Regarding the authority of Jesus, just what authority does He have over my life, over our lives? Speaking with, you know, a bunch of young people about it is a serious thing because why should we believe? Why should we obey what Jesus said? Socrates was a Greek philosopher before Jesus' time, very well known, very well respected, taught for forty years as a philosopher. Then came Plato who taught for fifty years.
Then Aristotle who taught for another forty years as well. This was their careers, forty years of being in universities and so on. But Jesus taught for three and a half years. Yet the influence of Christ's ministry infinitely transcends the impact that was left behind by the combined years of teaching from these three great philosophers. Jesus painted no pictures, yet some of the finest artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci received their inspiration from Him.
Jesus wrote no poetry, but Dante, Milton, Laurissen, and scores of the world's greatest poets were inspired by Him. Jesus composed no music. Still, Haydn, Handel, Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn reached their highest perfection of melody in the music they composed in His praise. Jesus did not rule a nation nor was He a CEO of a company, yet governments and corporations use His teachings on love and respect as the core values of their institutions. It seems that almost every sphere of humanity has been touched by this humble carpenter of Nazareth.
How is it that a man like Jesus with a humble background like He had could bring about so much influence in just three and a half years of ministry? Was it because His teachings were forced down people's throats? Manipulated them into believing a particular worldview? No. It seems as though people came from far and wide to voluntarily listen to Him speak.
Were His teachings attractive, easy on the ear, promoting wealth and easy living? No. He spoke about paying your taxes to authorities, being a good citizen, choosing a simple easy life, a down to earth lifestyle. And what were His motives? Did He teach perhaps for prestige, for status, for honour, hoping to gain powerful friends along the way who could make Him rich?
No. He said of Himself that He had no home, and that He survived on the hospitality of strangers and friends. Indeed, it seems as though none of these scenarios can explain why He had so much influence and why He did what He did. This morning we're going to be looking at a certain point in Jesus' career where He was asked this question, what authority do you have? Why should we listen to you?
Why should we be influenced by you? As a person who teaches, the truth is you must have sort of expertise, of knowledge to gain the respect of your listeners. A teacher is listened to, and Nikki might be able to attest to this. A teacher is listened to because they know more than you. Or they are an expert in the field and you want to understand what they understand.
It means, if you are to listen to a teacher that they have a particular knowledge in their respective field. And so establishing that authority is critical if you are to be taken seriously. So we're going to look at a moment where people ask, why should we listen to you? Please, if you have your Bibles with you, let's turn to Mark 11. Mark 11:27-33.
They arrived again in Jerusalem. This is the disciples of Jesus. And while Jesus was walking in the temple courts, the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders came to Him. By what authority are you doing these things? They asked.
And who gave you authority to do this? Jesus replied, I will ask you one question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John's baptism, was it from heaven or from men? Tell me.
They discussed it amongst themselves and said, if we say from heaven, He will ask, then why didn't you believe? But if we say from men, they feared the people for everyone held that John really was a prophet. So they answered Jesus, we don't know. Jesus said, neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things. Here we have Jesus being questioned, interrogated by the Sanhedrin, by the religious rulers of the day.
You see they claim to have the power to call prophets to an account concerning their mission, concerning their reason for teaching. They came to Jesus when, and the Bible says, He was walking in the temple court in verse 27. Now we can understand from historical evidence that this walking in the temple wasn't just He was having an afternoon stroll. This was a form of teaching, a teaching method. Many philosophers and teachers would actually walk while talking.
And so we can, I think, accurately interpret this to mean that Jesus was teaching in the temple? Jesus was walking around moving from group to group teaching. And so it makes sense then that the elders came to Him and said, by what authority are you doing these things? Meaning, saying these things, teaching these things. These leaders were perplexed to see Jesus being followed and being listened to.
And therefore, they came to Him with this question. By what authority? By what authority are you saying these things? Who gave you this authority? Let's have a look now at how this unfolds.
