This Week: Proper 21A
Gospel: Matthew 21:23-32
We can tell from the first glance that this is a messy reading. We have to wrestle with authority and how we receive it. Who gets it. And why. Nothing about this stuff is easy.
And when we recognize the challenge, we sense there is a choice to make. Do we deal with theology around authority or the experience of it?
The first part of the reading seems to deal with where authority comes from and the second part deals with how we determine who carries more of it.
All of this feels messy enough. But I think it gets even messier when we bring in our own experiences. Because I’m sure I’m not alone in making real world connections with this confrontation.
Truthiness
Stephen Colbert invented the word truthiness back in 2005, but it really came to life a decade later. The character Colbert played acutely depicted our relationship to truth and each other. He described our departure from common agreement on the nature of authority to an invented divide between equally acceptable options.
That, in his case, we can choose to think with our heads or feel with our guts. Both valuable. One is better, though, he says. And the one he thinks is better happens to also be the one he wants to use.
Is it better? Of course not. Objectively, it’s terrifyingly bad. But when we decide consensus represents one side of a partisan divide, well, what are we then left with? To argue against consensus. Or against expertise. Or against what we tend to simply call “reality.”
Living through the truthiness era has left us far more conflicted by the nature of authority than ever. And it has given many of us a strange tendency to need to pathologically “hear them out.” Of course, we know they are wrong, but maybe there’s something there…
Here comes the context
Which is why the context is so valuable. Jesus isn’t in a classroom and these aren’t students with reasonable ideas he ought to consider. Which, by the way, says more about our incessant need to bothsides every conversation than it does about Jesus’s way of love.
He’s being confronted at the Temple during Holy Week by people planning to kill him.
And the simple fact that their argument isn’t actually wrong is not the same thing as saying
- That it is right or
- That it is a “side” we are to give equal weight to Jesus’s.
Especially when we consider that they have been conspiring to kill him for some time and are using this confrontation as a justification for it.
We justify for ideological purity.
There is an intellectual move we do to remove context to find the purity of an idea. A concept that is behind incredible human breakthroughs and tragedies. Its most grave examples may be eugenics and genocide.
Isolating specific decisions allow us to get to the root of certain ideas or completely misunderstand them. It helps us see when people are being racist and also give us excuses for incredible acts of racism.
Isolating information, stripping it of context is what leads people to think that race determines IQ, for example. Context, on the other hand, helps us see how racism influences the environment that would reduce future IQ scores of anyone regardless of race.
Stripping this moment of its context renders the truth of authority opaque to us. It hides the way authority is used to undermine authority. It also can lead us to make false assumptions about the nature of divine authority for us—especially when we merely shift the justification we make for human brutality from tradition and onto divine inspiration.
The challenge of the parable
While both halves of the reading play together and offer much to each other, the context in the gospel reveals the truth of the first half. And it brings lie to seeing the second half as some generic “feels” response.
My own concern is that we respond to the parable with an “Of course! We like doers!” And yet, when given real world examples, we may find ourselves siding with people who are all talk. That we can simply justify whatever authority we choose to invest in someone else.
It also frames our experience as a choice between two options rather than four. When it is merely two, we’re all about the doers over the talkers. But when talkers who also do is on the table, that is totally our choice.
But then, when no talkers who do nothing joins the table, we tend to disregard them as lazy. Obvious.
The presence of these new options changes our perspective.
Because talking is a kind of doing. Sometimes we want big talkers regardless of their actions. Talking can get others to act.
And not planning to do something and then doing it anyway isn’t always good. It often leads to confusion. What if someone else showed up to cover for you? You’re not any more reliable. You’ve just made someone come in to work on their day off. That’s not good!
The binary choice Jesus frames is an oversimplification on purpose. It isn’t a rule about talking vs. doing. He wants the hearers to see the hypocrisy of the Temple leaders and why they can’t be trusted.
Because talking about the love of God and offering hate is their MO. And those who are first in the Kin-dom, the ones who are hated by people and loved by God, are more concerned with doing the love of God than talking about it.
Back to authority
Which brings us back to the nature of authority. That we shouldn’t read this as a treatise on authority as a concept. Nor should we read that parable as instructing us on how to wield authority effectively.
What we’re getting is a story about Jesus. About how he is being confronted. And how his mere presence undermines the authority of the Temple leaders, their arrangements with Rome, and how the whole system enforces poverty upon the people.
Authority isn’t the principle we are learning about. It is the key we use to learn more about the Kin-dom.