Why Christ Could Not Make His Authority Known to the Pharisees

“And when He was come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came unto Him as He was teaching, and said, By what authority doest Thou these things? and who gave Thee this authority? And Jesus answered and said unto them, I also will ask you one thing, which if ye tell Me, I in like wise will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men? And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; He will say unto us, Why did ye not then believe him? But if we shall say, Of men; we fear the people; for all hold John as a prophet. And they answered Jesus, and said, We cannot tell. And He said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things.”—Matthew xxi. 23-27.

The passage: When Jesus came into the temple and was teaching, the chief priests and elders asked Him by what authority He did these things and who gave Him that authority. He answered that He would ask them one thing, and if they told Him, He would tell them by what authority He acted: was John’s baptism from heaven or from men? They reasoned among themselves. If they said “from heaven,” He would ask why they had not believed John. If they said “of men,” they feared the people, who all held John to be a prophet. So they answered, “We cannot tell,” and He said He would not tell them by what authority He did these things.

One could be sure that the chief priests and elders would “reason with themselves” just as the Evangelist says. The simple question, “What is the fact, or what do we believe it to be?”, was not the one that would occur to them. Part of their religion was to avoid impolitic words or acts that might have mischievous consequences. They will have learnt to think straightforwardness and truthfulness not only inconvenient but, in a certain sense, wrong. Their first duty, as they saw it, was to keep up the credit of the Law and of those who interpreted and administered it. Endangering the people’s faith in themselves was their highest notion of sin, for who could tell what might follow if their disciples saw them commit a false step? I know of no more fearful sign of decay in a nation’s heart than this. It appears when teachers not only dare not speak the truth but make a principle of not speaking it, and have persuaded themselves that evasion is a merit and that there is a better way of serving the God of Truth than by being true. Then we may be sure that society has become radically corrupt and that some great change is at hand.

I. The Gospel’s account of the priests’ and scribes’ motives bears the plainest mark of genuineness, and it gives us a glimpse of the secret life of that time without which the events would be unintelligible. Even so, we may believe that they were really uncertain whether John’s mission was from Heaven or from men. They deceived themselves in two ways. They searched for language that would hide their thoughts, and yet often expressed very nearly what they meant. I say very nearly, because John’s words to their own class, “O generation of vipers, who hath bidden you to flee from the wrath to come?”, must sometimes have come back to them. Then a conviction they could not gainsay would follow: “He who spoke that had his commission from Heaven, not from men.” An inward voice will have told them so, and had they heeded it they could have given our Lord a direct answer. But it was part of their disease that they did not heed it and did not think they ought to. They had rules for deciding whether a man who claimed to bring a message from God was an authorized messenger. They expected him to show signs of his mission, which they, as students of the Prophets, could recognize at once.

Whatever faith they had was faith in their own power to apply these tests, and in the impossibility of the unlearned multitude applying them. They doubtless differed among themselves over whether the right signs were present in John’s case, and the same man’s mind may often have changed. At one moment the Rabbi would be struck by some correspondence he had not noticed. A light coming from he knew not where would seem to illuminate the page and show that the teacher with the leathern girdle might have been sent to him. Then he would be ashamed of a conclusion for which so little tangible evidence could be offered, and afraid to think that in his own day, before his own eyes, there had been a witness of the Divine presence.

Such shifts of feeling might seem to justify even men of a less evasive temper in saying, “We cannot tell.” They might even congratulate themselves on their diffidence. They had not merely been skilful in avoiding a possible future mischief; they had been cautious and modest in not deciding a point on which rash, foolish men were ready to pronounce at once.

II. “The multitude counted John for a prophet.” But was the multitude not liable to be deceived, and continually the prey of impostors? We would certainly say so of every age and country, and the New Testament writers say so of that age and country in particular. They speak of Judas and Theudas as examples of a class of men who kept rising up, each claiming to be a teacher, an inspired man, a Messiah or Christ. They tempted the people into rebellion and madness, and sometimes suffered with their victims, as deceived as any of them, and sometimes deserted them. The Jewish mob regarded such men as prophets. If they were mistaken in one case, why not in another? What did they know of the marks of a holy man? What skill had they in penetrating the dark passages of the Divine mind and finding differences or correspondences? They were always at the mercy of some sudden, false, violent impression, so what did their testimony signify? And what wise man would judge a teacher’s claims by counting heads and seeing whether he had a majority?

