Authority Omelets

Read me first! Matthew 21:23-32

 Jesus is making a mess. Something inside of him has been unplugged, a switch has been flipped, or maybe, rather, the slow trickle in the dam has finally succumbed to the pressure. If a few cracked eggs are needed to make an omelet, then Jesus has brunch ready for everyone.

So let’s just review a minute, shall we? In just the first half of this chapter, Jesus has stolen a donkey and her baby, or rather, told two of his followers to steal a donkey and her baby, he’s ridden in to Jerusalem, through the back door, somehow mysteriously on both the colt and the donkey, and gathered a mob of people around him. They’re shouting, waving palms, and proclaiming that he is their messianic-healer-king. They’re proclaiming that he’s the one to redeem Israel, that he’s the one with the power, with authority. And when he enters Jerusalem, it says the whole city was in turmoil. The whole city resembles Louisville or Portland or even Pittsburgh. People are taking to the streets, people are shouting and throwing rocks into houses and shops, people are making messes. Everyone is asking “Who is this guy?”, and the crowds are responding, “This Is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee!” There are riots in the street. There are protests. There are shouts and mobs and tear gas and rubber bullets thrown into the chaotic scene. 

And does Jesus tamp it down? Does Jesus calm everyone down and say, “Ok, guys, that’s enough civil disobedience for one day, let’s take a rest and talk it through in a civil manner?” Nope. He goes straight to the heart of it all and adds more fuel to the fire. He stirs up the wasp nest. He enters the temple, the center of civil and religious life, the place where all of this “order” is maintained, where the status quo is upheld, where “civility” — through power, manipulation, and societal control — is maintained. And what does he do? He kicks out all the merchants who are selling goods, all the consumers who are buying their wares, and makes another huge mess. He overturns tables. He spills the coins everywhere. He throws chairs and releases the doves. And then he opens the doors. He lets the blind and the lame into the temple, where they would have hardly been welcome, he brings them in to where they don’t belong, and he heals them, he makes them whole, he returns them to community.  And then all the kids come storming through, putting their grubby, sticky hands on all the relics, running through the aisles, knocking over the sacrifices, shouting and laughing and tugging on the shirtsleeves of the righteous and dignified.

This is righteous Jesus. This is civil-disobedient Jesus. This is riotous Jesus. This is temper tantrum Jesus. This is Jesus at his scariest and most out-of-control. And the chief priests and scribes, the maintainers of order, the ones who orchestrate how Jewish society is supposed to live and be and organize itself, are angry: they’ve lost control, their system is unraveling, and their precious structure, balanced precariously on a pin of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts,” “ins” and “outs,” inclusions and exclusions, begins to teeter, begins to totter, begins to fall off its axis.

Then Jesus goes to bed. He leaves the dishes in the sink, the laundry in the washer, the wet towels strewn across the bedroom floor. He leaves his mess, and goes to bed.

But then he wakes up and returns to the city. And out of his own fleshy, physical need, out of his own hunger, he looks for figs on a fig tree and finds none. Ignoring the fact that it is probably not even the right time of year for a fig tree to be bearing fruit, he curses it, and it shrivels and dies. You get the feeling that Jesus is all emotion at this point, that he’s lost his reason, that maybe, he’s gone a little mad. He tells the disciples that with faith, they’ll be able to do the same thing too, they’ll be able to shrivel trees tell mountains to throw themselves into the sea, . 

Jesus is making a huge, emotional, political, theological mess, and we’re only half way through the chapter.  Jesus is breaking down walls, literally and figuratively. Jesus is forcing the entire city of Jerusalem to see things in a new way.

And finally, now that we’ve finger painted the scene in messy swirls of blue and red and yellow until it turns a murky brown, now, we’re ready to engage with today’s lectionary passage. 

After stealing a donkey, after marching in to Jerusalem as if he were king, after inciting a riot and overturning the tables in the temple, after healing outsiders and listening to children, after withering a fig tree out of his own spite and hunger, after giving his disciples that same power, he returns to the Temple, begins to teach, and the chief priests and scribes, looking around at the unrest and broken windows and the graffiti on the walls, come up to him and ask him, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Anyone else need a break? A stiff drink? A pause to catch your breath? 

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

And I use that language on purpose, for a reason. I use that rated PG language to show that these guys aren’t messing around, they’re not kidding, they’re angry at all this disorder, and they’re threatening Jesus. Who gave you the right to make such a mess? Where do you get off? “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you such authority?” Who the hell do you think you are? 

They’re talking about boundaries. And Jesus has crossed them all. Jesus has destroyed all the us-and-them paradigms. Jesus has reversed what is considered sacred and what is profane. Who do you think you are, to feel so free to tear down these divisions, to cross out these lines, to eliminate the walls we’ve so carefully built to keep things neat, and orderly, to keep things making sense, to keep things under control. Who are you, to be making such a mess? Who do you think you are to be letting all this mess into our city, into our temple, into our reasonable, ordered lives? 

And Jesus answers them like any good teacher would. He answers the question with a question. He makes them a deal: “I’ll tell you, if you tell me.” It’s a traditional pedagogical move. It’s the socratic method. He’s giving them the chance to think, to examine the situation, not just give a knee-jerk reaction to what is going on around them. He is offering them an opportunity to change their minds, to cross a boundary, to erase a division. “Where did John’s authority come from? Heaven? Or Humans?” He asks. Either answer will cause them to shift their worldview. Either answer will force them to see things in a new way. Either answer will deconstruct the world that they have so very carefully constructed for themselves. So they choose neither way. They choose to stay stuck. 

