Jesus Has the Right to Mess Up My Life

I'd like to get you to turn to Mark chapter 11, where we'll be reading our text from this morning. And we're going to be dealing with a topic that I've called Jesus has the right to mess up my life, or Jesus has the right to mess with my life. And we get that idea from Mark chapter 11, verses 27 to 33. Just a short little incident that happened with Jesus and some of the authorities in his day. Verse 27 of chapter 11.

And they, this is the disciples and Jesus, came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him. And they said to him, by what authority are you doing these things? Or who gave you this authority to do them? Jesus said to them, I will ask you one question.

Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man? Answer me. And they discussed it with one another saying, if we say from heaven, he will say, why then did you not believe him? But shall we say from man?

They were afraid of the people, for they all held that John really was a prophet. So they answered Jesus, we do not know. And Jesus said to them, Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things. In the context of our passage, we have seen Jesus having just come into Jerusalem on his way towards the cross. This is a week before the crucifixion. Jesus has entered as a triumphant king into Jerusalem as people shouted, Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is the one who comes. Blessed is the coming of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of David. The next day, after that triumphal entry, Jesus is overturning tables in the temples. He's chasing people out of the temple of God who had turned the temple of God into a house of robbers, a den of thieves. Jesus, in a couple of days, had caused a massive stir in Jerusalem.

In view of all this, the religious leaders, the chief priests, it says, the scribes and the elders come to him, verse 27, and they ask him, by what authority are you doing these things? By what authority can you do these things? Why do they do this? Well, because they believe they have the power to call so-called prophets to an account, to focus in on what really is their mission, what is their message. They can determine, as these authorities, these spiritual leaders, whether these guys are legitimate or not.

Notice in verse 27 that they come to Jesus as he is walking in the temple. Commentators suggest that this probably means that Jesus is not just having a stroll around, Jesus is walking and he is talking with whoever is willing to listen, and he is sharing and teaching with them everything about God. In other words, Jesus is teaching in the temple. That's why they want to know why people should be listening to what he's saying to them. Jesus has caused a stir in the last few days.

The leaders are perplexed to see Jesus being followed and being listened to. And so they ask him the question that many of our friends and family and neighbours will ask today as well. By what authority can Jesus say these things? Or to put it in our terms, why should I believe what Jesus said? Well, have a look at what unfolds.

Firstly, we see the little red herring. How a question is posed to Jesus without really wanting to hear the answer. The Sanhedrin, which is the name for these religious leaders of the day, they want to run Jesus aground with this question. They want to embarrass Jesus with this question in front of his followers, to show him up as a fraud, someone not to be trusted. If they could make it plain to the people, if they could trip Jesus up with this question, then they could say that he doesn't have a legitimate mission from God, that he wasn't ordained by God, and so that they could tell these people not to listen to him.

By what authority do you do these things? But earlier in the Gospel of Mark, and we read this in the other Gospel accounts as well, these leaders already knew what Jesus was about. They were familiar with Jesus as a person. They had already decided, however, in their hearts not to receive his teaching. That was the position that they came to Jesus with.

They have decided not to believe in Jesus. So they are determined not to really ascertain whether they have the correct understanding in order to believe him or not, they come to find a flaw. They come to find a flaw in his authority. Why did they not accept that teaching? Why did they not believe in Jesus?

For the same reason anyone else will reject the teaching of Jesus. Because it makes them uncomfortable. You see, the religious teachers, they stood the same chance that any one of us have when we come to Jesus. We stand the chance to lose friends. We stand the chance to lose status.

We stand the chance to lose wealth. Because if Jesus was right about everything that he was saying, if the kingdom of God was really coming, then God was about to do something very new, very radical in Jesus. But they had good lives associated with the way that they had grown up. They had their traditions to uphold. They were the gatekeepers of their religion.

And if Jesus was messing up that religion, well, they were going to lose everything, potentially. In order to become chief priests and rabbis, remember, they had to be disciples of older rabbis, and Jesus was telling them, follow me, after these people had already spent significant parts of their lives. It's like saying to someone like myself, you've done five years, six years of theological study, start again. I don't want to start again. I've worked really hard for this.

