Trinity 17 2023

Trinity 17 2023

Philippians 2.1-13, Matt 21.23-32

It's hard to get far these days without some sort of formal identification. Passports, driving licences, photo cards and so on. And then there are the biometric checks - phones with facial recognition software and fingerprint detection. It's a sign of the times. Technology develops, but so do the ways criminals use it to defraud us. So ever more complex and inconvenient checks are needed.    

But if the technology is new, the problem is an ancient one. How do we know whether we can trust someone or not? How do we know whether they are who they say they are? That's the core question and it's there at the centre of today's gospel reading. By what authority are you doing these things? The chief priests ask Jesus as he preaches in the temple. Who do you think you are? in other words. It's not just his preaching that's rattled them, though. It's what came before it. 

Just the day before, Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, and then he'd gone straight to the temple and turned over the tables of the traders there. The temple authorities know that his actions weren't just a spur of the moment outburst. They were a deliberate message to anyone with ears to hear it. That triumphal entry on a donkey and the cleansing of the temple echoed well known prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures about the coming of God's Messiah. Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and how it would be understood by people who knew those scriptures. 

We might think that the temple leaders would welcome the Messiah, the chosen one of the God they worshipped, the one who would deliver Israel from oppression. But the problem was that Jesus wasn't the kind of Messiah they were hoping for. They assumed that the Messiah would be one of them, or at least sympathetic to them, not a carpenter from Nazareth who'd consistently challenged the status quo, of which they were definitely a part. It's classic institutional behaviour. Those with power tend to assume they have a right to hang on to it. They tend to assume they have a right to be at the front of the queue, at the centre of whatever's happening, and it didn't look as if that was Jesus’ plan at all. 

But if they wanted to get rid of him, they'd need solid evidence to take to the Romans about the claims he was making. They needed to hear him say that he was the Messiah out loud, clearly, with witnesses. The Romans weren't going to be interested in reenacted Hebrew prophecies. That's why they try to force him into this no-win situation. If he says he's the Messiah, they think the Romans will clamp down on him as a potential troublemaker. But if he says he isn't, the crowds will turn against him because he will have exposed himself as a fraud. 

But Jesus uses their own tactic against them, and in the end it's his accusers who are faced with the no-win dilemma. What about John the Baptist? Asks Jesus. Was he working in line with God's will and God's way? John had been executed by King Herod, but he still had a huge popular following. If they say they think John was sent by God, Jesus will ask them why they didn't follow him. He'd been calling people to live in obedience to the law after all. If they say he wasn't sent by God, though, the crowd, who loved him, will turn against them. 

The temple authorities want Jesus to reveal himself, to declare who he really is. But in the end, he reveals them and their true motivation, which is to preserve their own position and power and the stability of the institution that gives it to them. As I said, it’s classic institutional behaviour. The temple officials aren't bad people. They're just caught up in groupthink, and we are all capable of doing what they did. We're all tempted to defend the groups we belong to, the groups which give us identity and security, to refuse to see anything wrong in them and to refuse to listen to those who've been hurt by them. That's why victims and survivors of abuse so often find themselves ignored or silenced or vilified if they speak out about what's happened to them in churches or in schools, care homes, the police, the military, the NHS, sports organisations or businesses.

The little parable Jesus goes on to tell about two sons and their father hits home because it set in one of the most powerful and complicated institutions that human beings know - the family. A man has two sons. One initially refuses to help out in the vineyard - we aren't told why -  but eventually he goes and does so anyway. The other son says he will help, but doesn't. Which son does the father's will? asks Jesus. The answer is obvious. The first son, who actually does the job, even if he'd said he wouldn't. We might think it would be even better if he’d said ‘yes’ from the beginning, but I think there's a reason why Jesus doesn't set the story up like that - I'll come to it in a minute. His brother’s behaviour is far more frustrating though. If someone says they will do something and then doesn't, when do you give up waiting and do it yourself? Do you wait till the grapes are rotting on the vine? The second son, a dig at those temple authorities, may have looked good in his father's eyes at first, just as all their prayers and sacrifices made them look holy, but what's the point of that if it doesn't make any difference, if the harvest isn't gathered in or people's lives aren't changed? 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, we might say, or as Jesus puts it elsewhere in the Gospels, by their fruits shall you know them. However unlikely-looking the pudding, or the tree, or the person,  if they produce something which is nourishing and life giving, then obviously something good must be happening in them. That's the message of this parable. And that's why that first son needs to say ‘no’ for the parable to work. He's like the tax collectors and prostitutes  They were all people whose lives seemed to the religious elites to be saying a big ‘no’ to God. And maybe Jesus is also pointing the finger at himself - he was seen as a troublemaker and a rebel after all.  .But the tax collectors and prostitutes had listened to John and to Jesus, and were changing their lives, and Jesus himself brought new life wherever he went. Their lives were bearing fruit.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, writes Saint Paul to the church in Philippi. Have the same attitude Jesus did, he means. Not clinging to his power, but acting like a slave and dying. The kind of death by crucifixion reserved for slaves and other disgraced people. For Paul, it wasn't just Jesus’ death that was cross shaped, it was his whole life, focused on service rather than status, seeing and lifting up those who are at the bottom of the heap, helping them to find the God who was at work in them, as Paul puts it, enabling them to be and to do what God had intended so they could find their identity as his beloved children. 

And that brings me back to where I started. With those questions about identity. Passports and ID cards can only go so far in telling us - and those who meet us - who we are. To know that truly, we also need to know whose we are - children of a loving, serving, self-giving God who was prepared even to die for us, and who calls us to show the family likeness to him in the way we live our lives. Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you says today's collect. It's in God that we find our true identity. It's in God that we find our true calling and the strength to live out that calling for the good of others.

Amen