“Who do you think you are? What right have you to tell me what to think?”
Has anyone ever said that to you? It’s not very pleasant. But it happened to me, once. Back when I was just starting seminary.
I had run into an acquaintance of mine named Nora. She was pretty vulnerable and sensitive to begin with, and on top of that was going through some pretty rough times. I didn’t know her well; we’d only talked a few times. But I knew her children’s names, and where she went to church, and things like that and we were both in the mood for a coffee break. When we sat down, Nora saw me glance at the book she was carrying, one of Shirley MacLaine’s on reincarnation and channeling and other New Age ideology, and she said something like, “I’ve been doing a lot of reading on spirituality lately.” And I said, “Please be careful, that stuff can be dangerous.”
And she blew up at me.
And of course I hadn’t told Nora what she should think, I had told her what I thought. And I hadn’t told her not to do it, I had told her to be careful. And furthermore, as to who I thought I was, I thought I was a seminary student who knew a whole lot more than she did about these things, and had furthermore been pretty badly burnt playing around with New Age stuff before I became a Christian. So not only did I mean well - which you all know is no guarantee of anything, you know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions - but looking back I still think I did the right thing.
It’s politically incorrect, of course, even to hint that you don’t fully agree with someone else’s opinions. Because if all religious stories and values are simply cultural constructs, as our post-modernist society teaches, there is no truth against which anyone’s opinions can be measured.
Tolerance used to mean that everyone has a right to their own opinion - even when they are wrong. It’s what the French satirist Voltaire meant when he said, “I disagree with what you say - but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And of course it is especially important to be respectful of people’s deeply held convictions, which is the reason for the classic tabu against discussing religion and politics in public. But that’s not what tolerance means any more. Nowadays tolerance means that all opinions are equally valid.
A classroom exercise in values clarification was used for some 20 years with great success in getting kids to think about right and wrong. It’s a story of a village which is visited by a traveler and in the course of his stay a rumor arises that he has violated a local tabu, and the villagers stone him to death. As I said, this used to elicit lively discussion. But the California teacher who was being interviewed in the article said that the children typically respond with, “well, maybe what they did was right in their culture. Who are we to judge?”
The only way you can be absolutely sure that no one will criticize your decisions, or behavior, or morals, or beliefs, is to make criticism itself tabu. And the best way to make criticism tabu is by removing the standard of measurement from public view. Because if there are no standards, there can be no judgment, and we can all go on doing exactly what we want, can’t we.
It’s understandable, of course. Nobody likes to be told not to do what they want to do. Nobody wants to hear that they’re being foolish or unethical or just plain wrong-headed.
And that, of course, is where the Pharisees in this story are at. When they ask Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” [Mt 21:23] they weren’t really seeking an answer. They were saying, “Who do you think you are? How dare you do these things that call into question our authority, our teaching, our status?” That’s why Jesus didn’t answer them. The teachers of the law had all the information they needed to figure out who Jesus was after all, they knew the Scriptures backwards and forwards - but they were afraid to think too deeply about it, in case they might be wrong.
So Jesus answered them with another question, instead. It was a classic rabbinical teaching technique, designed to make students learn to reason for themselves, as opposed to just spoonfeeding them the answers. Jesus asked them, “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” [Mt 21:25] If they really had been confused, looking for answers, thinking about John the Baptist would have helped them figure out the answer. But the passage shows us that seeking knowledge was not their motive, doesn’t it.
Now, the Pharisees’ question wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Because authority is simply a matter of power. If you have enough people or enough guns or enough money, you have power, and you can do what you like and get away with it. You can even make other people do what you want. And that’s the kind of authority the Pharisees respected, and feared.
Now, neither John nor Jesus had money or guns, but they had people. They had a lot of people. And sometimes people follow not because you’re right but because you’re telling them something they want to hear. So the Pharisees could have wondered if Jesus was carrying on the way he did, healing on the Sabbath and whipping the money-changers off the temple steps and so on, because God had commanded it, or out of political ambition because he thought he could (a) get away with it and (b) gain even more power by doing it? They did have a responsibility to the people, and to the nation. It was legitimate to want to know whether people followed John and Jesus just because they wanted to believe so badly, or if there were something deeper going on.
But that’s not their motivation. Listen to them:
They argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” [Mt 21:25b-27]
Of course Jesus could have answered them. He could have said, “You want to know who I am? I am the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, the one you have been waiting for, the Creator of Heaven and earth, the I AM who met with Moses on Sinai.” He could have blown them out of the water. But that’s not his style.
Now, clearly, the religious leaders respected power.