I'm already respected. Follow me, Jesus says, and they say, fat chance. So they designed this question to trip Jesus up. Who has given you permission to teach these things? What are your credentials?

This morning, we may hear these words and we may be wrestling with the question over Jesus' authority. You may not realise it yet, but you are wrestling with Jesus' authority. You may confess to be a Christian. You may believe that Christians should follow Jesus even. But don't be surprised to realise this morning, or perhaps later this week, that you may not be following him at all.

Jesus' teaching is hard. Jesus' teaching is binary, as sacrilegious as that word is now. It is yes or no. It is you follow or you don't. And if you aren't following Christ, I can almost guarantee I know the inner dialogue of your heart, and it will go something the same way as these Pharisees had in their hearts.

Why should I believe what Jesus has told me? But I want to tell you that what is happening there is called throwing a red herring. It's a red herring, which means it's an expression to throw the red herring is to put something before someone that distracts them from a very important or relevant question. It's used to steer conversations or situations towards a false conclusion. But really, a red herring type of question or situation has got nothing to do with the situation at hand, the topic that is being discussed.

You can say, why is the sky blue? And then a red herring question is, the ground is brown. You know, it sounds important, but it's got nothing to do with the issue at hand. The Pharisees ask Jesus what authority he has to arrive in Jerusalem as a king, to drive out the corruption in God's temple, the question of Jesus' authority is the red herring itself. While they pretend to care about who Jesus is, they really just want to take the focus off their unrepentant hearts.

Here's the truth. Anytime we don't follow Christ, we're using the same red herring tactic. Instead of focusing on the reason of why I don't want to do what he's telling me, I'll instead question the legitimacy of his authority to say what he said. Does Jesus really expect me to remain a virgin until marriage in this day and age? We know better now.

Does Jesus really expect me to give all my spare time to serve other Christians in a church? Surely he doesn't. There's some that may do, people that are weird, people that don't have social lives. Can he really ask me to forgive a person who has been so rude to me? I can forgive lesser things, but this thing, that was just so mean.

Can he expect me to forgive 70 times seven? How can Jesus demand all these things from me? But of course, if he is Lord, if he is King, and you believe in your heart that he is Lord, nothing he demands will ever be questioned by you. Nothing he asks of you will ever be enough too much. So we have to beware of the little red herring.

We question Jesus' authority without ever really wanting to know the answer. Well, let's see what Jesus' response to this tactic of the red herring is. Point number two, you're playing with the lion's tail. Jesus is smarter than you. We see Jesus flipping this whole situation on its head because he takes their question and he brings another question to them.

Instead of answering directly, he asked them, what are your thoughts concerning the baptism of John? Was that baptism from heaven or from men? In other words, Jesus asked, by what authority? You're questioning my authority. By what authority did John preach?

By what authority did he baptise? Now at first glance, it seems that Jesus is trying to avoid the problem, that he's throwing a red herring himself. Well, I don't want to deal with that. Let's focus on this question. Instead of answering that question, he is trying to be subversive, trying to dodge.

But what we're actually seeing here is a very common rabbinical tradition of intellectual jousting through rhetorical questions. In that day and age, this is how you really showed yourself to be a great theological thinker. Someone might ask you something, not in this sort of way, but it's an example. What is two plus two, rabbi? And instead of saying four, the rabbi would show how smart he is by saying, what is the square root of 16?

He knows the answer is four, but he shows that he not only understands it, he has an even better way to ask that question that shows how intelligent he is. So by putting this question back on them, Jesus is asking them to go right back to where his ministry began. Remember, it started with being baptised by John. John began getting the soil ready for Jesus' ministry. And John did that by preaching a message of what?

Repentance. Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, he said. And people were flocking to John in this time. People were coming to focus on God again, and so his preaching was preparing this soil for Jesus' words to hit people in their hearts and their heads.

