By What Authority Are You Doing These Things, Mt. 21: 23-27

This question that the chief priests and the elders ask Jesus in this passage from Matthew’s Gospel is still familiar to us today. It is the question that militant atheists and relativist ideologues still ask us, oozing with the same kind of self-important cynicism, today. They are the equivalent of the chief priests and elders who confronted Jesus with this question. Jesus’ response, as usual, is to bat the ball back into their side of the court, by asking them a question whose answer would reveal and defeat their cynical intentions.

Modern atheists and relativists, like the elders and chief priests confronting Jesus in this passage, deny any authority but their own and, ironically, never see either the tyrannical nature of their ‘authority’ or its natural limitations rooted in their unseen imperfections. Instead of welcoming a true authority that could perfect their lives, they try desperately to wipe it out, to protect their self-referential, comfortable claims to absolute authority. This passage still speaks directly to us today. Jesus’ way, truth, life, and authority are just as present today as it was then. It is still challenged, not just by those who actively and militantly deny his authority. It is challenged by each of us whenever we choose to commit sin, whether that be in large and egregious ways, or in those ways that we imagine to be small, insignificant, and hidden from sight.

But here is the truth that Jesus reveals. When we listen to Jesus with open, humble hearts and minds, and when we trust him, we do, “hear what God says, and know what the Most High knows, and see what the Almighty sees” (Numbers 24:4). When Jesus says to the Apostle Thomas in the upper room at the Last Supper, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”, he reveals directly his own divine identity and his role as the ultimate revelation of God the Father. This is the authority in and through which Jesus acts and speaks! It is this authority that is the source and the goal of all that is good and true, in all places, and in all times.

The chief priests and elders, in their cleverness, could see the dilemma that Jesus had put them in with his question about where John’s baptism was from: “Was it of heavenly or of human origin” (Mt. 21: 25)? Their clever minds could see that no matter how they answered it, they would fail to accomplish their designs to rid themselves of this troublesome Jesus, who spoke and acted with such clear authority. In the end, seeing their dilemma and not knowing how to avoid it, and “for fear of the crowds who regarded John as a prophet”, they take the cowardly way out saying, “We do not know” (Mt. 21: 26-27). But that answer, then and now, is truer than they realize. That they do not know is not the problem. Their unrecognized problem is that they are too proud to admit that or to submit to that real authority.

And here is the message for us today. We, too, are challenged to believe that Jesus is the true authority of our lives. It is when we come to ‘see’ and believe the truth of Jesus’ divine authority with the eyes of faith, and submit to it willingly and wisely, that we find real liberation from our unrecognized slavery to our egos and our imagined, yet insupportable claims of divine wisdom, insight, and absolute authority. Jesus alone is our freedom. It is in his authority alone that we are truly set free. Ah, paradox! It is what it is.