By what authority?

“Who gave you the right to do that?” 

It is very human to challenge someone that way, and it goes right back to the Bible. When Jesus had entered Jerusalem in triumph and overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple, the chief priests and elders asked, 

“By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?” (Matthew 21:23 NIV).

People today are just as resentful about Jesus having any claim on them. “By what authority? Why should this Jesus have rights as King over my life?”

Jesus is not embarrassed by the question. It is the questioners who have the problem, not He. They are making three tragic and disastrous refusals:

• a refusal to believe (Matthew 21:23),
• a refusal to hold up a mirror to themselves (verses 24-27) and
• a refusal to obey (verses 28-31). 

The rest of the chapter spells out the grim consequence of these refusals. It is, spiritually, a matter of life and death. 

First, the Jewish leaders demonstrate a refusal to believe. “By what authority?” they ask. The only authority they recognise is the qualifications they approve of themselves. It is a bit like our society today with its stress on paper qualifications.

Jesus saw authority in a different way. His mighty works of healing and compassion were evidence in themselves. They demonstrated God’s love and authenticated God’s power. Every one of them made a statement about Jesus’ authority and bracketed Him with God.

As far as we know, nobody in Jesus’ day ever denied that the miracles had happened. Rather than believe in Him, His critics fished around for an alternative explanation - the same as the deniers of miracles are doing to this very day.

The leaders refused to believe and, secondly, they refused to hold up a mirror to themselves. They wanted to ask awkward questions of Jesus. But how embarrassed they were when He turned and asked awkward questions of them!

The Scottish poet Robbie Burns, seeing a flea on a lady’s bonnet at church, wrote these memorable and relevant lines in the poem “To a Louse”:

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Finally, verses 28-31, the refusal to obey. I love the parable of the two sons. Dad asks each in turn to go and work in his vineyard. The first one barks rudely, “I don’t want to!” But afterwards he changes his mind and does it. The second one couldn’t be more of a daddy’s boy. “I’m your man!” (Literally, “Me, sir!”) But go he did not. For Jesus, truth shows in character. A truthful character does what it says on the tin.

Think about it, comments Jesus. You can be as awkward a cuss as you like, but if you go away and on reflection do the right thing, you get the credit. On the other hand, you can be ever such a little creep, but if you end up not doing the right thing you don’t get the credit. Good intentions don’t count. Obedience does.

“By what authority?” we challenge the Lord Jesus Christ, we who are merely strangers, pilgrims, tenants on this earth. But as we point the finger at Him, 3 fingers point back at us:

• Why did you not believe the evidence?
• Why did you not take a long, hard look at yourselves?
• Why were you not obedient?

When the crowds heard John the Baptist, they asked, “What should we do?”
Years later, when the jailer at Philippi saw God at work in the apostle Paul and Silas, miraculously freed from their chains (Acts 16), he asked, “What must I do?”
Sadly the Jewish leaders were asking a different question: “How can we avoid losing face?”

The right response to Jesus Christ’s works is “What should I do?” And the Lord loves that question and replies, 

“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).

By what authority? By royal authority. Through the inspired pages of Matthew’s gospel, this first-century Man and His first-century miracles come to your 21st-century door. Will you give the right response?

Those Difficult Names

One of the hurdles I have found over the years in persuading people to do Bible readings in church is the unpronounceable names.

Whether these are long like Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz or short like Kios, many potential readers come to the name, spot that there is more than one way it could be rendered and immediately freeze. “I don’t mind reading for you,” they say, “but please make sure there are no difficult names in the passage.”

You can buy English pronouncing dictionaries. Some - dating from a day when the problem exercised many more minds than now - have a wide range of Bible names and advice on how to say them.

I tell people they worry too much, though. The simple truth is that the languages of Bible times were so outlandish to our ears that we can’t possibly pronounce the names authentically. Your guess is as good as mine!

OK, I can tell you with some confidence that the name “Salmon” was never pronounced like the English fish spelt the same way. The “l” is meant to be sounded. Also “Shealtiel” shouldn’t come out like “shield teal”. But surely there are worse crimes than getting those details wrong!

Why, you might ask in exasperation, did God cause His word to be written in a day and a culture so far removed from our own, so that we are left to struggle with names and places that are completely unfamiliar?

I can think of one excellent reason. One day when I was a student an African studying theology approached me and admitted, “I’m not a believer”. “Why?” I asked. “Christianity is western,” he complained. “It’s the culture of colonialists like the British. It has nothing to say to us Africans.”

I thought how false and unfortunate this was. You could equally claim that no culture is at home with the Bible outside a narrow strip of land on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The places and the names belong largely to that restricted area. Even then, 2000 years have passed and many of those features have changed beyond recognition. The concept that “God was man in Palestine”, as Sir John Betjeman put it, is not something that we Brits can wear like a glove.

Thank God every race and culture is in the same boat! Each one must wrestle with the unfamiliar to pledge allegiance to Christ. In particular we must abandon the culture of self-reliance to which we are all wedded. As we do so, our storm-tossed boat becomes the focus of a glorious divine rescue mission.

Day by day His tender mercy,
healing, helping, full and free,
sweet and strong, and ah! so patient,
brought me lower, while I whispered,
‘Less of self, and more of Thee!’
      Theodore Monod, 1836-1921

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”        (Revelation 7:9-10 ESV)