It was easy to argue this way, and not easy to find the flaw in the argument. Yet every learned doctor, once he had proved his point to his own satisfaction, will have been haunted by a thought like this: “It is very strange that people from cities, from the country, from the seaside, women, publicans, soldiers, brought up in utterly different circumstances, should have been moved at once by the same impulse. It is strange that a man who held out no definite hope of freedom from the Roman yoke or from the oppression of the rich, who threatened judgment, spoke harshly, denounced sin and counselled repentance, should draw more people into the wilderness than the preachers of sedition. It is strange, above all, that we could not resist the current but were carried along, going ourselves to hear the new teacher, and some of us even submitting to that humiliating ceremony meant only for Gentile proselytes.” Such reflections will have come to them again and again with a disturbing force that no rules could explain or reduce. The result was greater vagueness about what they should believe, and a deeper assurance that there was something they ought to believe.

III. What way out was there of this contradiction? What could help them tell the multitude’s true instinct from its habit of being led away by lies? John had said to them, “Bring forth fruits meet for repentance; and think not to say unto yourselves, ‘We have Abraham to our father:’ for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Might they not have needed these words? Were they deceptive? Did the Pharisees not know, actually know, that they were not deceptive, but brought long-cherished deceptions of their own into the light? What if John were an impostor? Then the more they purged their minds of impostures, the surer they would be to detect him, and there could be no danger in that course. Someone had found them out, and they knew it. Someone acquainted with the secrets of their hearts had revealed them. They were saying within themselves, “We have Abraham to our father,” while they had no likeness to Abraham. They were wrapping themselves in comfortable security while feeling inwardly hollow. They exulted in professing faith in an unseen God without believing in that unseen God. John said: “Repent! Turn round to Him Whom you say you believe in. Act as if you did believe in Him, as if He knew you and cared for you and wished you to be true, honest men. If you have greater knowledge than the vulgar, use it. If you have studied the Law and the Prophets more than others, remember that every sentence in them is a declaration of God to man, and a call to men not to hide their counsels deep from God. Remember that all the Law and Prophets are addressed not to Gentiles but to Jews, to men in the Covenant, speaking to them of their sins and unbelief and calling them to turn to Him from Whom they are turning away.” My brethren, the Pharisees had no call whatever to settle John’s claim before they received this message as meant for themselves. If these things were true, it did not matter to them whether the speaker was a liar. Nor did it matter how far the multitude’s judgment of him was to be trusted. If the multitude listened because he laid bare their sins and deceptions, they could not be wrong. If they listened because he showed them the source of their sins and the way out, they were doing a safe thing, whether or not they could prove by chapter and verse that he had a right to be heard. The chapter and verse told them, so far as they entered into it, the same thing he was telling them, and his instructions, so far as they were obeyed, made chapter and verse shine as never before. What more did they want? What better evidence could they have had that the Book they were taught to revere sanctioned him?

IV. So the Pharisees and the multitude had a common starting-point. Both had this test of John’s truth, and both might use it or reject it. If they rejected it, we may be sure they could not profit by any other. An angel from Heaven saying, “This is a true prophet,” would have availed nothing, for the angel would have had to prove his own commission, and to their hearts rather than their eyes. If their hearts clung to the falsehood or pride that made them impervious to light, his proofs would be wasted. But suppose this first step was taken. Suppose a Pharisee honestly confessed, “I have been deceiving myself. I have substituted belief in a belief for belief in God. I have claimed to be a child of Abraham instead of claiming a child’s privilege, which is to know God and trust Him.” Suppose he wanted a truer, healthier state of mind and heard the call to repentance as meant for himself and not for others. He might then, I think, find that the Prophets had given him hints by which to identify the Baptist as one of themselves. If, in this new state of feeling, he turned to the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, I do not think the mere outward match of “a voice crying in the wilderness” would chiefly occupy him. It would only lead him to ask whether the cry that voice uttered was really John’s. And when he read, “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,” I cannot help thinking he would recognize the very substance of the doctrine that had gone home to his heart, with the more certainty and satisfaction because its form was so different. He would say: “The stern man with the leathern girdle told us, the religious men, to do the very thing he told the publicans and harlots to do. He did not treat us as better than they; he seemed to consider us worse; he made me know I was worse. Surely this was exalting the valleys and laying the hills low. I never felt the truth or beauty of Isaiah’s discourse till now. The natural image was striking and seemed a worthy preparation for some Divine appearance, yet I used to feel a kind of exaggeration in it. I did not see how the reality could match the symbol. Now I know in myself what it is to be cast down from a height where I looked on everyone beneath me as crawling ants, and to feel myself one of those ants, no better than the meanest. And I know what it is, feeling so, to discover that each of these creatures, I among them, has in it a capacity for a divine elevation and glory I never dreamed of. Surely the Prophet’s comparison is not overstrained but feeble and cold! What change in nature can be an image of this change in the lord of nature, Man; of the levelling that goes on in him, and of the exaltation he feels is possible for him!” Then the other part of the passage will also have taken on new meaning: “The Glory of the Lord shall be revealed.” John had spoken of One Whose fan was in His hand, Who would purge His floor, gather His wheat into His garner and burn up the chaff, and Who would baptize with the Holy Ghost and fire. This was a different idea of the glory of the Lord from any the Scribe had held before. But how it harmonized with the previous sentence, as his inward discoveries now interpreted it! It was just such a revelation he needed: of One Who could purify him and purify Society from its root, burn up the dross in him and in it, and give both a new life. One Who could do that must be the King his countrymen and he were looking for. He must be that Righteous Lord of Whose day or manifestation the Prophets were continually speaking, always connecting it with the sins and redemption of the nation and the world.

