Saying and Doing (a sermon)

Text: Matthew 21:23-32

If there is one thing that worries me most about my relationship to Christ, it’s how easy it is to merely give lip-service to him. 

Ours is a word-based faith. We believe on the basis of an announcement we call the gospel, an announcement that God has done all that is needed for us to be reconciled to him. Christ has died and risen again. Our sins are atoned for. We are forgiven. 

And the way we enter into this eternal state of grace before God is to believe the announcement, to trust in him whom the announcement is about: Jesus Christ, the crucified one.

Having believed, we then learn to pray. We confess our faith, to ourself and each other. We go to church and sing. We open a Book called the Bible and read it. We listen to it expounded by a preacher. Upon our profession of faith, we are baptized. And echoing Jesus’ words in the words of institution, we remember Jesus’ death in the bread and the cup.

Words, words, words. It seems like a whole lot of words.

But then again, words aren’t the problem, are they? 

God, after all, created the world with words. He spoke, and it was. 

Jesus, the Scripture says, is the Word of God incarnate. 

The law of God—a law we know by means of words—is written by God in the heavens. And all the days of our lives are written in God’s book. 

By our words we will be justified, Jesus tells us. And by our words we will be condemned. 

If we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved, writes the apostle Paul in Romans 10. 

Christianity, if it’s anything at all, is a religion of words. It’s a faith. A belief. And if we prefer to call it a relationship—which, of course, it is—we are quickly forced to admit that it’s a relationship expressed primarily in words. 

In our passage this morning, Jesus is in Jerusalem. The triumphal entry, which the church celebrated on Palm Sunday, has just taken place earlier in the chapter. There Jesus entered the city as a humble king, riding a donkey. He cleared the temple of money changers. He cursed a fig tree, symbol of Israel, for bearing no fruit. And now he is back in the temple courtyard the next day. The people in charge of the temple demand to know where Jesus thinks he got the authority to trash the place the day before. They are the descendants of Levi, not him. On what basis does he get to come into Jerusalem and start criticizing the way things are done in the temple?

“I’ll answer your question,” Jesus replies, “if you answer mine first.” 

Jesus then goes on to ask them what they think about John the Baptist (verse 25). Was he a religious nut? Or did God send him? 

The religious leaders don’t want to answer the question, because their answer would anger the crowd of pilgrims who have come to the city for Passover. Most people, especially those in the countryside, took John for a prophet—but not the priests and elders. If they admitted as much, and denied any divine authority to the preaching and baptizing ministry of John, they’d soon have a riot on their hands. But if they said what they knew the onlookers would want them to say, they’d look like fools because they had never joined the crowds in being baptized by John. 

So the religious leaders refuse to give an answer to Jesus’ question. 

Jesus returns the favor and refuses to answer theirs. 

But then Jesus goes on to give a parable. 

“There was a man who had two sons,” Jesus says (verse 28). This father tells both his sons to go and work in his vineyard. One son says he will go. The other refuses. 

The son who says he will go would clearly appear to be the obedient son to any onlooker who witnessed their conversation. This son does not, however, actually go out into the vineyard and work. This son, Jesus implies, is like the religious leaders who argue with Jesus. They say all the right things, and everyone thinks they are obedient sons, but they don’t actually do the will of God. 

The second son, who refused to obey his father, eventually has a change of heart and gets to work. This son, Jesus implies, is like the tax-collectors and sex-workers. They, too, said no to God. But when John the Baptist came preaching repentance and the coming of the kingdom, they changed their minds and obeyed. They submitted to water baptism, confessing their sins to God and committing—with God’s help—to a change of life. 

This parable, of course, is actually a veiled answer to the religious leaders’ question of Jesus. On what authority does Jesus come sweeping into Jerusalem and flipping over tables in the temple? He comes, for starters, on the authority of John the Baptist. John, after all, pointed people to Jesus. John came preparing the way for the kingdom of God. And Jesus is the kingdom of God, embodied (and veiled) in human flesh. So if answering or refusing the call of John the Baptist means answering or refusing the call of God, then the authority of Jesus’ actions has to be God himself—because Jesus has come on the authority of John.

The religious leaders would undoubtedly have understood what Jesus is saying, as would at least some of the crowd. But it’s all veiled enough that they can’t really react. They have to just be offended and annoyed for the moment—though this exchange will be part of the growing tension that leads ultimately to the murder of Jesus on the cross.

But Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders in our text, I feel, is also a challenge to you and to me. 

Our faith, as I said earlier, is a faith primarily about words. There is a lot of saying-the-right-thing in Christianity. We look askance at those who say something false, foolish, or unbelieving when it comes to matters of the faith. To be orthodox (with a small “o”) in our doctrine means to say right things about God—and that is clearly important. 

But how often do we say the right things about God, only to be like the disobedient son in Jesus’ parable? How often do we call Scripture the Word of God, for example, but then go on to ignore and disobey the very things that it says? 

This week, as we rest in the truth that our redemption is by grace alone through faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone on the cross, let’s not forget that we express that faith with our lives—that we love the God who loves us by our deeds. 

In the most important sense, we who have placed our faith in Christ have responded like the son in Jesus’ parable who went. We, like the tax-collectors and prostitutes, have repented and believed in God’s Word. We are justified by faith in the cross. But now that we are justified and set right with God, let’s go on to completion (as it says in Hebrews 6:1) and incarnate our words with our lives.

Let’s Pray