Matthew 21.23-32
What sort of friends and relations would we really like to have? No one wants the kind of friend who promises to help us but then never materialises when the time comes. Nor do we really want friends and relations who refuse to help us but then grudgingly turn up when the time comes - perhaps after we call them up and tell them things have reached crisis proportions. The ideal friend or relation is the person who's enthusiastic about helping us from the start and turns up on time without being pestered. Yet today's lectionary reading isn't about that kind of person.
We live in a very sceptical society, where we find it very hard to trust the people who shape our lives. And I don't just mean political leaders, but opinion shapers, experts and teachers of all kinds. We constantly look for their feet of clay, confident that they will be found to have them.
Andy Burnham has tackled this head on by promising that he's an honest man of the people who will make some very specific promises and then do everything in his power to honour and keep them. People are of course waiting for him to fail.
At the other end of the political spectrum, even some of Nigel Farage's keenest supporters don't believe he will actually be able to keep all of his promises. But they say all the other political parties have already been tried and found wanting and they're happy to give someone new and untried a chance to fail.
Outside of the world of politics there’s a constant quest for teachers who’ve abused the trust of their pupils, doctors and nurses who’ve misdiagnosed or mistreated their patience, scientists who’ve falsified their results, and thinkers and creatives who’ve just got it wrong or shown themselves to be prejudiced in some way. Now of course all those things are important and do need to be called out, but we live in a society that especially loves to be sceptical about what people say and to compare it unfavorably with what they actually do.
So the story of the two brothers has a particular resonance for us. One promises the earth but does nothing. That sounds like typical behaviour. The other promises nothing but comes around in the end and delivers.
Today's Gospel reading comes pretty hard on the heels of the cleansing of the Temple, where Jesus has turned over the tables of the moneychangers. It's hardly surprising then that the first part of the reading is one of the many entrapment stories that record the ongoing standoff between Jesus and the Jewish authorities. We’re told by all the gospel writers that these punctuated his ministry, but especially that final week in Jerusalem.
Why do the gospels focus so much on these stories? At one level they show how clever and quick witted Jesus can be. But that doesn't explain why the Gospels include so many of these stories.
What really matters to the gospel writers is that they’re always keen to emphasise how Jesus’ beef was not with the Roman Empire but with the people who controlled the Jewish synagogues and the Temple. Some scholars think that, to emphasise this point, the Gospels play up these adversarial stories, because they help to show that Christianity was a parting of the ways between Jewish people, some of whom decided to follow Jesus while others did not. On this telling Jesus’ teaching only really upset a few nitpicky Jewish scholars. So, for the Roman authorities, there was nothing to get alarmed about.
Some scholars now go further and argue that the whole controversy between Jesus and the Jewish leaders was invented by the gospel writers to explain why Christians were being expelled from Jewish synagogues at the time when the Gospels were being written. According to this interpretation, the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem didn't really care what Jesus was doing, and he was only executed because the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, thought he might pose a threat to law and order.
However, I think it's pretty clear that Jesus didn't get along very well with at least some of the Jewish leaders. He obviously didn't approve of what was going on in the Temple and he said in public that one day very soon the Temple would be torn down.
So the leaders do have good reason to try to trap him here. ‘By what authority are you doing these things?’ sounds like a perfectly reasonable question, and that's because it is. But, if Jesus admits that he's acting on his own authority, the crowds will stop believing in him. On the other hand, if he claims that he's acting on God's authority it will look like blasphemy. After all, he's only a humble carpenter from Galilee.
The trap seems to be closing, until Jesus manages to turn the tables on them by asking the Jewish leaders what authority John the Baptist had for his ministry. Back in the day John was a much bigger deal than Jesus. He had tens of thousands of followers in Palestine, and even twenty years later St Paul was still encountering John's disciples on his journeys around the eastern Mediterranean. Fifty years later, a Jewish aristocrat called Josephus was also still defending John and saying he was a good egg. So if the Jewish leaders deny that John had any authority at all, they will make themselves hugely unpopular. But if they concede that John's authority came from God, Jesus will ask them why they tried to cancel John and allowed King Herod to put him to death.
It's possible to feel some sympathy for the Jewish leaders here because what John the Baptist had been doing was fairly radical. Jewish people were used to the idea of immersing themselves in water to purify themselves and they used purification rituals at intervals throughout their lives. But being baptised or immersed in water by someone else, by a baptiser, and receiving baptism as a one-off sign that you wanted to radically change your way of life, these were new ideas. John was the person who made this kind of immersion popular. He headed up a mass movement aimed at ordinary people. And in doing this he wasn't building on any earlier tradition.
We can imagine why whole crowds might have been drawn to him. If they wanted to confess their sins and make a new start in life, they could do that any time in private. But the only way to make a big public statement about it would have been to travel to the Jerusalem Temple, a journey that might take several days and even longer if you lived outside of Palestine, and then make a sacrifice which you would have to buy using special money that only circulated in the Temple itself, whereas John was offering people the chance to go publicly into the desert and be immersed in water by him.
Maybe this was simpler for many people. It was certainly cheaper. So if this was okay with God then some of the Jewish leaders might have to be made redundant, because there would be less sacrificing going on in Jerusalem. And also, it was totally without precedent. So the Jewish leaders were reluctant to agree that John had been given this missionary task by God, but neither did they dare to disagree with Jesus.
According to Matthew, that confrontation then sets the scene for a parable which only he records. This is the story of the two brothers.
If this is the original context for the story then it could mean that it's not too late for the Jewish leaders to change their minds. Saying ‘No’, right at the beginning of his ministry, to John's call to repentance, was understandable and could still be put right. It's never too late to have a change of heart and repent. Better to do that after careful reflection than to jump straight in - so to speak - and go through the motions of supporting John at the beginning of his ministry without being truly committed to it, and then leaving him to his fate with King Herod.
If this is what Jesus intended the parable to mean, what then are we to make of the tax collectors and prostitutes - who stand in for all those who knew from the very start of John's ministry that they truly needed to repent and flocked to see him? They aren't like the first brother, who said the right thing but didn't actually follow through with it. And neither are they like the second brother, who at first refused to do the right thing but then came round and did it after all. Instead, they illustrate a third way of responding to John’s ministry, with an immediate and totally sincere response.
At this point the parable becomes a way of having a very direct dig at the Jewish leaders. They have shown that they understand the parable, so therefore they too should now know the right way to respond to John’s example
But what is the parable saying to us? We can forget its original context. The Temple and the Jewish leaders of the day are long gone. We don't have to worry about the entrapment stories where Jesus and the leadership play mind games with one another. We only have to decide what practical difference the parable might make in our lives.
In an age of scepticism I think we have to see it as a call for absolute sincerity and transparency. We should never find ourselves saying one thing but intending or even ending up doing another. Our word should be our bond.
But on the other hand there’s always room for repentance, for a change of heart. What we decide in the heat of the moment isn’t always the end of the matter or the final word. People who’ve made a mistake or let someone down, perhaps especially politicians and leaders but all of us at times, tend to dig ourselves in deeper and stand our ground, doubling down on what we’ve said or done. But we’re invited by Jesus to reconsider that approach. We can repent at leisure. We can reconsider. We can apologise and try to do better. We can do the right thing after all.
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