Good morning and welcome to Thursday. My name is Alan and I will be taking us to the end of the week. It was great to hear from Becky Wilson yesterday as she shared her thoughts on the start of Matthew chapter 21. Today we are tackling the next section of the same chapter. A section all about authority. There is a withered fig tree, a discussion on faith and prayer, Jesus’ authority questioned by the religious elite and a parable, not bad for just 14 verses!!

REFLECTION:

It’s worth staying around and listening to the whole of the passage at the end of today’s thought but for now let’s focus v28-32, a short parable.

“What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’  

“‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.  

“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.  

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?”

“The first,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.  For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.

Who gets to tell you what to do?

Government? Are we following the guidelines carefully through Covid or are we making up our own rules as we go along?

Who gets to tell you what to do? Your boss at work? Do you grumble and complain and question the decisions they’ve made?

Who gets to tell you what to do?

The word obedience literally means ‘to hear under’ – to hear instructions as one under authority. So if I am instructed to do something… guess what!? I do it.

In a military state… Roman occupied Palestine…

In strict religious society… led by the religious elite who Jesus is now confronted by…

In a very patriarchal system… dominated by the male elders in the family…

Obedience was commonplace, it was the norm. To our ears today the very word obedience has strong – negative – connotations. We don’t like it, it doesn’t sit comfortably with us, it must be wrong.

Jesus says in v21 “if you have faith” and later “If you believe” – both “faith” and “believe” come from the same word… “faith” and we know that faith is about trust right!? If I put my trust in Jesus then all is well with me! Well yes, but faith is also about faithfulness… about being faithful to God’s instruction. Faith is a term found in a Roman soldier’s oath of allegiance to the Roman emperor. It is a term that denotes who gets the final say, whose authority we are under and whose cause we will ultimately live and die for. Heavy stuff!!

So Jesus tells a story about two sons… One tells his father he will do something and he doesn’t; the other says to his dad he won’t do something but he does…

Despite what the sons said… which one did what their father asked of them? “Simple” say the religious elite, “the one who went off and worked in the vineyard.”

“So what about you?” Jesus asks. You claim to know what God is asking of you but you don’t do it! And yet the tax collectors and prostitutes who made no claim to know or follow God’s will… they get it and are entering the kingdom of God!

And… if that weren’t enough – You saw what was happening and still you didn’t repent and believe him

We have heard it taught that to repent, means a change of mind. That is literally what it means. We were doing something wrong, we recognise it, we admit it and we choose to turn around and go the other way.

But what if repentance isn’t so much about what we did but about the authority that we sit under?

Who gets to tell us what to do? Who has the final say in what we do and how we do it?

Today,