Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost; 1 October 2023; Proper 21A (RCL); Exodus 17:-7; Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32.
Matthew puts two sayings or teachings of Jesus together that on first sight don’t have a lot to do with each other. The first is the controversy exchange with the religious authorities. It’s important to remember that the “these things” about which the authorities are questioning him include driving out the merchants of animals and tipping over the tables of the money changers, although the lectionary leaps over this incident. So, the place of the Temple is in view in this exchange.
Jesus, like a good Cynic, redirects their question to one of his own, putting them on the spot: Was the baptism of John of heavenly or earthly origin? Matthew shows us their dilemma — Jesus has laid a trap for them, which they dodge. Jesus, in turn, refuses to answer their question, implying that John’s baptism, as well as Jesus’ authority, is of heavenly origin.
To that controversy, Matthew appends some material unique to him. We certainly have examples of stories in the Old Testament of two sons, the younger one usually coming off better (Esau and Jacob being the prime example), and Luke has the story of the Prodigal. And whenever we encounter a vineyard in biblical literature, our minds should go directly to Israel (see Isaiah 5 and Psalm 80:8-19 for good background). This, then, is a story of two brothers tending God’s people, or entering God’s promises. The elder at first seems to refuse the Father’s instructions, but then complies, while the younger (Jacob/Israel?) seems to comply but does not.
In his letter to the Romans, chapters 1 & 2, Paul makes a similar argument, in chapter 1 stating that the Gentiles have had plenty evidence of the goodness of God, but have refused it, and been given over to all the horrible things ascribed to Gentiles as punishment for worshiping the creature rather than the creator. And then, in chapter 2, Paul lays exactly the same charges against Israel, only worse, because they have had God’s own self-revelation, and so can’t claim ignorance as an excuse.
So, at one level, this parable functions to say that the Gentiles (the elder son) have obeyed God better than Israel, by accepting Jesus as Lord (the point of Matthew’s Gospel being to make it possible for Gentile Christians to observe the spirit, if not the letter, of the law). But, to maintain the integrity of the narrative, Matthew has Jesus bring the conversation back around to John’s baptism. Tax collectors and prostitutes heeded his call for repentance, because their sinfulness (brokenness) was painfully obvious to them The repentance John was calling for was the repentance of Israel’s failure to live the law. He was baptizing in the Jordan, which itself was a political statement, reclaiming the promised land for a new people cleansed by their desert sojourn.
So, by what authority is Jesus attacking the Temple — earthly or heavenly? The rending of the curtain enclosing the holy of holies at the moment of Jesus’ death makes it clear that God is leaving the Temple.
And, we can’t overlook the passage from Philippians. Paul quotes an early Christological hymn, which makes it apparent that within a matter of a decade or two of Jesus’ death, Christians were already imagining him as divine in a way far different from the divinity of the divine man of pagan religion. Jesus did not account equality with God (the Greek implies sameness) as a prize to be won (by ascetic ascent, a la the divine man), but rather emptied himself and took human form (the divine man myth works the other way around — a human takes divine form), and was obedient to the point of death on a cross. And so God has bestowed on him the name above all names, that is the unutterable divine name.
Modern rational approaches to Christianity have insisted that Trinitarian language, and language of divine status for Jesus, was imported from Greek philosophy in the fourth through sixth centuries, and that honest Christianity eschewed that language to see Jesus as the “religious ultimate,” in other words, a pagan divine man. This hymn puts the lie to that argument. Here, well before the turn of the first century, we have language of Jesus sharing God’s name and nature. No wonder Paul suffered so much at the hands of the synagogue in his missionary journeys. This is outright blasphemy. Paul saw that what God had done in Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s own promises, as faithfulness to God’s own purposes. Matthew sees Jesus in the same light, as replacing the Temple where humanity encounters the divine.