Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

 Who is Jesus? This has been a question asked all through the gospel: by disciples who find themselves making abrupt decisions to step out of their boats and tax booths to follow him; by the crowds who flock to hear his teaching; by the sick who are healed by his touch; by the religious authorities who find themselves by turns infuriated, intrigued, angered and scandalized by his behaviour.

 Now the stakes are raised. The episode we hear in today’s gospel takes place in the temple, the centre of Jewish life and identity. It comes straight after Jesus has ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey as crowds shout Hosanna, and after he has tipped over tables and chased out the traders from the temple, before curing the blind and the lame who came to him.

 All of this is deeply provocative stuff. It stirs up Israel’s memory and hopes by enacting old prophecies about the coming of the Lord to Zion. It captures the public imagination, and is a direct challenge to the religious leaders. They are supposed to be the guardians of Israel’s laws, the teachers of God’s ways and the interpreters of his will. Not some upstart provincial rabbi whose popularity and pretensions need to be squashed. Who the hell does he think he is?

 So now they bait the trap. ‘By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?’ Make no mistake: this is not a polite enquiry, nor the opening gambit in a good rabbinical debate. The chief priests and elders of the people know a thing or two about authority, about who has it and who doesn’t. And they feel pretty secure in the knowledge that in this encounter, they are the ones with authority.

 They’re not wrong. The next time Jesus stands before them they will condemn him to death, and think that by doing so they are doing God’s will.

 But instead of slinking away in awe at their cleverness and cowed by their authority, Jesus turns the question back on them, making them face the uncomfortable truth about how precarious their power really is. They can’t answer him, because they’re afraid both of the crowds who regard John the Baptist as a prophet, and of the alternative answer, which is that they have ignored the revelation of God, which shows how thin their claim to speak for God is.

 And then Jesus tells a parable to make absolutely sure that they see themselves in the mirror he holds up to them. There are two brothers: one refuses to go and work in the vineyard when his father asks him to but ends up going, the other says he’ll go but never does. Which does the will of the father?

 Who is doing God’s will? Is it the chief priests and elders, who grow rich on the opportunities afforded them by their position, who enjoy the status it brings and the glow of satisfaction that comes from knowing they are in the right? Or is it the prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners who have always found themselves on the wrong side of the holiness divide but in the preaching of John and the company of Jesus learn that they are loved by God and so repent?

 Is the son who does the will of the father the one who says all the right things but does not do them? Or the one who says no but then has a change of mind and goes and does what his father asks?

 This is not a mirror the elders want to look in. Jesus’ parable exposes their hypocrisy, the gap between their lofty words about God and their actual disobedience to him. John had come preaching repentance, and tax collectors and prostitutes had listened and repented, but the religiously secure had refused to hear, as now they refuse to hear Jesus, all the while thinking they are saying yes to God, and being the obedient son.

 But it’s not really flagrant hypocrisy Jesus is exposing here. It’s the baked-in belief that they already know God’s will that prevents them from recognising God incarnate standing before them. They mistake their beliefs for obedience. But their God is too small, their beliefs too narrow, and they can’t see that all this time they have been congratulating themselves for the righteousness that separated them from the sex workers and the other sinners, while God himself has been on the far side of that division, preaching the gospel and extending the invitation into his kingdom.

 Mistaking beliefs for obedience is not a sin confined to the religious elders of Jesus’ day. Most of us, if we’re willing to look in the mirror held up to us, know that there’s often a gap between what we think we are and what we do. Our actions betray our words: we say we care about the environment, or human rights, but our holiday and consumer choices tell another story. We say yes to God with our lips but each time we nurse resentment in our hearts, or withhold help from someone in need, or gossip behind someone’s back, or refuse to make space at the table for people not like us, we are really saying no. Sometimes this will be a wilful refusal of the will of God, but quite often it is not. We just assume that God’s will coincides with our own, or have got so used to containing God within the parameters of our own beliefs and convictions that we don’t notice him when he’s there enjoying the company of those we’ve written off, and inviting us to join him.

 Or, when he does get close enough for us to notice him we object to the way he disrupts our temples, and work out ways to see off this threat.

 But there is good news, even for those of us who have been saying yes and doing no without even realising it. For there is still time to have a change of mind, to repent, to set Jesus free from the constraints we impose on him – and to discover the freedom he wants for us. The religious elders could not conceive that the power at work in Jesus was the power of God, because they never expected God to show up in the wrong company, or to disrupt the temple, or to take on flesh and make his home among us. Yet right in front them is Jesus, the Son who came to do the will of the Father, which is to reconcile all people to himself. God meets our outright refusals of his will, our half-heartedness, our hypocrisies and our disobedience with his own yes to us in Christ, turning our noes into yesses, and by his Spirit at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for his good pleasure (Phil. 2.13).