideas about the pope and the authority of the church, but at the same time it got some amazing truths right. It set itself up with the idea of what would happen if Jesus returned in today’s world, not as conquering king, but rather as he spent his life in Israel 2000 years ago. Jesus, now going by the name Joshua, wanders through towns and teaches truth to those who are outcast and unloved and some churches embrace him and others want nothing to do with him. Those who want nothing to do with him are very much like the temple leaders found in today’s scripture. They are more interested in their own standing than in hearing the truth. Their words and their actions are not connected.

3. Say what you do

Jesus goes on and tells the people and specifically the temple leaders a parable. And the parable is very clear. There is a man who has work that he needs done and so he asks his two sons to go to the vineyard and do some work. One son shows a stubborn streak of independence and disobedience and says no to his father, but then he finds himself able to and goes into the field and does what his father asks. The other son tells dad that he is going to go do what he asks, but then doesn’t. Jesus wonders which is the one that did what his father asked. The answer is obvious. The actions speak louder than the words and what matters isn’t what you say you’re going to do, rather it is what you do.

We don’t know what changed the sons’ minds. Did the one who said he couldn’t have something clear up in his schedule? Did he change his mind because of guilt? Was his conscience working overtime until he decided to do the right thing? Or was he just being contrary with his father because he wanted to be, though he had every intention of going in the end?

And then there is the son who said he would go and didn’t. Did he just blow it off? Did he say yes without thinking through whether he really could? Did he forget? Did something come up that kept him from going. When it comes down to it we discover that intentions don’t really matter as much as results.

Jesus identifies the one who said no and then went with the tax collectors and the prostitutes; he identifies that son with the lost. These are the people who made bad decisions earlier in their lives and headed off in the wrong direction, but then repented. They realized they were heading in the wrong direction and turned around. They came back and followed.

Jesus is looking at the leaders in the organized religion of the day as those who started in the right direction but then got sidetracked and ended up not following where God had led.

Many of us said yes to God early in our lives. And therefore we have a choice. Are we going to follow through with what we promised to do? Are we going to remain faithful to our God and go where he sends us or are we going to let ourselves get distracted and turn away from God’s call on our lives? Are we going to be like the Pharisees or are we going to take a third way. This third way is the son who says yes to his father and then follows through with it. I believe that if organized religion was full of people following this third way, it wouldn’t be the villain it is made out to be. If the temple leaders had looked at John the Baptist’s teachings and truly wondered whether they were from God instead of wondering how their answer to Jesus’ question would make them look, then the conversation they had would have been much different.

Jesus hadn’t given up on organized religion. Not at all. The problem was that the organized religion of the day had given up on him. But instead of giving up on them, he did all he could to try to get them to see this about themselves and change this about themselves. And there were Pharisees who did follow Jesus, so we know that he did get through to them. Are we going to allow him to get through to us? Are we going to respond when he calls? Are we going to follow through with our promises to him? In the end it is important to remember that we have asked Jesus to be our Savior and Lord, we have promised ourselves to him. The question is whether we are going to live the way we said we would. The question is whether we are going to follow through with our promise. We have said yes to our God. Are we ready to follow through and act this out? Amen.