Faith can be resisted not because the truth is obscure, but because accepting it would require conversion

It’s one thing to be able to cite Scriptural passages to assert one thing or another. It’s quite another to exercise sufficient humility to truly understand how those passages are calling you to change how you think and act with others. In our Gospel lesson this morning the Chief priests and elders try to expose Jesus as a fraud by asking him by what authority he teaches. Instead of saying, “I’m God, or the Son of God,” he decides to use their question as an example to his followers for centuries to come: “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?"

Now think for a moment, these are God’s chief priests and elders who are supposed to recognize the signs of God’s revelation. The entire history of Israel is based in particular individuals (usually of extremely common origin like Abraham, David, Jeremiah, Isaiah) speaking and acting in ways that point to God coming into the world, sending someone who will “take on the transgressions or sins of Israel in order to redeem them.” 

This isn’t hidden. It’s not a secret. It’s the testimony of every single passage of the Old Testament Scriptures. So when John tells of Christ’s coming, he is not doing a new thing. He’s following a very familiar pathway of God’s prophets, right from his common birth, to his proclamation of and recognition of Jesus, to Jesus’s own baptism which John performs. For the Jewish leaders - whose role it is to interpret God’s revelation - not to recognize John as from God seems impossible. Yet they argue with one another: “If we say, 'From heaven,' he will say to us, 'Why then did you not believe him?' But if we say, 'Of human origin,' we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet." So they answered Jesus, "We do not know."

This answer is a lie. It is not that the chief priests and elders don’t know the answer to the question - that John’s baptism is divine; it is the final pointer to Jesus as the fulfillment of all prophecy. The evidence is abundant. The reality is that the chief priests and elders want to maintain their ways, their comfort. They do not want to be challenged and changed by the one to whom John points: Jesus himself. They don’t like what he says. They don’t like his demand that they repent; that their law will not save them; that their ways are not God’s ways; that they must submit, repent, and open themselves to learning anew through Christ. 

Now it’s one thing to be truly ignorant of God’s revelation. There are many things we simply don’t know or understand, or at least not in any given moment. But says Jesus, to claim ignorance, to claim you don’t have sufficient evidence to know me when you have been following me, hearing this repeated story of my coming and how I would be revealed; to hear this repeated story and see in other people, aspects of who I am repeated in your history and your personal lives again and again, to have revealed to you in Word and deed, the very life of God and to claim ignorance of God’s presence with you: that is the first and greatest sin because in rejecting me, you have no means to keep yourself alive, you reject life itself. 

Jesus won’t accept this. He goes after these lost sheep by exposing their false humility by saying they don’t know how to answer his question: “A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' He answered, 'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir'; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." The exposure trap is set; the chief priests and elders fall into it. You are the second son. All of us, far too often, are the second son. We know who Jesus is - we know he perfectly fulfills the will of his Father - because he follows the Father’s will to love us even to his own death, which he does not will or desire. 

So often we respond to God like the chief priests and elders though, with a feigned ignorance: I don’t know what you really want me to do here God. But we often respond like that before, or without consulting God at all. We fall back into our old patterns and ways of responding to people and situations: fear becomes judgment, aggression, dismissiveness, rage, vengeance or violence. Uncertainty drives the grab for social, political and legal power to cut others down or off, rather than trying to understand who they are, why they’re doing what they are, and what God is saying to us through them. Frustration results in walking away, narrowing the sources through which we are willing to examine the world, and so blocking God, who through them may be challenging us, provoking us, demanding of us. 

I’ll just do what makes me comfortable, secure, self declaredly righteous. I’ll throw the name of Jesus at you and a verse or two of Scripture because it fits my already formed worldview (likely from some decade of the 1900s), for surely God’s revelation is as obvious and common sense as is my own. My friends, far too often you and I are the chief priests and elders. We want to start the presumption that our judgment is God’s own; our common sense is God’s sense. God would only show up to us as we expect and presume. Jesus corrects us: his own people, Jews and Christians alike. It is solely in the humility of following, confessing, repenting, and seeking God everywhere - even with people and situations that challenge us and draw us through times of trial and tribulation and self questioning - that we are drawn to Goda.