V. Here were signs of correspondence between the mind of the Prophets and the mind of John the Baptist that were worth all the signs the Pharisee had looked for so diligently. One can imagine that some of the signs he had thought decisive now looked far less so, and that he sometimes missed them altogether. He may have found less distinct chronological order in the Prophets than he had supposed, more mingling of times and seasons, and more difficulty in telling whether any of them spoke of what would happen in his own age or of events reserved for later generations. But I suspect that the awakened inquirer, instead of being discouraged, will have gained the greatest help from this. He will have found that what he needed and was to seek was an Eternal Kingdom, a Kingdom of God. Its manifestation might differ from one age to another and come more mightily into view at one time, but it is the same yesterday, today and for ever, and is really about all. When it shines out in its greatest brightness and fulness, it can be entered and truly seen only by those whose eyes have been purged, who have been stripped of pride and self-sufficiency and made to feel that their right and share in it is the same as that of every vagabond and outcast. Everyone is a stranger to it who will not be humbled, and no one is who will.

VI. My brethren, this is what makes the words of my text and the whole history of John the Baptist so instructive for us, for the lesson is eternally true. Our Lord did not arbitrarily refuse to tell the Pharisees His authority unless they said whether they believed in John’s mission. He refused to tell them what they could not understand except on a previous condition. Were they still the proud, contemptuous, self-exalting men John had denounced? Then they could not know what Christ’s authority was or enter into its meaning, however divinely accurate the definition. Had they listened to John, felt that they needed cleansing as much as any Gentile and that God must cleanse them, and received the call to repentance as the best, most comforting, most divine of messages, for them as much as for the publican? Then they were in a condition to be taught about that mysterious government over heart and will which Christ carries on, and could feel something of the freedom, universality and penetrating quality of His royal grace. Every prophet came proclaiming that valleys were to be exalted and mountains and hills made low, because every prophet witnessed to a divine, eternal, invisible kingdom that claims all as its subjects and refuses its blessings to none who do not choose to be without them. The greatest of the Prophets spoke most fully of the abasement of the proud and the exaltation of the beggar because he could speak most fully of a King Who had come into the world to be mocked, spat on and cast out as a blasphemer, and yet to baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire.

VII. That last of the old race of prophets was to open a dispensation in which the least was to be greater than he. Strange that it should be so! We, the ministers of the New Covenant, cowards as we are, mostly reeds shaken by the wind or men in soft garments who like kings’ houses better than the wilderness, rebuking no Herod and offending no Herodias, we are declared greater than the brave, true preacher of righteousness who prepared Christ’s way. And it must be so. Those who speak of One exalted to give repentance and remission of sins must be greater than he who only preached the baptism of repentance for remission of sins. Those who can say, “The King has come, and has died and risen and ascended, and is with us always,” must be greater than the man who said, “One is coming after me Who was before me.” Those who can say, “He is baptizing with the Spirit,” must be greater than the man who said, “He shall baptize with the Spirit.” Greater, that is, in power and in weight of responsibility, however much poorer and feebler in purpose and action. Shall the time not come when God will make us understand our calling and willing to fulfil it, or else silence us and raise up faithful witnesses in our place? Is the time not at hand, or even come, when He Himself will exalt the valleys and level the mountains? Every kind of pride, lay and ecclesiastical, commercial and religious, will be trampled down, the rags that covered it torn off and its nakedness exposed. Everyone who in weakness, ignorance and blindness has turned to God and trusted in Him will have His likeness and be satisfied with it. Yes, brethren, the cry “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” will yet be heard through the palaces and hovels of our land. And God will make the lofty as well as the lowly understand whether that voice is from Heaven or of men. It will come not with evidences drawn up to suit the taste of the world’s dogmatists, but with a demonstration to the consciences of wayfarers, convincing them by crushing them. It will bid us cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils, and expect the glory of the Lord to be revealed, which all flesh shall see however it may shrink from the sight, and in which all spirits that have waited for it shall find their own glory, life and joy.