Chapter 27 - The Authority of Jesus (21:23-32)

27 The Authority of Jesus (21:23-32)

And when He had come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to Him as He was teaching, and said, “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” And Jesus answered and said to them, “I will ask you one thing too, which if you tell Me, I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John was from what source, from heaven or from men?” And they began reasoning among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ He will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the multitude; for they all hold John to be a prophet.” And answering Jesus, they said, “We do not know.” He also said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things. But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, ‘Son, go work today in the vineyard.’ And he answered and said, ‘I will, sir’; and he did not go. And he came to the second and said the same thing. But he answered and said, ‘I will not’; yet he afterward regretted it and went. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The latter.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you that the tax-gatherers and harlots will get into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him; but the tax-gatherers and harlots did believe him; and you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him.” (21:23-32)

Authority is a strong word, denoting power and privilege. A person with authority exercises control over the lives and welfare of other people. Society cannot operate without having some people in positions of authority; the alternative would be anarchy and chaos. In the family, parents have authority. In school, teachers and administrators have authority. In the community, the mayor, city council, police, and firemen all have spheres of authority. And so also in the larger bodies of government.

The conflict in this encounter between Jesus and the religious leaders was over the issue of authority, specifically Jesus’ authority, which they questioned and which they feared would threaten their own positions of authority.

THE CONFRONTATION

It was still Wednesday morning of Passover week. After Jesus and the disciples had passed the fig tree He cursed the day before and found it completely withered (vv. 18-22; cf. Mark 11:20-21), He had come with them into the temple.

The group of chief priests and elders may have included the high priests Caiaphas and Annas, who served concurrently for several years (Luke 3:2). Because of the seriousness of their confrontation of Jesus, it is likely that at least the captain of the Temple, the second highest official, was present. The elders comprised a wide variety of religious leaders, which definitely included Pharisees (Matt. 21:45) and scribes (Luke 20:1), and possibly Sadducees, Herodians, and even some Zealots and Essenes. Although those groups had many differences from each other and were constantly disputing among themselves, they found common ground in opposing Jesus, because He threatened the authority of the entire religious establishment.

Every false religion has the common denominator of works righteousness, of salvation by human achievement, and is by nature offended by and opposed to the gospel of divine accomplishment by God in Christ. Although the religions of the world are divided by vast differences in theology and practice, they find common ground against the gospel of Jesus Christ, just as did the Jewish religionists in the Temple. They may presume to honor Christ as a prophet, a great teacher, or even as one among many gods, but they vehemently oppose the truth that He is the only Savior and that no person can come to God except through the merits of His sacrifice.

As He had the day before, when He so dramatically cleansed the Temple, Jesus now took center stage there again and was teaching as He walked about the courtyard (Mark 11:27). It seems certain that those whom He had driven out for making His Father’s house a den of robbers (Matt. 21:13) had not returned, and the entire spacious Court of the Gentiles was now available for those who came to worship. Many of them had probably followed Jesus there when they saw Him come into the city that morning.

We are not told what Jesus was teaching on this occasion, but He was likely reiterating some of the more important truths He had taught many times before. We can be sure that whatever He said was related to His kingdom, the subject with which His ministry began (Matt. 4:17) and ended (Acts 1:3). In His parallel account, Luke reports that Jesus was “teaching daily in the temple, . . . preaching the gospel” (Luke 19:47; 20:1), which was sometimes called “the gospel of the kingdom” (Matt. 9:35). Whatever His specific theme, “all the people were hanging upon His words” (Luke 19:48).

The primary question the Jewish leaders now had for Jesus was the same as it had been from the beginning, “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” (cf. John 2:18). By these things, they probably meant everything Jesus had been teaching and doing, but they particularly had in mind His abrupt and, in their eyes, utterly presumptuous cleansing of the Temple the day before. Except for His similar act at the beginning of His ministry, He had never done anything that more clearly, forcefully, and publicly devastated the religious establishment. While it was happening, they were powerless to stop Him and apparently were even speechless. But now that they had recovered from the initial shock, they were on the offensive and were demanding an explanation.

Rabbinical candidates originally had been ordained by a leading rabbi whom they respected and under whose teaching they served a kind of apprenticeship. And just as the teachings of the leading rabbis varied greatly, so did their ordinations. Because of widespread abuses, and probably also to centralize rabbinical authority, the Sanhedrin, or high Jewish council, had taken over all responsibility for ordination.

At his ordination a man was declared to be rabbi, elder, and judge, and was given corresponding authority to teach, to express his wisdom, and to make decisions and render verdicts in religious as well as many civil matters. During the service various discourses and readings were given and hymns sung. Once ordained, the man had official recognition as a credentialed teacher of Israel.

