Amazed & Silent (April 20, 2022)
Don’t you just love surfing social media platforms these days? There is a new rudeness, censorship, and an air of accusations. Before you know it, Fact Checker may just remove your image posted with a scripture or worse some folks end up in “Social Media Jail”. Unfortunately, this is a real place. You are out and “they” are in. Today’s passage is a lot like Fact Checkers gone wrong, very wrong!
The religious leaders were always planning questions and plots to trap him.
Trap #1: “By what authority are you doing all these things?” (Vs.20:2)
Trap #2: “Now tell us—is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (20: 22)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch in our OT reading for today, (or out on the pasture) the Israelites are still dividing up their land equally. (Man, this has taken a while.) The problem for them is the very same problem that we are going to deal with in our NT passage.
After everything they have been through, they still don’t know who is in authority and they still don’t believe they are to follow and give their allegiance to ONLY God in worship. An entire community is betraying the Lord and building another idol that will bring down judgment on the whole people. “If you rebel against the Lord today, he will be angry with all of us tomorrow.” (Joshua 21: 18)
So, when we see this group of religious leaders dealing with Jesus, we can see that they have come from a long lineage of “knuckleheads”. To be more precise in my language, they are used to asking tricky questions, demanding answers, and feeling “entitled”.
Jesus once again teaches them with a story or parable. He tells of a man who planted a vineyard and leased it to tenant farmers and moved to another country to live for several years. At the time of the harvest, the owner sent a servant back to collect his share of the crop from the grape harvest. The farmers attacked the servant and beat him up. This happened THREE times to THREE different servants. The owner then sent his heir to the estate, his son. They murdered him!
Here is what Jesus says, “The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.” (Luke 20: 17)
Where does our allegiance belong? “Render to Caesar the taxes due to government, but our allegiance belongs to God!” Why? We are to “give to God what belongs to God”. They knew that Jesus' little parable was about them.
So, they failed to trap Jesus on that day, and it tells us that “they were amazed” and they… BECAME SILENT.!! Speechless!!!
Perhaps, today we can learn a lesson as well about what to do when we are demanding answers and feeling entitled. We want God to answer us but may forget that he is the master of the vineyard, and we are to be his obedient servants and should behave as his adopted children.
Amazed and Silent!
