In this reading there are three instances when Jesus’ opponents try to trick him into saying something that would either get him in trouble from a religious, political, or popular standpoint. The first is when the chief priests, scribes, and elders came to question his authority. If he claimed to have his authority from God, then they would accuse him of blasphemy but if from man, then he would have no sway over them and they could deal with him any way they wanted. In Jesus’ wisdom he simply pointed them back to John the Baptist and asked where he got his authority. He forced them to look and see how God was working in John and in him and their response to God. John was Jesus’ forerunner and therefore what they thought about him would apply to Jesus also. Since the copped out on answering that question, Jesus didn’t have to answer them.
The second was the issue of paying taxes. This time, the leaders sent Pharisees and Herodians to ask if it was legal to pay taxes to Caesar. A simple yes or no would get Jesus in trouble with either the government for teaching taxes to Caesar to be illegal or trouble with the people who didn’t want to pay taxes. Either answer could have ended his ministry at the wrong time. Again, Jesus in his wisdom answered by putting the emphasis back on God and their relationship to him and the government.
With two failures to trap Jesus, the Sadducees came to trap him with a theological question. Supposing to have a fool-proof scenario where a woman had seven husbands on earth, even commanded by Scripture, they asked who she would be married to in the resurrection. Since they didn’t even believe in a resurrection, it was obvious they wanted to show that Jesus didn’t know the Scriptures and would therefore be discredited before the people. Jesus simply used Scripture to show them how far off base they had become in their theology. He again pointed them to the living God.
After a scribe asked him a straightforward question, no one dared ask him anymore questions (Mark 12:34), Jesus asked the scribes a question about how the Christ could be the son of David when the Lord called the Messiah Lord. They couldn’t answer (Matt 2246) because they didn’t want what God does, people who want to know and obey the Messiah, Jesus.
The question then comes to us. How many times and in how many ways do we try to trick the Lord? We aren’t trying to discredit Jesus, but we are trying to get away with something. We try to trick Jesus every time we sin because we think we know better than God or we don’t think he can’t see what we’re doing. We may even be more like the Sadducees when we simply don’t like what the Bible says and we want to conform it to whatever current scientific, sociological, or other human studies have stated contrary to it. We try to trick him when we don’t accept the fact that God knows best and even works in our struggles to make us more like Jesus. We try to trick him when we don’t want to be accountable to God who has created us. Whenever we do any of these things, we think we can trick God and get him to allow us to sin and excuse it because we have found a loophole in the Bible. We need to repent when we are doing these things as we are no better than Jesus’ opponents who tried to trick him.
No comments:
Post a Comment