So he gives them another chance, this time in the form of a story. 

Who does the father’s will? The kid who says he’ll do something and then doesn’t? Or the kid who refuses to do something, and then does it anyway? The kid who is trying to please their dad in the moment by appeasing him, or the kid who causes conflict at first but then eventually goes and does what he’s asked to do. Who does his father’s will? The kid who gives the right answer, but never acts, or the kid who tells the truth about how he feels, but then changes his mind? The kid who sticks to what he thinks and what he wants, or the kid who is changed? 

Now, neither of these kids are going to win the “Son of the year” award. Neither of these kids are perfect sons. All of us are either hypocrites or remorseful. Most of us are both. But none of us do exactly what God asks exactly when God asks it. 

But Jesus isn’t asking for that. Jesus isn’t looking for the one who can do all the right things all of the time. He’s asking for the one who, at the end of the day, does what God wants him to do. God is looking for the one who will tear down their own boundaries, their own notions of what they think and how they feel, who will tear down the walls that they have built up for themselves, and go and do what God has asked them to do. That’s what the first son does. He changes his mind. He turns around. He shifts his worldview. He is transformed. He’s different. He grows. He destroys a small part of the box he has constructed for himself, and he steps outside of it, beyond it, to do God’s will.

That’s what Jesus is doing with these questions. Jesus is giving the chief priests and the elders of the people a chance to change their minds, a chance to reexamine their worldview, a chance to break down the walls and structures and barriers that they have so carefully formed for themselves in order to keep themselves safe, in order to keep the world making “sense,” in order to have the authority to say who is in and who is out. 

But the real authority belongs to those who are willing to change, those who are willing to see things anew, those who are willing to say how they feel, in complete honesty, and then change their minds, and do something different. Jesus’ authority doesn’t come from drawing dividing lines and standing sentinel at the gate, determining who is in and who is out. Jesus’ authority comes from repentance and changed minds. Jesus’ authority comes from a broken and a striving people. Jesus’ authority comes from the cross. The cross - that place of humiliation and despair and brokenness. That place where all of that gets transformed into redemption and new life and resurrection and the breaking down of divisions between us and God, between us and each other. And that’s where our authority comes from too. Not in our ability to keep things neat and tidy, not in our understanding of complex ideas, not in our wall-building or our dividing or keeping things under control. Our authority comes from the life-changing, transforming, boundary breaking work of the cross. The tax collectors and the prostitutes and the blind and the lame and the children get this. They understand it. Because they’ve been on the other side of the wall, they’ve been excluded from the temple, they are the most helpless of the helpless. They’re the son who changes his mind. They see things anew. They’re transformed. 

Jesus comes to make a big ol’ mess of things. Not just in the world, but in our hearts, too. Jesus comes to cause turmoil and questions and conflict and confusion so that we can stop what we’re doing, and change our minds. We can recalibrate. We can adjust, amend, reconfigure.

I have a mini-panic attack every time I drive out to the church. Well, every time I get in my car to go anywhere, really. I pass by house after house, yard-signs covering every patch of grass, inching themselves right up to their neighbor’s property line. Now, to be honest, my anxiety comes mostly from my fear that who I want to win the presidential election will not win the presidential election. I have my own opinions that I think are the right opinions, no doubt. I’m scared about what is going to happen come November, scared for myself, sure, but also scared for those who live outside of the boundaries that those with so-called authority have built. I’m scared for our present day prostitutes and tax collectors and children and lame and weak and overlooked and all those who have been kicked out of this white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy that we’ve built for ourselves. But mostly, I’m scared because we have lost the ability to change our minds. We’ve lost the ability to cross over boundaries. We’ve put up sign after sign after sign in our yard, only to show whose side we’re on, only to build deeper trenches and higher walls, only to insist on who belongs and who doesn’t. We’ve hardened our hearts to each other and lost our ability to change our minds. We think we know better. And we are not moving. We think we have the authority because we are right.

But authority comes from transformation. Authority comes from changing our minds. The kingdom of God belongs to the tax collectors and the prostitutes, not because they think the right things or made the right choices, but because they saw the truth, and they changed their minds. They saw things differently. They answered “no,” at first, but then they changed course, they turned around, they went a different way from where they were originally headed. They rewrite their synapses. They rewire their brains. They fill in the trenches they’ve been stuck in and forge a new path. They make a mess. They start over. They tear down walls and upend tables and create a space for others to enter in. 

We’ve all set up boundaries for ourselves. We’ve all determined who is in and who is out, even when that means that we reject our own selves. But Jesus comes in and upends those tables, he scatters loose those coins, he tells us that this is not the way things have to be. Change your mind. Look beyond. Because of the signs and the rituals and the belief systems and the politics and the rules that we’ve set up for ourselves, there’s a whole world we’re missing, a whole kingdom of God that we’re losing out on. 

Come. Make a mess. Join the riot. Protest in the streets. Tear some stuff down. Break some rules. Change your mind. Pull the yard signs out of your yard so that you can see and hear and know the guy on the other side. Create a space for others to enter in. That’s the only way anyone ever changes their mind. Jesus comes to make a mess in our hearts and change our minds. The kingdom belongs to such as these. 

Thanks be to God.