Jesus knows the red herring question. He sees their unrepentance and he says, listen, the problem here isn't my authority. The problem is your arrogance, your stubbornness, your pride. Even when John was around, he tells him, you were rejecting his preaching. In fact, you asked him the same question.

Where is your authority, John? In other words, the problem isn't the person of Jesus. It's the message of Jesus and what he's demanding. Repent, believe, and follow me. Jesus and John preached the same message.

They introduced the same kingdom. And we know that the leaders in Jerusalem asked John the same questions. John 1:19, if you go there, you'll see that they approached John with almost the exact same line of questioning. This is what John 1:19 says, when the Jews of Jerusalem, this is these people, sent priests and Levites to ask John who he was. He, who is John, did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, saying, I am not the Christ.

They were asking, why are you saying these things? Are you the Messiah? Are you claiming to be the Messiah? He says, no, I'm not. But they want to understand whether they should reject him for saying those things as a so-called Messiah.

Now Jesus says, what is the result of your inquiries? And they're stuck. On the one hand, if they say that the baptism, the teaching of John was from heaven as Jesus posed it, they would shame themselves because Jesus would immediately turn it back to them and say, why didn't you believe him? Why did you not repent and believe? Why were you not ready for the kingdom to come when I came onto the stage?

Why didn't you believe that the kingdom had arrived? On the other hand, if they say the baptism came from man, in other words, his teaching and his baptism was an invention of his own, then they would expose themselves to be completely, spiritually bankrupt. The whole Jewish world had been turned upside down by John the Baptist's ministry. We can't understand just how significant his ministry was. And if they had said publicly in that moment, no, John didn't, he didn't really understand, this was not from God, when everyone else knew it was from God, it would reveal their hearts and how bankrupt they were spiritually.

And so brilliantly, Jesus wedges them into this dilemma. Jesus is then justified in refusing to give them an answer to their arrogant demand because he knows all along they don't really want the answer. We don't know, they say sheepishly. And Jesus says, well, then I won't tell you either. In Africa, there's a saying that when you do something really dumb, you are playing with the lion's tail.

And we can understand the imagery there, can't we? A sleeping lion may look lazy. A sleeping lion may look disinterested and harmless. He may not care about a soft little nibble on the tail every now and then, or a few playful swats at his tail. That won't wake him from his slumber.

But watch out. Keep playing with that tail, and you'll wake him up. And the lion is a powerful beast. And you will always come off second best. When we throw red herrings around, and we come up with all sorts of reasons not to live under the authority of Jesus Christ, watch out.

Jesus is much smarter than you. He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows your secret motives, which you try to hide behind know-it-all statements and virtue signalling forgeries. And well, he knows them so well. He sees them so clearly that they all just unravel in light of his brilliance.

He is smarter than you. He knows you better than you know yourself. He holds the essence of all truths, the Bible says, in his hand. Our excuses are like water pistols against the bazooka of his all-seeing gaze. Be careful when you try to play with the lion's tail.

One day, that lion will raise its head. Thirdly, he's the Lord of all, but you will only find the truth if you search for it. Jesus frustrates the Jewish leaders and he tells them, I'm not gonna play your game. You don't deserve to be told because it's plain that you are not searching for the truth. The question we have this morning that we have to answer is, what do you make of Jesus?

What do you make of Jesus and his message? Now, may be confronted for the first time this morning. You may be new to being at a church. Perhaps you've been coming to a church for a long time, however. It doesn't really matter because the question remains the same.

Everyone is on a level playing field. Because we see even in Jesus' day, most religious of all religious people had to answer this question and even the farmer, the most basic of the lowest rung of society had to answer that question. What authority does Jesus have for me to believe? C. S.

Lewis wrote in his book, Mere Christianity, that we cannot remain neutral or pretend ignorance about Jesus. You have to do something with him. He writes, I try to prevent, he says, anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him, which is, I'm ready to accept Jesus is a great moral teacher. He's a good man, good bloke. I'd have a beer with him.