Jesus had had no such ordination and therefore had no such recognition. By what authority, then, the leaders asked, did He not only teach and preach but even heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead? Most especially, why had He presumed to take upon Himself—an untrained, unrecognized, self-appointed rabbi—the task of casting the merchants and moneychangers out of the Temple? Although not themselves religious leaders, those men were operating their businesses under the auspices of the Temple authorities. “Who gave You . . . authority to throw them out?” those authorities asked Jesus.

Although they did not recognize the source and legitimacy of Jesus’ power, they never questioned that He had it. That His authority was unprecedentedly powerful was incontestable. No one had ever healed as many sick people, cast out as many demons, or raised people from the dead as Jesus had done. The miracles were so obvious, numerous, and well attested that the religious leaders never doubted that Jesus performed them, having seen many of them with their own eyes.

Those leaders knew that power such as Jesus displayed had to be of supernatural origin, and they knew He claimed it was from God, whom He repeatedly called His heavenly Father. When He forgave a paralytic’s sins, some of the scribes present “said to themselves, ‘This fellow blasphemes.’” Knowing what they were thinking, Jesus accused them of having evil hearts and proceeded to heal the man’s paralysis in order to show His critics that He, the Son of Man, had “authority on earth to forgive sins” (Matt. 9:2-6). The crowd of common people who witnessed what He did made the only sensible response: “They were filled with awe, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men” (v. 8). But the scribes refused to accept the obvious. No amount of evidence could penetrate their confirmed unbelief. And like the Pharisees on an earlier occasion (Matt. 12:24), the Temple authorities who now confronted Jesus no doubt preferred to believe that His power came from Satan rather than God.

The chief priests and elders in the Temple also knew, as the multitudes often acknowledged in amazement, that Jesus taught authoritatively, with a clarity, definitiveness, and certainty that was completely lacking in the pronouncements and interpretations of the scribes (Matt. 7:29; Mark 1:22). As in many liberal church circles today, a key qualification for acceptance was lack of dogmatism. Virtually every doctrine was open to reinterpretation and revision, and absolutes were shunned as presumptuous. Human wisdom had long since replaced divine revelation, and Old Testament Scripture was cited primarily to support their humanly-devised religious traditions. When Scripture conflicted with tradition, tradition prevailed (Matt. 16:6). In the minds of most Jewish religious leaders, there were many authorities but none that was exclusively authoritative, not even Scripture.

Yet Jesus’ ministry was nothing if not authoritative. He demonstrated authority to grant those who believe in Him the right to become children of God (John 1:12). His heavenly Father “gave Him authority to execute judgment” (5:27) and “authority over all mankind” to give eternal life to those His Father has given Him (17:2). He had authority over His own life, “to lay it down,” and over His own resurrection, “to take [His life] up again” (10:18).

In all the things He said and did, Jesus never sought approval or support from the recognized Jewish authorities. He completely ignored their system for ordaining rabbis and approving doctrines. He did not ask approval for His teachings, His healings, or His casting out of demons, and certainly not for His forgiving sins.

Jesus had both dunamis (power) and exousia (authority). Dunamis refers to ability, and exousia to right. Jesus not only had great power but the right to exercise that power, because both His power and His authority were from His heavenly Father. “Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life,” Jesus said, “even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes,” and “just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself” (John 5:21, 26). “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me” (6:38; cf. v. 44, 57; 7:16, 28; 8:18, 54).

And because Jesus had the Father’s power and authority, He sought no human authority, accreditation, ordination, or credentials. By so doing, He pitted Himself directly against the Jewish religious system and incurred its unrelenting wrath. Its leaders were appalled and scandalized that He not only failed to consult the Sanhedrin and the Temple authorities but had the audacity to condemn them.

In asking Jesus to identify His authority, those leaders probably hoped He would say, as He had many times before, that He worked under the direct power and authority of God, His heavenly Father. That would give them another opportunity to charge Him with blasphemy, and perhaps to succeed in putting Him to death for it, as they had tried to do before without success (John 5:18; 10:31).

THE COUNTER QUESTION

And Jesus answered and said to them, “I will ask you one thing too, which if you tell Me, I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John was from what source, from heaven or from men?” And they began reasoning among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ He will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the multitude; for they all hold John to be a prophet.” And answering Jesus, they said, “We do not know.” He also said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” (21:24-27)

Jesus answered the question of the chief priests and elders with a query of His own. He was not being evasive and had no reason to be, having given the answer to their question countless times before. And if they answered His question now, He would answer theirs, telling them again by what authority He did these things.