The first thing we see is how they designed to run Jesus aground and to embarrass Him with this question. If they could make it plain to the people that Jesus didn't have a legitimate mission. If Jesus wasn't sent by God, then He wasn't ordained by God even though He may have seemed well qualified, even though He may have seemed very intelligent if Jesus didn't have a legitimate reason or mission, God ordained mission, they should not listen to Him. So they were resolved not to receive His teaching, and they determined to find some sort of flaw in His commissioning. Why listen to someone if he doesn't have a reason for us to listen to?
And they would have liked to have concluded that Jesus' mission was invalid and untrue. Why was that? Because, and we know these guys, because it was making them uncomfortable. It was making them uncomfortable. They had too much at stake.
They had honour and status. They had wealth. Pharisees were wealthy people in their time. It was making them uncomfortable. They could have lost everything, their friends, their status, if they had accepted that Jesus Christ was their Lord.
And so they designed this question to run Jesus aground, to trip Him up. You know, it's really difficult for us because we can't say, well, these guys are so terrible. But if I was to look at myself, and I've shared this with the school this week as well. If we are to look at ourselves, we try to make up these same excuses. Why listen to God when He's telling me to do this?
We try to look for some escape clause. Oh, we feel God wants me to do this, but maybe I'm too old to do it. Maybe I'm too young to do this. Or God is nudging me in this direction, but He hasn't told me exactly why He's doing it. So I'll just hold out until I know more.
We question the authority of God over our lives. We might throw out these sort of questions. Just throw out a question. It's not answered. We're not gonna make a move. We throw out, like these guys, a red herring.
Well, let's see what Jesus' response to this red herring is. We see Jesus turning the whole situation on its head. He answers a question by giving a question. Now we might think this is completely like a smokescreen. He's trying to just avoid the situation, you know, when you get asked a question and you don't know what it is.
Like, lecturer of our Bible college, he used to say if we ask him a question, if he didn't know it, he'd ask someone else to answer the question or something like that. So he gives an answer via a question. He says He asked him, what are your thoughts concerning the baptism of John? Was it from heaven or from men? By what authority, in other words, did John preach?
By what authority did he baptise and gather disciples? Answer me, He says. Deal fairly and honestly and give a categorical answer one way or the other. So we might think, well Jesus is trying to avoid the issue here. But again, if we understand the rabbinical tradition, this was actually a master class in rabbinical debating.
What used to happen with the rabbis is they would ask these questions of each other, but instead of answering it outright, they would try to show how much they knew by giving another question on top of that. So for example, some rabbi might ask, what is two plus two? Now the answer is four, obviously. But the other rabbi might ask, well, what is the square root of 16? So he asked another question which answers the question, which shows that he actually understands what the answer is.
But he sort of dares the other person to also understand what the square root of 16 is. So by putting this question back to them, he asked them to go right back to where it all began. Right back to John the Baptist. Before Jesus was around, God was preparing the people. John was preparing the way for Jesus.
And so Jesus was saying, listen guys, the problem here isn't My authority. It's not My authority, but it's your stubbornness and your pride. Even when John was around, he says, before he was murdered, you were rejecting his preaching. You were rejecting his call of repentance over your lives. And you asked the same questions of John.
John, where is your authority? Who has told you to do this? In fact, we see the same question being asked of him in John 1:19. It says, when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask John who he was, he did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, I am not the Christ. We see them again sending their scouts, sending their people to say, who are you exactly?
How can you be saying these things? Now says Jesus, what was the result of your inquiries about him? What did you discover? Now they're stuck. They thought they're gonna trip Jesus up, and He just flips it back on them.
If they say the baptism of John was from heaven, well, then what he had to say was worth listening to. What he had to say, the call to repentance, was a genuine call to repentance. They couldn't bear what would happen if they were to say that he was sent from God? On the other hand, if they say the baptism is from just a normal man, in other words, he wasn't sent from God, then his teaching and his baptisms were inventions of their own. But then again, they would expose themselves to be completely devoid of what the real spiritual needs of the people were, the people that they were meant to be leading.