They don't accept his claim to be God. He says that's the one thing you cannot say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing that Jesus said, for example, I forgive your sins. Who can say that? What sort of man says that?

That would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg, or else he's the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else he is a madman or worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.

But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about him being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. Friends, do we really need more proof of his authority before we really make him the Lord of our lives? The Greek philosopher Socrates taught for forty years. His disciple, Plato, taught for another fifty years.

Aristotle, that came after Plato, taught for forty years. But the teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, taught for three and a half years. Yet the words he left in this world after just those three years outweighs the combined years of teaching from the greatest of philosophers. Think about governments, civil authorities, multinational corporations, align their missions, their core values along what Jesus taught. Jesus painted no pictures, and yet some of the world's finest artists, Raphael, Michelangelo, da Vinci, they received their greatest inspiration from him.

Jesus wrote no poetry, but Dante, Milton, Morrison wrote some of the world's greatest poems in his honour. Jesus composed no music, and still Haydn, Handel, Beethoven and Bach reached the heights of musical perfection in the music they composed in his praise. It's not about how smart Jesus was, however. It's not about how perceptive he was. Despite all those things, it's what he did at the end of that three and a half year ministry that has made him undeniably my Lord.

You see, it was only a matter of days after this very confrontation in Mark 11 that Jesus was dead. Days. Beaten, dead by crucifixion. At the time, it seemed like an arrogant rebel who was preaching a new world order had now received his just desserts. And the question is, where is his authority now?

If he truly was the Son of God, why would God the Father let him die? But once again, Jesus was gonna have the last say. Once again, Jesus would turn everything on its head. Sure, God taking him off the cross would have been an absolute miracle. But what is more impressive, saving a man's life or bringing him back from the dead?

And what's more powerful, securing the well-being of one good and righteous man, or rescuing a world full of God-hating people. And what would be more amazing, a man who loudly proclaims in the streets that he is God or a God who quietly becomes man to serve that man by dying for him on the cross. You can question his authority. You can question his motives. You can question his authenticity, but you cannot, you cannot remain neutral about him.

Or some people will try to shut him up as a liar and some people will try to ignore him by labelling him a lunatic. Today, I wanna tell you that you are called to fall at the feet of him who is Lord. Either his death was a meaningless, pitiful end to an ordinary life, or it was a profoundly meaningful crowning event for the one who stands as King over everything. And I wanna tell you, I believe him when he says that one day, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that he is Lord. I believe him when he says that.

This morning, take Jesus at his word. And so for some of us sitting here, you won't see Jesus as Lord because you aren't searching for the truth. You are content with the red herrings. You're content living the forgery. Today, however, if you do not know that Jesus is the King of your life and you realise by God's grace that you have wandered away from the message of the gospel, which is our only good news, recognise this morning that he came to earth for you, that he took your place on the cross bearing the punishment of sin, your sin on your behalf.

And through that, he has become your Saviour. And friend, because he is your Saviour, he can be. He should be your Lord. If you are a Christian here this morning and you know this, can I encourage you that in your heart, in your life, that you will be giving him more of the authority that he needs, that he deserves as the Lord? Push back against those areas, those red herrings that does Jesus really expect this?

Should I really give all of this over to him? Get rid of the things that interfere with the life of living to his glory. Why? Because he deserves it. You profess that he is Lord, live like it.

Jesus Christ has authority over all our lives, and today he demands that we listen and that we obey. Let's pray. Father, as we come into this place to have your word wash over us, we marvel at the perceptiveness of our hearts. Lord, we are rebels in the same way that they were rebels in your day. We are rebels in the same way that we try to take the attention off our unrepentant hearts.

And we feel theologise or we philosophise or we simply rationalise things away. Help us to see with the brilliant clarity that you can give us today to understand that you are the Lord of lords, the King of Kings, and that we must bow to you. You do not have to bow to us. Forgive us, Lord, for the areas in our life where we are still resistant. Help us to be soft towards your prompting this morning, and teach us by your Spirit to give over those areas where we still hold on so tightly.

We ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.