This teaching isn’t about word vs. action. It’s about a relationship with God that may begin in one spot, but ends in trust.
There is no question about God’s presence
Proper 21A | Matthew 21:23-32, Exodus 17:1-7
Word vs. Action.
When Jesus sets up the teaching about God along the lines of a simple logic puzzle we feel really confident about the answer. Which is the point, of course. Jesus wants us to get the idea. Behaving like an inhabitant of the Kingdom of God is better than talking about it.
This binary of word against action is pretty intuitive, even if the logic is actually more complex.
In setting it up the way he does, Jesus gives us his priority. Because there are two sons and both of them lie. Or perhaps, change their minds. It happens to be that one has lowered expectations and then surpasses them. While the other raises expectations and fails to meet them.
We are presented with an ethical quandary about the value of a person’s word. And yet, we overwrite our concerns instantaneously. Because action, doing the will of the father, is that much more important.
This teaching isn’t really about word vs. action, then. It’s about the supremacy of a relationship with God that may begin in one spot, but ends in trust.
Of course we know this teaching has a context.
This isn’t a random statement of truth. He’s telling this to the chief priests of the Temple who have just confronted him. This is after the Triumphal Entry we celebrate as Palm Sunday. After Jesus has driven the money changers and livestock-sellers out of the Temple.
These leaders confront Jesus about his authority. And Jesus says that he’s open to talk about authority if we start with God’s authority working through John the Baptist.
In a modern version of this, Peter would be serving as Jesus’s hype man because what we need here is an “awwww snap”. We need that right here because Jesus is confronting them right where they live. He’s confronting that separation between our relationship with God and what we do.
So this teaching comes out of that moment. He’s confronting the people who just confronted him about authority. He’s teaching them about word and action.
But Jesus then draws their attention to the outsiders: tax collectors and prostitutes. And names the fact that these people break the rules and should be driven out and yet the kin-dom of God is for them! Because they are closer in their relationship to God than anyone who would cast them out.
This is a challenging word for us.
It doesn’t match what we’d like it to be. Which is why we are so eager to take that teaching out of its context. To make it easier.
The other teaching for today bears so much on how we might approach the very same topic: of relationship with God in the midst of confusion.
Remember last week we had the manna from heaven. And the context of this is liberation. These people have been liberated from servitude in Egypt and brought out with the promise of land and freedom. They are there because of their trust in God. And rather than see the liberating glory, they are fixated on what they no longer have.
They feel stuck.
So they demand Moses fix it. We’re thirsty. We need something to drink.
If this were the first time, we’d understand. Out here, in the middle of nowhere. It seems like Moses has led them to their doom. They were promised a promised land and they don’t have it.
We could understand that frustration, if it were the first time.
The first time was Exodus 15. They demanded water and God gave them water.
Then they demanded food. God gave them food.
Here they are, thirsty again. And what have they done? They’ve gone backward. Back to who they were before God provided for them. Before God showed God’s presence among them. They went back to their old ways and said once again You’re gonna kill us! So maybe we ought to kill you.
After God has been with them.
So this third time, they’re getting violent. So Moses goes to God and God says “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb.” Then it says
“He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
They’re fighting over whether or not God is with them when God has made God’s presence known to them multiple times! And they are refusing to see it.
There is no question about God’s presence. God is there. There is no debate. But they make debate.
No debate
So what is the authority? Why are the Pharisees so off? And why are we lost?
Why do we feel the absence of God in the midst of a pandemic? Separation? Why do we feel separated? The conditions are obvious. But why do we? I can see why other people are. Those who haven’t known the miracle of God. Who haven’t seen the kin-dom at work. Who haven’t experienced anything like it before. But those of us who have, how can we say God isn’t with us?
God is here!
with us!
making God’s self known!
That is our work now. To see in this moment what is for us to see.