Authority
Sermon Notes 27th September on Matthew 21:23-32
by Desiree Snyman
Authority
Authority. Who has authority? Why? What is authority? Who gives authority? When is authority appropriate? Most importantly, what is authority for? These questions sit beneath Matthew 21. Jesus has confronted the Temple establishment and is confronted in return: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” It sounds like a question about credentials, but Jesus turns it into a much more confronting question about the nature and function of authority itself.
The writer’s context is important. Matthew knew what it meant for established structures of authority to collapse. The Gospel is traditionally associated with a community connected with Antioch, a place where refugees fled after 70 CE. Their world had been profoundly reshaped by war, the destruction of the Temple, the annihilation of the priesthood and the devastation of Jerusalem. With the temple gone, the priesthood finished, the community were negotiating questions of identity, faith and authority in a radically altered world. Matthew is asking the same question as the chief priests and elders: when familiar structures of authority are shaken, what makes authority legitimate?
The narrative context matters. Jesus has entered Jerusalem in an extraordinary piece of political street theatre. Riding a donkey, he deliberately evokes Zechariah’s vision of a different kind of king (9:9). He enters the Temple and overturns the tables, declaring, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.” The blind and the lame then come to Jesus in the Temple and he heals them. Those who were marginalised are restored to the centre. Jesus leaves Jerusalem and spends the night in Bethany which means the “house of the poor”. The geography itself becomes theological. Jesus moves between the centre of institutional religious power and the place associated with poverty and living on the margins.
When Jesus returns to the Temple in chapter 21, the chief priests and elders ask, “By what authority are you doing these things?” Matthew 21 and 22 are about conflict; there are a succession of confrontations involving chief priests, elders, Pharisees, Herodians and Sadducees. These groups had different interests and theological positions, yet opposition to Jesus creates unlikely alliances. The enemy of my enemy becomes my friend. Their question is about who authorised Jesus. His response asks something deeper: what makes authority legitimate in the first place?
Jesus tells two more vineyard parables. Remember Matthew 20.1-16 was a vineyard parable blaming the victims of oppression. Here in Matthew 21 Jesus tells a parable of two sons of a vineyard owner (verse 28- 32) and the spiral of violence where vineyard tenants murder the vineyard owner’s son (verses 33 – 41). In Matthew 21.28 – 32, a father asks both sons to work in the vineyard. The first refuses but later changes his mind and goes. The second says the right thing, “I go, sir,” but does nothing. For Jewish listeners, the image of two sons inevitably resonates with stories of brothers such as Jacob and Esau. In that ancient story the expected order is reversed. The firstborn Essau does not receive the inheritance and is the ancestor of the Edomites, an enemy of Israel. Jacob, the second son, becomes the bearer of the promise and ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel. Yet Jesus reverses the reversal. Here the first son ultimately does the father’s will. Jesus makes the provocation explicit by pointing towards tax collectors and prostitutes, people occupying the religious and social margins, and declaring that they are entering the kingdom ahead of respectable religious authorities.
The socio-economic context of first century Judaism matters enormously when Jesus begins telling stories about vineyards. For Jesus’ Jewish listeners, vineyards carried powerful scriptural associations. Isaiah 5 describes Israel as God’s vineyard. God expects good fruit but instead finds wild grapes: “he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” Verse eight provides an important interpretive key: “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you.” What is this referring to? Unable to pay taxes and debts, many peasants lost their ancestral land to wealthy urban landowners. The peasants became labourers on the farms they once owned. Vineyards often signalled extreme wealth because land was unproductive for years before yielding a return. Labourers lived in near poverty, growing food between the vines but surrendering part of even this meagre harvest to the landowner. Hungry, dispossessed and exploited, they longed for a Messiah who would overturn this economic order and reverse the fortunes of rich and poor. Land, debt, labour, inheritance, wealth and power are all present when Jesus says, “A man had two sons,” and sends them into the vineyard.
The conflict between Jesus and the various factions within Judaism is complex when seen in the light of historical, narrative, socioeconomic and religious factors. Jesus is engaged in a conflict over authority within an occupied, economically stratified society. The Jerusalem leadership claims institutional authority, but Jesus appeals to the prophetic authority of John and to the actual response of socially disreputable people. Authority is therefore being judged from below, by its response to God's prophetic demand rather than by institutional status. Jesus relocates moral authority from those who possess institutional power to those whose lives actually respond to the demands of justice.
This brings me to Man Ray’s extraordinary 1921 artwork The Gift, or Cadeau. It will help us answer questions on authority. The Gift is an ordinary flatiron with fourteen sharp tacks attached to its base. The intervention is simple but disturbing. The iron retains its identity and appearance, but its function has been inverted. An iron exists to smooth and care for fabric. Man Ray’s iron tears and destroys it. The title deepens the irony because something presented as a gift has become harmful.
Cadeau gives us a powerful image for thinking about authority. Authority is not fundamentally a position. Authority is a function. Spiritual authority exists to serve. Visionary servant leadership emerges from love and seeks the flourishing of others. When religious authority becomes preoccupied with status, institutional preservation or protecting the status quo, it may retain every outward sign of authority while betraying its purpose. The robes, titles, buildings and structures remain, but the iron has begun to tear the cloth. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse should have permanently unsettled any assumption that religious office, ordination or institutional status automatically confers moral authority. in our own diocese one of the findings by the Royal Commission is that we the church were more concerned about preserving our organisation than we were about the victims of abuse who should have been our primary concern. Jesus’ confrontation in the Temple exposes precisely this possibility: “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.” The Temple still looks like the Temple. Religion still looks like religion. Authority still looks like authority. Jesus asks what it is doing and whom it is serving.
The same question can be asked of our institutions. Banks exist to facilitate economic life and serve communities. When profit and accumulation take precedence over the common good, their function becomes inverted. An institution can be extraordinarily successful according to its own measurements while failing the purpose that legitimises it.
The ecological question turns the challenge towards humanity itself. We are not separate from creation. We are creation, within creation, possessing extraordinary power and therefore profound responsibility. When power becomes domination, extraction and exploitation rather than relationship and care, we become like Man Ray’s iron: equipped to nurture life while tearing the fabric of which we ourselves are part.
Artificial intelligence raises the same question. Technology is justified because it serves humanity. Yet we increasingly accommodate human activity to technological systems, while experimental AI agents have demonstrated capacities to circumvent some restrictions placed upon them. Even the everyday CAPTCHA carries an extraordinary irony: a machine requires a human being to prove that they are human before allowing them access. The servant begins determining the conditions under which the one it was created to serve may participate.
We return, then, to the question asked of Jesus: “By what authority are you doing these things?” Perhaps Jesus’ response suggests that this is not quite the right question. The deeper question is not simply, Who gave you authority? It is, What is your authority doing?
Does religious authority liberate or control? Does economic authority serve the common good or accumulate wealth? Does technological authority serve humanity or increasingly require humanity to serve it? Does our extraordinary human power within creation nurture life or consume it? Man Ray’s The Gift leaves us with a deceptively simple question: What are you for?