17th Sunday after Trinity
READING: Matthew 21.23–32
By What Authority?
“By what authority are you doing these things?” Words taken from the Gospel we’ve heard today
It is a good question. Perhaps it is one of the defining questions of our age.
Because every day we allow something or someone to have authority in our lives.
How do we decide what is true? Whom do we trust? What shapes our opinions? What makes us change our minds?
Once, perhaps, the answers seemed simpler. We trusted the doctor, the teacher, the priest, the newspaper, the BBC, the expert. Not unquestioningly, but there were recognised places where authority seemed to reside.
Today in our very changing world it feels much more complicated.
We have twenty-four-hour news, social media, podcasts, influencers and endless online commentary. Our phones constantly offer us opinions about almost everything. Algorithms increasingly determine what appears on our screens, usually giving us more of what we have already shown an interest in.
So perhaps a good question to ask ourselves occasionally is:
What and whom actually has authority over me?
Is it Scripture? Tradition? Experience? Reason? Science? The Church? Friends? Social media? My own instincts?
Or simply the voice that most closely agrees with what I already think? All thoughts worth pondering this week.
And it’s that question about “ by what authority” that takes us into the Temple with Jesus.
Let’s remind us of the account we’ve heard today .
The chief priests and elders come to Jesus and ask:
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
It sounds like a theological, a religious question. But Jesus quickly reveals that something else is probably going on.
So Jesus asks them about John the Baptist. Did John’s authority come from heaven or was it simply human?
And suddenly the religious leaders are trapped.
What is fascinating is that they do not ask one another, “What is true?”
Instead they ask, in effect, “Which answer is safest for us to give?”
If we say John came from God, Jesus will ask why we ignored him. If we say his authority was merely human, the crowd may turn against us.
Their discernment has become tangled up with protecting their own position.
And perhaps that is where this Gospel comes uncomfortably close to us.
Because institutions can do that.
Churches can do that.
And individuals can do that.
We can become so concerned with protecting what we have, defending our reputation, preserving our structures or justifying what we have always done that we stop asking the much more important question:
Where is God actually at work?
That feels like a particularly useful question for any church community who have a heart and calling for working with people and systems on the edges of our society – often HeartEdge focused churches
Because the life of God, encounter with God, is not confined to the places where we expect to find it.
God is encountered in worship and Scripture, certainly. But God may also be encountered around a lunch table, in a community centre, at a foodbank, through music or theatre, in a conversation with someone sleeping on the street, in a campaign for justice, in a café, in a choir, in the person who walks into church but does not know when to stand up or what to say.
The task of the Church is not always to take God somewhere.
Rather , our task is to recognise that God has arrived in every situation before us….and together we experience the God who is with us…every where and in every situation.
Let’s go back to the gospel reading for a moment –
Jesus goes on from talking about authority to tell the story of two sons.
A father asks them to work in his vineyard.
The first says, “No.”
But later he changes his mind and goes.
The second says, “Yes, sir.”
But he never goes.
Which one did what the father wanted?
The answer is obvious.
The first.
You see, in telling that story Jesus places authority not simply in saying the right thing but in participation..in doing the right thing too..
That matters enormously for us the Church.
We can say beautiful things about compassion. But are we alongside people who are struggling?
We can speak about community. But who actually feels they belong?
We can talk and pray about justice But whose voices are heard when decisions are made?
We can preach about welcome. But who finds a place at the table?
We can say “yes” to God every Sunday and yet somehow … like the second son …never quite make it into the vineyard.
And there is something else wonderfully hopeful about the first son.
He changes his mind.
His first answer is not his final answer.
Perhaps that is one of the signs of a living faith: the capacity to be changed.
We can say, “I used to think that, but now I see things differently.”
We can discover that someone we dismissed has something to teach us.
We can allow another person’s experience to disturb our assumptions.
We can recognise that something we thought was impossible is already happening.
Maybe repentance is not primarily about feeling guilty.
Maybe repentance, turning around , is becoming available to God again.
And then Jesus makes the story even more uncomfortable.
He tells the respectable religious leaders that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom ahead of them.
These are precisely the people whose lives carried little authority in respectable society.
Yet Jesus says: look at them.
Notice what is happening.
They heard John. They responded. Their lives are becoming evidence of God’s activity.
That gives us , the Church, a challenging question:
Whose lives are we prepared to recognise as evidence of what God is doing?
Maybe someone experiencing homelessness understands something about community that the comfortable congregation needs to hear. In NightChurch Penzance that has often happened.
Maybe the young climate campaigner sees something about creation that the established Church has been slow to recognise. Read some of the articles in Green Christian magazine.
Maybe someone who has felt excluded from church can teach us something about welcome.
Maybe the artist, entrepreneur, community organiser or person running the local café is already creating places of encounter, belonging and hope. So many examples can be found in u tube clips on the HeartEdge website.
And in all these situations perhaps we see examples of people is not to telling those outside the church what God is doing….but ..
It is to listen.
That is a different kind of authority.
It is not authority exercised over people, but authority discovered with people.
And that is what we see in Jesus.
His authority is not primarily demonstrated by credentials or position. It is revealed in relationship: eating with outsiders, touching those others avoided, listening to people whose voices were ignored, washing feet, forgiving enemies and giving himself away.
So perhaps the question at the end of this Gospel is not simply:
“By what authority?”
It is:
“What has authority over me?“
What voices shape the way I see the world?
Whose experience do I trust?
Whose experience do I dismiss?
Where might God already be at work beyond the boundaries I have drawn?
And am I still capable of changing my mind?
Because sometimes faithfulness begins with having the courage to say:
“I hadn’t seen that before.”
And then, like the first son, getting up and going into the vineyard.
Image: Getty Images, Unsplash.com