They feared the power of John’s followers, who believed that John was one of the great prophets, even Elijah himself perhaps. They’d lose either way. John had a large following, even though it had been a couple of years since his execution, and might even riot if the temple authorities told them John wasn’t a great prophet.
But it never seems to have occurred to these Pharisees that there was another kind of power operating here, a kind of power that they couldn’t manipulate or disarm or use to their own advantage. You don’t hear them saying to themselves, “If we say John’s baptism was of human origin, and it was really from God, we’ll be setting ourselves against God and be in really serious long-term trouble.” God is not even in their equation at all. They’re not interested in right or wrong, they only want to collect ammunition to make sure they come out on top.
They were interested in power, but they forgot that God’s power is rooted and grounded in truth. And the minute they stopped being interested in truth, they lost.
These were the religious leaders, mind you, the ones whose whole reason for living was built around the premise that God had called and chosen and set apart the people Israel and expected them in return to love him, and listen to him, and follow him. They knew the story of the Exodus better than anyone, they knew that God had freed the Israelites without any sort of human power at all - without armies, without horses or chariots or soldiers. They knew that God had miraculously provided food and water for 40 years in the desert. The priests were God’s anointed servants for guarding and protecting the sacred things, the Pharisees were Biblical scholars who taught that following God’s law was the most important thing in the world. They had said yes to God as publicly and loudly as they could. And yet when God actually began to work in their midst, and called them to be a part of it, they turned their backs on him.
The authority the religious leaders relied upon was the power and influence they had with the people by virtue of their education and their position in the temple. Their whole focus in dealing with Jesus was to maintain that power and keep him from upsetting their applecart. And - let me be fair about this - it may very well be that some of them really were more worried about what Rome would do if there were another uprising, than about their own positions. But the point is, even they weren’t trusting in God. They really believed that it was about politics, about playing one faction against another, about going along to get along and keeping the squeaky wheels from bothering the sensitive Roman ears.
So whether or not their focus was on maintaining their position and authority, or on making sure the Romans wouldn’t crack down even harder, they were all working on their own agendas, and under their own power. They really believed that it was all up to them. They paid lip service to God, but really didn’t believe he was in charge. So they got mad at Jesus for calling them to account.
Instead of listening to God, measuring their actions by God’s standards, and trusting God for the outcome, they compromised truth for short-term gains, and lost everything.
Because, you see, 40 years later Jerusalem fell. And none of the political maneuvering, none of the worldly and cynical compromises they had made with the Roman authorities made any difference at all.
Who did Jesus think he was, anyway?
Just the only person who can tell us who God is.
Just the only person through whom we can have a relationship with God.
Just the only person who can give us forgiveness, a new start, purpose and meaning, and power to live with faith and hope and love and joy even when circumstances are difficult.
My mother turned 103 last year. One of the things that I am going to have to face soon is that her will specifies that I cannot speak at her funeral. She’s a Unitarian, and we have for years skated very carefully around the subject of religion. But every now and then the subject comes up, and one morning at their Sunday meeting - I can't call it worship - a woman had spoken on the subject of prayer. And I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “Mom, whom do Unitarians pray to?” And she said, “Yes, that’s the problem. And of course the thought of asking for anything is unthinkable.”
And I thought, as I always do when we talk of spiritual matters, “how sad.”
Because instead of walking desperately through life on a tightrope, trying to balance this choice against that goal and knowing that it’s all up to you and what if you make a mistake and how do you know if any of it matters anyway...
Instead of that, she could be walking with Jesus, knowing that even if we make mistakes, God never does; knowing that no matter what we do God will still love us; knowing that no matter how dark things get God will bring us back into the light.
You can go it alone, for a while. And the more God has given you, the more tempted you may be to try. If you’re healthy, educated, prosperous... it’s easy to rely on those gifts to see you through life. But none of those things can get you through the hard times that come into every life, and none of them last past this life at all. And the more you rely on yourself, on your own skills and achievements, to chart your course, the harder it is to hear and see and respond to God in action when he walks among us - as he still does.
Who does Jesus think he is, anyway? He comes among us making radical demands, asking us to change our priorities and love the unlovable and work for justice and be faithful to our spouses and empty our wallets for people we’ve never even met.
Who do we think we are, anyway? How can we follow someone who calls himself the Truth and insists that he is the only way to God when so many in our society insist on creating God in their own image and get angry at those of us who challenge them? How dare we make such an outrageous claim?
We dare because God’s authority is all we need.
We dare because we have the Truth himself on our side.
We dare because we are not alone.
