September 27, 2020 | Worship

What are some of the unanswerable questions in your life? They may have something to do with future events, or they may go down the theodicy rabbit trail of why does God allow suffering. Unanswerable questions are tough, we don’t like to admit when we don’t know everything. Even harder, are the unaskable questions. These are the ones that we won’t even pose to ourselves for fear that they might expose us as frauds, or they might reveal just in the asking that we have a lot of work to do, a lot of changes to make in order to even begin to fathom answering an unaskable question.

In today’s Gospel, the priests ask Jesus a question, and in typical Jesus style, he answers them with a question. Even though this is something we know Jesus did often, the Priests and Elders were thrown by this answering a question with a question bit. Jesus answered their question with an unanswerable question.

If this scripture feels a little out of place today, the last Sunday in September, which, by the way, HOW is it the last Sunday in September already—but if it feels off, that’s because this reading is one that takes place chronologically during Holy Week. We have spent 6 months apart now, and Holy Week feels like eons ago, and hearing a piece of scripture that takes place the day after Palm Sunday is even more disorienting as we’re in this mushy reality where time seems to have forgotten how to keep pace anyway. I invite us to lean into this discomfort and disorientation today, though. If this were truly Holy Week, we would be somber. We would be introspective. This is a time when we would examine the hardships that Jesus faced in his time with us, the cruelty of other people, the impossible binds that those who are in power find themselves in as they try to placate various people and their demands, while also wrestling with their own misgivings. It is a time when we would witness a crowd of people as they turn from supporters waving palm branchers to a mob demanding Jesus’s death because fear and powerlessness are powerful motivators. And we can use the imagery and feelings that are evoked during Holy Week right now as we sit in the middle of Ordinary Time, during a decidedly extra-ordinary time in our country’s history.

The question that is posed to Jesus is one that is intended to reveal him, it’s like the scooby doo trick where they take the mask off the ghoul and it’s really the guy who they thought was a good guy all along. The Priests and Elders are hoping he’ll slip up and give the wrong answer, or say something they can point at and say “Aha! We knew you were a fraud!” His simply being there and doing what he does was threatening to them because it threatened all the structures in place that granted their own authority. There were specific ways of behaving, certain ways to go about performing religious rites. This appeal to authority is way of reinforcing the legitimacy of the established way of doing things, and it is one that is useful for silencing anyone who does not benefit from the policies, practices and prescriptives that are well established. It’s a way of marking one’s territory, and it often works to silence people. Jesus wasn’t having it though. Jesus asked a question he knew they couldn’t answer. It was a question they would have preferred was completely unaskable. He wanted them to answer whether John’s baptisms were from heaven or whether they were human-made, a spectacle.

Cue the panic.  There was no way to answer this without either admitting that Jesus had the authority to do the things he was doing or making the crowd angry, the crowd who believed John was a prophet. They were stuck toeing the line between unmasking themselves as scooby doo villains or creating mass chaos in the streets—something they did not want during this time. As we remember, Jerusalem would have been teeming with pilgrims, with people who had come into town for Passover. The Chief Priests and Elders had power, but were not in power. Jerusalem was occupied by Rome, and so they had the delicate balance of keeping peace among their own people and not raising suspicion or militaristic action by the romans. I think of our modern day politicians who have many constituencies with conflicting interests, and the impossible task of keeping everyone at peace with watered down policy that is ineffective at changing a thing.

So the chief priests answer “we do not know.” Usually an “I don’t know” answer is the best one to give when you genuinely don’t have answers to questions, rather than leading someone down a wrong path. But in this case, they knew where John, and by extension Jesus, got their authority. Their admission of not knowing was less about a genuine lack of information and more about their inability to admit where they had gotten it wrong. Their lack of willingness to upset the system that Jesus was there to disrupt.

So Jesus threw a parable at them instead. He shared the lesser-talked about tale of two sons. In this one, two sons were asked to work in the vineyard by their father. One said “nahhhh, I’d rather watch YouTube and play on my Nintendo Switch” (the kids are still playing on that one, right?) But a few hours of ‘Yo, this is ya boyyyyy Gamer G, and you guys have been asking me to yeet a watermelon off a cliff in an inflateable shark costume…” and the son was like “yeah, no, I’ll go tend the vineyard. Youtubers are the worst.”   

When the father had asked the second son to go work in the vineyard, he was all about it. “Sure pops, Let me just put on my shoes.” But then the second son never went out, presumably on YouTube or learning one of those TikTok dances.

So Jesus asks, which of these two did the will of his father, the one who turned off the TV and finally went to work or the one who said he would go out there who ended up on the couch all day?

This questions is an easy one to answer, oh thank goodness! They all reply, possibly in unison, “The first.”

Then Jesus turned it around on them, saying that John came but they didn’t believe in his authority (Ah! The scooby doo mask has come off!) however the tax collectors and prostitutes believed, and even after they saw these acts were of God and not of human construction, they still refused to change their position based on newer, better information. The lowest of the low on the fringes of society would get into heaven first, ahead of the pious priests and elders.

Can you imagine how that felt? I’m going to do a scooby doo unmasking right now because it has to happen. In this story we are probably not Jesus, and many of us are likely not the prostitutes and tax collectors either. Not yet, anyway. We all have ways that we align with similar modes of thinking and acting that align more with the Chief Priests and Elders. And we don’t like being unmasked. It feels terrible. Jesus was daring, and he opposed established systems by interpreting and following the Torah in ways that challenged authority. Jesus was working toward justice and wholeness to the poor and the vulnerable. The people on the fringes. The ones who are targets. The ones who are labeled inconsequential. The people who, if a bullet from an officer of the established authority killed one of them, the officer in question would only be slapped on the wrist for the property damage of the neighbor’s house, but not for murder. You see where I’m going, and I promise you my heart is beating and my hands are shaking as I unmask this scooby doo villain part of us, because I too am part of this system. I benefit more by staying quiet. But not answering the questions that might reveal that I am part of a system that favors me over others.

But this is the work of Christ. Jesus, in that intense week before his death faced authorities who questioned his authority, and he did so bravely in order to save those who have been marginalized and ignored. As we ask ourselves “What Would Jesus Do” to do a fun callback to 1990s Christian teen bracelet trends, if we are not open to the unaskable questions of “how are we part of upholding oppression?” then we are not fully asking what Jesus would do and how Jesus would respond in our own time.

But we have to ask. And the lesson that the Chief religious folk didn’t learn was that, even though he implied that they were the second son, who was all talk, but then never actually did any of the work, they could also become the fist son if they would put their fragile pride aside and turn to the work of caring for all of God’s creation, starting with those whose lives seem to matter less. This week, I empower you to turn to Christ to ask for help in unmasking the ways that you are propping up systems that help you but are devastating for others. It’s not fun. It’s not comfortable. You might shake a little and get mad about it, and that’s okay. It is the holy work of being bold in order to ensure justice and wholeness for the poor, the oppressed, and those who the law does not keep safe. And I believe that, with the help of Jesus Christ, it is completely possible for us to create a world that is truly just for all it’s inhabitants. Blessings on this work. Amen.