His question was simple: “The baptism of John was from what source, from heaven or from men?” Because John the Baptist had started his ministry first, the religious leaders had rejected him even before they began to reject Jesus. The baptism of John referred to His entire ministry, which was characterized by his baptizing those who repented of their sins (Matt. 3:6).

John was the last prophet of the Old Testament age and, like Jesus, became popular and admired by the masses. He was readying the people for the Messiah, and his demeanor and the content and power of his preaching had made a great impact throughout Israel. After Herod arrested John for condemning his adulterous marriage to his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias, the king hesitated for a long time in putting John to death because the people considered him to be a prophet (Matt. 14:3-5).

As the chief priests and elders quickly realized, Jesus’ question put them on the horns of a great dilemma. As they began reasoning among themselves, they saw they would be in trouble for whichever answer they gave. If they were to say, “From heaven,” Jesus would then say to them, “Then why did you not believe him?” It was not simply that they had rejected John himself but that they had also rejected John’s clear testimony about Jesus, whom that prophet had openly acclaimed to be “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” and the very “Son of God” (John 1:29, 34). To have accepted John as a prophet from heaven would have required accepting Jesus as the Messiah; and that they absolutely would not do.

No amount of testimony from John or evidence from Jesus Himself would bring them to recognize Him as Messiah. They were trained to discount or explain away facts as well as scriptural truths that were not consistent with their humanly-devised religious beliefs and standards. The man born blind whom Jesus had healed told his Pharisee inquisitors, “We know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is God-fearing, and does His will, He hears him. Since the beginning of time it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, He could do nothing” (John 9:31-33). But the Pharisees were unmoved by those obvious truths. Instead, they lashed out at the man, resentful of his presumption in trying to teach the teachers of Israel (v. 34). When unbelief investigates spiritual truth, it is predisposed to reject it.

As the religious rulers continued to discuss Jesus’ question, they realized that if they answered the opposite way they would also be in trouble. If they said John’s ministry and message were from men, they would lose what little credibility they had with the people and would even incite their ire, because the multitude still considered John to be a prophet. They themselves firmly believed that John was not a prophet, but they did not dare state that belief in public. Their only recourse, therefore, was to confess with embarrassment, We do not know.

Consequently Jesus replied, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” As Jesus well knew, had He given them an answer, they would only have used it against Him. They were not interested in learning the truth about either John or Jesus. Their sole purpose was to induce Jesus to again claim messiahship and divinity so they would have grounds for putting Him to death for blasphemy (cf. John 5:18; Matt. 22:15).

The religious leaders persisted in rejecting the light Christ sent them, and He therefore turned it off. He had no more teaching for the scribes, Pharisees, chief priests, and others whose self-satisfaction blinded them to the truth of the gospel and their own need for it. For them there would only be further warning and condemnation. In a long series of woes, Jesus was about to declare judgment against them for doing their deeds to be seen of men, for refusing to enter the kingdom themselves and for hindering others from entering, for being blind religious guides, for being outwardly righteous but inwardly wicked, for honoring the ancient prophets in name but being of the same mind as their forefathers who killed the prophets, and for being a brood of vipers destined for hell (Matt. 23:5, 13, 16, 27, 30, 33).

When He was on trial before the high priest Caiaphas, “Jesus kept silent,” refusing to give a single further word of testimony (Matt. 26:63). And when Pilate asked Him to respond to the accusations of the chief priests and elders, Jesus “did not answer him with regard to even a single charge” (27:14).

When a person steadfastly refuses to hear God’s truth and to receive His grace, God may choose to withdraw Himself. In face of the unrelenting wickedness of mankind in Noah’s day, the Lord declared, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever” (Gen. 6:3). The Lord finally said of unrepentant Ephraim, “Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone” (Hos. 4:17), and in relation to rebellious Judah, “He turned Himself to become their enemy, He fought against them” (Isa. 63:10).

Even as Jesus approached Jerusalem during His triumphal entry, He had wept over the city, saying, “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you when your enemies will throw up a bank before you, and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation” (Luke 19:41-44). And soon after Jesus’ severe excoriation of the scribes and Pharisees, He lamented, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! For I say to you, from now on you shall not see Me until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’” (Matt. 23:37-39).

THE CHARACTERIZATION

But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, ‘Son, go work today in the vineyard.’ And he answered and said, ‘I will, sir’; and he did not go. And he came to the second and said the same thing. But he answered and said, ‘I will not’; yet he afterward regretted it and went. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The latter.” (21:28-31a)

In this short parable Jesus characterizes two contrasting responses to the gospel. And once again He gives His opponents the opportunity to condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

In the first instance, the son who was asked to work . . . in the vineyard told his father, “I will, sir,” but he did not go. The implication is that he had never intended to go and lied to his father to give the false impression of obedience. The second son at first refused to go, saying, “I will not,” but he afterward regretted it and went.

