None of Your Business

One day, Jesus was teaching in the temple and telling the good news. So the chief priests, the teachers, and the nation’s leaders asked him, “What right do you have to do these things? Who gave you this authority?”

Jesus replied, “I want to ask you a question. Who gave John the right to baptize? Was it God in heaven or merely some human being?”

They talked this over and said to each other, “We can’t say that God gave John this right. Jesus will ask us why we didn’t believe John. And we can’t say that it was merely some human who gave John the right to baptize. The crowd will stone us to death, because they think John was a prophet.”

So they told Jesus, “We don’t know who gave John the right to baptize.”

Jesus replied, “Then I won’t tell you who gave me the right to do what I do.” (Luke 20:1-8)

It’s good news when the home town wins—unless you were rooting for the other side. That the religious establishment reacted to Jesus preaching good news with anger tells us something about the religious establishment.

After Jesus drove the moneylenders from the Temple, while he was preaching, the religious leaders approached Jesus and asked him about the source of his authority. Jesus then used his popularity and the popularity of his cousin, John the Baptist, against the religious leaders. They did not believe Jesus was unauthorized. They did not believe that John the Baptist was a prophet of God. But they were well aware of what most of the people in the crowd believed. When Jesus asked them about John’s message, they realized that they couldn’t say anything without getting themselves in serious trouble.

So when they refused to answer Jesus, Jesus likewise refused to answer them. Jesus point was that they didn’t believe John came from God, so why would they believe Jesus when he told them he came from God and had God’s authority for his actions? Their question was not an honest one. He knew that and they knew that. They wouldn’t accept the truth, so what was the point in giving it to them?

When someone has already made up his mind, giving him the facts is not going to change it. We therefore need to be careful about how fast we make up our minds. A made up mind, too often, can become a fortress against the truth.

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