Children of the revolution

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be found here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 21: 23-27) should be a sobering one for us to read because it is full of pious, apparently godly people being exposed and getting nowhere fast. Let the shipwrecks of others be your seamarks.

Jesus is approached by the chief priests and elders of the people, asking questions about the source of His authority. He sets them a kind of theological brainteaser before He will answer their question -  was John the Baptist from heaven or not? – and this puzzle undoes them. Because they cannot answer it, He will not answer their first question. The scene is set for the approaching denouement only a few chapters later in the gospel of Matthew with the betrayal of Judas and the events of the Passion.

What are the mistakes that the chief priests and elders make? They are multiple, and they started longing before this gospel scene began to unfold. We should not be deceived by the first question: it is not likely to have been an honest inquiry about Jesus’ authority. Jesus had been working miracles for years at this point. There is a tone about it that suggests not an investigation but the justification of a conclusion the leaders had probably reached already: Jesus must be stopped. They do not ask Him about His authority because they want the answer but because they are out to defeat Him and His influence. We are all at risk of the same kind of mistake: prejudging a situation negatively and then, instead of undertaking honest discernment, justifying the decision we have already attached our hearts to. Discernment is a challenge, not only because it seeks to attain the as yet unknown, but also because it requires our hearts to be genuinely free and responsive to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. How easy it is to confuse the latter with interior movements that merely confirm our established biases towards what we want and against what we would rather avoid!

The genius of Jesus’ answer to the chief priests and elders is just one more warning to the unwitting who believe they can wrestle with God and win: was John’s baptism from heaven? In their pride, humans believe they can measure the truth, whereas in reality, it is truth that is the measure of human beings. Jesus’ question is like a mirror held up to the slow and stumbling minds of His accusers, and they find themselves gazing on an image than none of them particular likes.

If they answer Jesus’ elegantly simple question by saying ‘from heaven’, their answer will show them to be hypocrites, for the problem then becomes why they did not believe the Baptist. Why did they fail to act on something that they perceived was the work of God? Any one of us might ask ourselves the same question. Why do we neglect the signs of His work? Why do we close our eyes to the possibilities He illumines for us? Ultimately, why do we do such things while smugly if unconsciously priding ourselves on how good, how nice, how proficient we really are? Why do we hold ourselves to be devotees when our lives lack the integrity required of us, or when our lives lack the genuine, health-giving penitence that consciousness of our lack of integrity ought to inspire in our hearts?

We fear to be exposed for who we know ourselves deep down to be, as did Jesus’ questioners, yet fear is also what a negative answer to Jesus’ question will induce in them. For if they say John’s baptism was not of heaven, it is the people that they will fear! In fearing the people, they are really afraid of losing control, or losing influence and power, and possibly afraid of the Romans. To answer the question one way or the other, therefore, they must face two realities; either that they have previously been shamed by the light, or that they are now cravenly afraid of the dark.  If saying ‘of heaven’ risked exposing them as hypocrites, saying ‘of earth’ will risk exposing them as cowards.

In both these possibilities, the souls of these men – and our own souls – are dissected and left out to dry in the sunlight. We have all been hypocrites, knowing what we should do, but lacking the integrity to do it, to count the cost or to take the risk of averting our eyes from the looking glass of our own self-image only to cast them upon the Holy Face. We have all been cowards likewise, fearing to let go the out sized theatrical costumes of our own vanity, too scared to be right for fear of getting things wrong and being exposed as the gentle, fumbling clowns we really are.

What should be a warning to us in this gospel scene, however, is its conclusion:

So, they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

In truth Jesus had already told them by what authority He did such things. The authority was written into actions which nobody on earth had ever done. Indeed, He had specifically and explicitly demonstrated His power to forgive sins through working the cure of a paralysed man in Matthew Chapter 6. For those with hearts open to the truth, He had already provided the answer that the chief priests and elders then supposedly came looking for in Matthew Chapter 21.

And why is this a warning to us? Because even though sin is in the will, it is possible in our minds to sin against the light. It is possible not only to close one’s selfish heart around the things one is unprepared to let go of, but also to close one’s tiny mind around the deceits that satisfy our hearts, rather than opening them up to the expansive grandeur of God’s invitation. It is possible – heaven help us! - to blot out the truths that frighten us and fail to take the risks our Divine Friend wants us to embrace.

The world belongs to risk takers, says Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest. But to brave the opening our minds to His light, or to dare to choose His dangerous call to us, we must run the risk of declaring a revolution against everything in us – the hypocrisy, the cowardice - everything that makes us children of the chief priests and elders rather than children of God. Let us then, in God’s name and in His power, be revolutionaries against our worst selves, abandoning our destiny to the action of the Eternal Rabble Rouser who overturns tables in the temples of our hearts to make them fit for His presence. For as Bernanos says in the same essay, in the end prayer is the only revolt that is left standing.