"Pleasing People, Pleasing God"
If it is a choice, it's better to please God than people.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Text: Mark 11:27-33
Many years ago, a Xhosa Diviner related a wonderful African saying to me: “The jackass, when he brays does not even make the bed of the forest tremble, but the tiger's paw, even when it delicately touches a leaf causes everyone in the jungle to scatter.” I have often wondered about the meaning of the aphorism. What is it trying to convey? Well, clearly, it is talking about authority and power, and how power and authority do not just come from those who have the most to say, like the braying jackass, but from those with the innate power and strength of the tiger. It is not those who pretend to have power who have the real authority, but those who genuinely possess it who can cause others to tremble and to scatter.
The encounter in Mark's Gospel is yet another example of where the braying of the jackass confronts the powerful roar of the tiger: when there are those who, by virtue of their own words want to claim power, authority and prestige when they are in the company of the one who possesses it legitimately, and uses it wisely. It is no coincidence that Mark, in his usual graphic way, tells us that all of this takes place within the context of the temple. It is in this context that the religious leaders - the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Scribes feel their authority and power. By coming into the temple, Jesus was entering into their world, confronting their authority head-on, and they were offended by it.
Not only were they offended by it, but they wanted to silence Jesus. They were amazed by all the things he had done: the healings, the teachings, the miracles, the driving out of demons, and now, prophetic speech in the temple! They wondered how to silence him, how to keep Jesus of Nazareth quiet.
It was a wonderful encounter. You feel sympathy for the religious leaders - after all, it was their temple. They were the priests and the rabbis and the teachers and the scribes. They were the ones responsible for looking after the law, not this Galilean who wandered in and started preaching. They also had a very traditional and very rabbinic conception of authority.
You see, for them, authority was something passed on through the generations. A master, for example, would receive authority and then pass that authority on to his student, so the student would learn from the master, and would gain the master's authority. A rabbi would gather a cadre of people and teach them, and from their teachings, they would pass on their power and authority to other rabbis, all the time believing that this authority traced back to Moses.
From Moses right up to the time of Jesus, they believed that authority was passed through the priestly class from generation to generation, very much like the Roman Catholic understanding of papal succession dating back to Peter and passed from pontiff to pontiff. Likewise, the rabbis, the priests, the Pharisees and the Scribes believed that their authority had come from Moses.
When Jesus broke onto the scene and spoke in the temple, performing healings and miracles, they could not understand his authority and wanted to know where it came from. Who bestowed on him the right to do and say these things? In the encounter with Jesus in the temple, Mark gives us a very clear sense of what the two forces were trying to do: The priests were trying to silence Jesus and Jesus was trying to proclaim the Word. So what happened?
If we look carefully at the story, there is a very clear sense that it is not just about authority: It is about popularity, it is about honesty, it is about mystery. All of these things have a profound impact on the way that we live the Christian life.
Look, for example, at the authority issue. They come to Jesus and try to trap him. They say to him, “By what authority are you doing these things?” They assume that Jesus is grasping authority. After all, he hasn't followed any of the great rabbis or masters, so who is he to come along and start claiming authority? They want to know who his teacher is and where his authority comes from.
Here is the irony! The Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes were abusing their authority, not to draw people to God, not to expand the kingdom, but rather to preserve their own integrity, their own position and their own authority. They weren't interested in the masses; they weren't interested in the ordinary people and their relationship with God; they were interested in preserving the status quo and using their authority for their own gain.
A number of years ago, I read a story on one of my favourite websites -“Yahoo! Sports” (and one never knows the veracity of these things) about the day when Fidel Castro celebrated his 74th birthday. He decided that because Cubans love baseball as much as they love cigars, to host a baseball game with the newly-appointed President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez as his guest.
When it was Castro's turn at bat he invited Chavez to pitch. The first pitch zoomed across the plate while Castro was standing, looking down - strike one! He began to worry. Then, Chavez threw two balls in a row, they were nowhere near the strike zone. Castro swung at the fourth pitch and missed. Then Chavez threw a wild pitch; the count was full: three balls and two strikes. Chavez couldn't resist and pitched one right over the plate. The umpire cried, “Strike!” Castro looked back at him and walked straight to first base. When he looked over at Chavez, standing on the mound completely wrecked by all of this, he said, “This is my day, not yours, Mr. Chavez!”
I liken what was done there to what the Scribes and the Pharisees were doing. They were thinking it was their day, their temple, their place, and they could play by their rules. Jesus broke into this and shattered their world. They said to him, “By what authority are you doing these things?” And then, in a classic, rabbinical way, Jesus answered them with a question. He said, “I will ask you one question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John's baptism—was it from heaven, or from men?”
This immediately put the religious leaders on the defensive. If they said that he baptized with the power of God then they would legitimize Jesus, who was baptized. If they said that it was through the power of men, then it would denigrate John the Baptist, and the problem was that he was very popular and had a huge following. Everyone thought he was a prophet, maybe the next Elijah, so they were in a quandary. They answered, “We don't know.”