When Jesus asked the chief priests and elders, “Which of the two did the will of his father?” they gave the obvious answer, “The latter.”

Jesus’ point in this story is that doing is more important than mere saying. It is, of course, best for a person to say he will do God’s will and then do it. But it is immeasurably better to at first refuse His will and then repent and do it than to hypocritically agree to do it but not. In this context, the doing of God’s will relates to acceptance of the gospel, of receiving Jesus as the Messiah and as Savior and Lord.

THE CONNECTION

Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you that the tax-gatherers and harlots will get into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him; but the tax-gatherers and harlots did believe him; and you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him” (21:31b-32)

After His opponents gave the only possible answer to His question, Jesus showed them their connection to the parable. He informed them that, although their answer to His question was right, their response to Him and His ministry was wrong and wicked. Their own words condemned them. They did not correspond to “the latter” son, who did the father’s will, but to the former, who did not do it. “They say things, and do not do them,” Jesus said on a later occasion (Matt. 23:3). They claimed to obey God, but their actions denied that He had any place in their hearts. They claimed to be longing for the Messiah and lauded His name; but when He came, they would not have Him.

The Lord therefore said to them, “Truly I say to you that the tax-gatherers and harlots will get into the kingdom of God before you.” No rebuke could have cut them deeper or infuriated them more, because in their eyes, tax-gatherers and harlots were the scum of society, perhaps even worse than Gentiles. Tax-gatherers not only were merciless extortioners but were traitors to their own people, Jews who bought franchises from the Romans to collect taxes from their own people to support the Roman occupation. Harlots were the epitome of gross immorality. If any people were totally outside the pale of God’s mercy, the self-righteous Jewish leaders thought, it was those two groups.

The men who now stood before Jesus, on the other hand, were the religious elite, the interpreters of God’s law and the keepers of God’s Temple. They claimed to give their lives in obedience to God and lived under the self-serving illusion that, because of their exalted positions and their many religious works, they were of all men most pleasing to Him.

Yet Jesus declared to those proud leaders that tax-gatherers and harlots who chose to disobey God but later repented would get into the kingdom of God before they would. Before you does not mean that the unbelieving leaders would eventually enter the Kingdom, because no unbeliever will ever enter. Jesus simply used the expression to show God’s reversal of man-made standards for salvation. The tax-gatherers and harlots were nearer the kingdom than the chief priests and elders, not because they were inherently more righteous or acceptable to God, but because they were more ready to acknowledge their need for God’s grace than the self-satisfied priests and elders. Jesus’ point was that claims to religion do not qualify a person to enter the kingdom, and even gross sin, when repented of, will not keep a person out.

“For John came to you in the way of righteousness,” Jesus continued, giving the answer to the question His opponents had earlier refused to answer. To say that John came . . . in the way of righteousness was to say not only that his ministry was from God but that he was a godly man. He was a holy, righteous, virtuous, Spirit-filled man whom God had sent to prepare the way for His Son, the Messiah. He preached a righteous message and lived a righteous life. “Among those born of women,” Jesus had affirmed, “there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist” (Matt. 11:11).

“But you did not believe him,” Jesus told them. The Jewish leaders had been skeptical of John from the beginning, having sent a group of priests and Levites to question him (John 1:19-25). And when John “saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance; and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, “We have Abraham for our father”; for I say to you, that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham’” (Matt. 3:7-9).

“But the tax-gatherers and harlots did believe him,” Jesus said. Some of the tax-gatherers had been open to the gospel even in its incomplete form taught by John the Baptist. As evidence of their sincerity in being baptized for the repentance of their sins, they asked John, “Teacher, what shall we do?” (Luke 3:12). Although no specific instance is mentioned in the gospels, Jesus makes clear that among the multitudes who were baptized by John there were also some harlots who did believe him and who, like those tax-gatherers, confessed their sins and were forgiven (see Matt. 3:5-6).

Concluding His indictment, Jesus said, “And you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him.” They did not believe John’s message when they heard it themselves and did not even believe him when they saw the transformed lives of the tax-gatherers and harlots who had believed. In other words, they would not be convicted either by the truth of the message or its power to transform sinners.

They had been exposed to the full light of the prophet of God and the even greater light of the Son of God, yet they refused to be enlightened. They had heard the message of the herald of the King and the message of the King Himself, yet they would not listen or believe. They had witnessed the power of John and the power of Christ, yet they would not be moved.