In fact, if they had said that this guy wasn't the real deal, they would have been in physical danger. Their lives may have been taken because so many people knew that John had come from God. And so now Jesus brings them to this dilemma. Firstly, they are completely flabbergasted and baffled by this question and therefore they are forced into a dishonourable retreat. They can't go one way or the other so they say we don't know.
They pretend ignorance even though this was already a massive blow to their egos. They say, okay, we're not gonna answer this one. We also see that Christ comes off with honour and respect in light of this. He shows that He is the better rabbi. He shows that He has authority, wisdom, intellect that surpasses all of these fantastic academics.
And Jesus is justified then in refusing to give them an answer to this arrogant question. Jesus says this is not worth My time. I won't tell you by what authority I'm doing these things, Jesus says. They don't deserve to be told because it was plain that they weren't searching for the truth. They were searching for an escape clause.
And Jesus didn't need to tell them because His works which He had performed right in front of them showed plainly that He had authority from God. In fact, Jesus was only a few days away from being crucified. This was the beginning of the crucifixion story of the passion of Christ. This was a few days before He would rise from the dead to show the real authority that God had given Him. Power even over death.
The question that we needed to ask this week of our schoolies, the question that we asked this morning is what do we make of Jesus and His message? For some of the school leaders, it was the first time they've heard this message. The first time that they've heard about Jesus and His authority. But for some of us sitting in church for a long time, this might also be another good wake up call. What do you make of Jesus this morning?
What authority did Jesus have for us to claim to be His follower? If you follow a teacher, you follow him because he has authority. If you claim to be a Christian, you follow Jesus. You don't follow church. You don't follow a green book.
You follow Jesus Christ. Maybe you've never thought about it that way. You may have experienced that internal struggle that the religious leaders felt when they asked Jesus that question. You may have that frustrating feeling inside you of wanting to believe, but at the same time fighting so hard to keep your head down because what you have right now is too good. It feels too good.
C. S. Lewis wrote in his book Mere Christianity. He wrote this: I try to prevent anyone saying that really foolish thing that people often say about Jesus. They say, I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.
Lewis says, that is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said, for example, I forgive your sins, would not be a great moral teacher. In fact, he would either be a lunatic on level with a man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut Him up for a fool, can spit at Him, you can kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about Him being just a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He never intended to. That's what C.
S. Lewis wrote. Friends, we don't need any more authority. The evidence is accurate and if the accounts are indeed trustworthy, then the miracles that He performed, the teaching that He gave, the sacrificial death that He died, all point to the divine. Some people might try to shut Him up as a liar, as a lunatic.
They might try to ignore Him, but every single human being is called to accept Him as Lord. A matter of days after this particular confrontation, Jesus was crucified as some sort of liar, as a lunatic perhaps. To those people that did it, Jesus was dead, gone in the ground. It seemed like this arrogant rebel who preached revolution and a new world order had now received His just desserts. Where is His authority now?
He was dead. If He truly was the Son of God, how could His father let Him die? Why not perform a miracle by taking Him off the cross? They asked. But as per usual, Jesus would have the last say.
Sure, God the cross. Didn't perform that miracle. But what is more impressive? Saving a man's life or bringing him back from the dead. And what is more powerful, securing the health and the well-being of one good man or rescuing a world full of despicable God-hating people like us?
What is more powerful? And what is more amazing? A man who claims to be God to gain followers or a God who became man to serve people by dying for him. Love Him or hate Him, Jesus will force you to have an opinion of Him. You can question His authority, you can question His motives, you can question His authenticity, but you cannot ever remain neutral.
Either His death was a meaningless and pitiful end to an ordinary life or it was a profoundly meaningful and priceless crowning for the one who will one day be declared King of the whole earth. The Bible says that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess either with great joy, great happiness, or with fear that Jesus Christ is Lord. This morning, after this week, I want us to again take Jesus at His word, to take Jesus at His actions, that He came to earth for us. He lived and He died for us. Our hearts yearn for Him to be our Saviour.
Our hearts hunger for Him to be our Saviour, and let's give Him more authority over our lives. All of it. All of it. He deserves it. Jesus has authority over our lives.