They lied! They knew! In the classic tradition of the Old Testament where the priests and the prophets were often at odds - the priests proclaimed they handed down power through the ages and the prophets proclaimed immediate power from God - we have this encounter between Jesus and these people, these religious leaders. For Jesus, power came from God.
Mark tells the story, and we are at an advantage when we read it because since we know it ends with the death and resurrection of Jesus. We know about his authority, but they didn't and there is some sympathy for them for their lack of understanding. They did know however, that there was something different about Jesus. They understood his authority came from God. They had a problem though; they wanted popularity.
You see, more than pleasing God and telling the truth, they were interested in making sure that they were popular and that everyone was on their side. If it meant agreeing with Jesus or simply saying nothing, they did it. If it meant allowing him to be in the temple, they were willing to do it. They wanted to trick and silence him. More than anything else, they wanted popularity.
My friends, this popularity is a terrible seduction! In the 19th century, the great Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard was always on the side of what he called, “the common man” or “the common person.” He did not mean that in a derogatory sense, he meant the average person. The problem was that those in power didn't want Kierkegaard to get the common man - the average person - on his side.
There were religious powers that didn't like being criticized by Kierkegaard and aligned themselves like “a mob,” to use Kierkegaard's words, and created some degree of oppression and conformity on society and on him. He said, “Nobody these days uses the word ”˜I' for fear of opposing the mob. Everyone is like a ventriloquist, where the mob tells you what to say and you say it.”
In other words, you simply spout what everyone else is thinking, rather than providing honest leadership. He said, “I shall never know the security of being like everybody else.” Kierkegaard defied the mob. My friends, Jesus defied the mob. He defied the oppression of the mob of religious rule. He went into the temple to proclaim the Word of God no matter what.
I often think that popularity is seductive, and sometimes the church gets seduced by its desire to be popular. We want everyone to agree with us. We want to say to the world what we think it wants to hear. We want to abide by the mores and the values of our time in order that we are accepted.
But the seduction of that popularity can often be at the expense of the truth. It can often be at the expense of the Word of God. Jesus makes it abundantly clear that we can't do that. Whether it is in our work, our personal relationships, or decisions made by churches, we don't just go along with the whim and fancy of whatever is popular and acceptable: We should go by that which is right.
There is another side to all of this: honesty and mystery. What is fascinating about this encounter between Jesus and the religious leaders is that they were being dishonest. They knew his authority came from God, but they acted like jackasses. They knew Jesus was the true power - the tiger. They wanted to claim it for themselves by making a lot of noise; Jesus had it because he was the Son of God, but they wanted to be popular and therefore, they couldn't really be honest.
It is like the story I read of a boy called Ken, who was writing an exam in a room with his fellow students. Realizing that Ken was struggling, his teacher came over to him and asked, “How close are you to finding the right answer?”
Ken looked around and said, “I am about two seats away.”
The Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Scribes were two seats away. They knew where the truth was, they knew who the truth was, but they weren't prepared to acknowledge it.
In some ways there is an irony in the Gospel of Mark. On one hand, Jesus wants to keep who he is a secret - we've looked at that before - on the other hand, he wants people to be honest and not trick or silence him. You see, the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Scribes were good people, but they were misguided. They had a notion and an understanding of God and authority and power and truth was theirs, but when they encountered the real thing, they were blinded by it, they simply couldn't see it for what it really was. Jesus is letting it be known that if you really want to know who God is, you have to look at his ministry, and if you want to understand the authority of God, you have to look at his Son.
A number of years ago, Terry Borthwick was writing in Leadership magazine about a time when he got on a plane travelling between Boston and Denver. There were men in black suits with bulging pockets and wires around their ears, wearing dark glasses - a bit like the movie Men in Black. They walked up and down the aisle until everyone was seated, and he thought to himself, “They look like security people. There must be someone famous coming aboard.”
He was sitting near the front of economy class and looked around the curtain, to his great surprise and to some extent, great sense of honour, he saw these men were guarding the former President of the United States, Gerald Ford, who was about to take his seat. Borthwick thought, “I have never met a President, perhaps this is my opportunity to shake a President's hand.” Big mistake! He got up and walked towards the President, the men in black suits held him back. He thought, “How can I possibly meet the President?”
Then he remembered he had attended university with Gerald Ford's son, Mike. He had only met Mike once, but he knew him. So, yelling over the heads of the security team, he said, “President Ford, I just want to let you know, I know your son, Mike.”
Ford, being gracious, said, “Well, in that case, come on over for a moment.” And so, for a couple of minutes before the flight took off, they talked about Mike and college days and what it was like to be a retired President. Borthwick then got up, returned to his sea, buckled in and the flight took off. He said that his year was made. Why? He had talked to the great President because he knew his son!
That, my friends, is what Jesus was getting at. The authority that he had was the authority of the Son of God. The authority that he had to speak in the temple came from his Father. The power that he had to do these things was not passed on from man, it was passed on to him through the power of his heavenly Father.
So, when we are seduced into wondering whether we should please people, let us remember that first of all, we should please God. The true authority in this life does not come from those who make the most noise or who claim some form of human precedent, but for those who are truly at one with the Son. In this life, the greatest thing we can say is that we have pleased God. There is no other foundation for our lives. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.