Verse for the week of September 25th:
Which of the two did the will of his father? They said, ‘The first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.’
(Matthew 21:31)
What a harsh saying of Jesus! He is telling the chief priest and the elders of the people that ahead of them are the tax collectors and prostitutes in terms of entering into the Kingdom of God.
The religious leaders would have been shocked and it would not have sat well with them. Just try to imagine telling a group of the most important religious leaders today that ahead of them in terms of entering into the kingdom are prostitutes and thieves. The phrase that comes to mind is from a sitcom of my youth—Different Strokes. Within this show one of the main characters would look at his brother and say ‘What ya talking about Willis?’ As a way to show surprise at what his brother said. I think that the religious leaders would have said something similar when Jesus told them that tax collectors and prostitutes would enter the kingdom ahead of them. For they would have been shocked at such a thought—for after all how could God allow outsiders and sinners to enter ahead of people who in their own eyes were (or should have been) the apple of God’s eye. How God could not first let in his favorites (or so they thought that they were God’s favorites)?
The reason that Jesus says this is because of the inability of the religious leaders to see what God is doing in their midst through Jesus. This saying about entering the kingdom comes right after the religious leaders are questioning Jesus’ authority which leads Jesus to tell a parable about two sons. The parable tells of two sons who are both asked to go and work in the vineyard. One says he will go, but doesn’t. The other says he will not go, but does eventually go. The question at the end of the parable to the religious leaders is which son did the will of the father. The religious leaders answer, the one who said he would not go, but did. While they answered correctly, what they did not see was that they were more like the son who said he would go, but didn’t. Jesus was trying to get them to see that while they said the right words about God, in reality they were missing out on what God was doing in their midst.
When we read this parable today and hear this saying of Jesus about the tax collectors and prostitutes, how does it speak to us? In what ways does it challenge us in our faith?