Sermon Title

There is an old Jewish witticism in which someone asks a rabbi, “Why do rabbis always answer a question with another question?” The rabbi replies, “Why shouldn’t a rabbi answer a question with another question?”

Perhaps you have been asked a different question: If you could sit down for a meal with anyone, living or dead, who would you choose? Some of us might choose a family member whose stories we wish we had heard more fully. Some might choose a person whose courage changed the world. We might come to that table with a long list of questions.

Commentator Charles Campbell recalls watching a television interview in which a guest was asked that very question. Without hesitation, the guest said he would like to interview Jesus. Campbell’s reaction was that such a meeting might not go quite as the guest imagined. Jesus might ask the questions. Jesus might unsettle everything the guest thought was settled. Jesus might say, “Come, follow me,” and leave the guest wondering what that invitation would require.

That is something we discover again in today’s reading. A question is asked, but Jesus does not offer the kind of answer his questioners expect. Instead, he asks a question of his own. Then he tells a story that invites everyone listening, including us, to consider the distance between what we say and what we do.

Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem. He has entered the city, and he has disrupted the activity in the temple courts. Now the chief priests and elders ask him, “By what authority are you doing these things?”

It is a reasonable question. The temple was central to the religious life of the people, and its leaders had real responsibilities. Someone had arrived and turned things upside down. They wanted to know who had given him the right to act as he did.

We know more about Jesus than those leaders knew in that moment. That can make it tempting to stand at a comfortable distance from them, certain that we would have recognized what God was doing. Yet the Gospel is not inviting us to congratulate ourselves for knowing how the story turns out. It is inviting us to listen.

Andrew McGowan reminds us that this scene is part of the movement toward the cross and resurrection. It is not simply a timeless argument between Jesus and a set of religious authorities. There is urgency here, and there is danger. When we forget that, we risk turning the people in the story into caricatures. Christians have too often done that in ways that foster contempt for Jewish people and Jewish faith.

We need to be clear: Jesus, John, the chief priests, the elders, and the people listening were all part of the Jewish world in which this conversation took place. The conflict in this passage is not a reason for Christians to claim that Judaism was rejected or that Jewish people failed to understand God. Such claims have caused great harm. The question before us is not what was wrong with somebody else’s faith. The question is how people entrusted with responsibility respond when truth asks something difficult of them. That is a question for the church too.

McGowan points out that Matthew takes the priesthood and the temple seriously. Their calling matters. That is why their response matters. Jesus is not asking us to dismiss the leaders as though they had nothing to offer. He is confronting a particular failure to act on what they might have been able to discern.

When the leaders ask Jesus about his authority, he answers with another question: Did John’s baptism come from heaven, or was it merely human?

They consider their options. If they say it came from heaven, Jesus can ask why they did not believe John. If they say it was merely human, they fear the response of the crowd, who regarded John as a prophet. So they answer, “We do not know.”

I wonder whether some of us can recognize that moment. Not because we face the same circumstances, but because we know what it is to hesitate when an honest answer might cost us something. Perhaps it might change a relationship. Perhaps it might ask us to acknowledge a mistake. Perhaps it might mean admitting that someone we had dismissed had something important to teach us.

Jesus then tells a parable about two children. A parent asks each of them to go and work in the vineyard. The first says no, but later changes their mind and goes. The second says yes, but never goes. Which one did the will of the parent?

The answer seems obvious. The first one did. The first child’s words were not promising, but their actions changed. The second child said the right thing, but did not follow through.

Then Jesus brings the story close to those listening. People whom the religious leaders had dismissed responded to John’s call. They changed course. The leaders saw this happening, yet did not change their minds.

It would be easy to turn that into another story about good people and bad people. But the parable will not let us settle there. The first child is not someone who got everything right from the beginning. The first child changed. And the second child is not beyond hope. The very act of telling the parable leaves open the possibility that, having heard it, a person might yet walk into the vineyard.

Eunyung Lim reminds us that Matthew’s first audience heard this story after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, in the aftermath of war and profound loss. They knew what it meant for familiar leadership and institutions to be gone. In that setting, Jesus’ words would have carried grief as well as challenge. The leaders in the story might have chosen another path. Their response was not inevitable.

That matters for us. If the parable were only a verdict on people who lived long ago, we could listen and move on. But if it asks what we might choose now, we have to stay with it a little longer.

Charlotte Cleghorn suggests that rather than pointing our fingers at the chief priests and elders, we might ask where we resist change. Where do we want to keep things as they are because the familiar feels safer? Where do we hear a call to do something difficult and answer with agreeable words, hoping those words will be enough?

These are uncomfortable questions. They are also hopeful ones, because Jesus seems to believe that people can change. The first child does change. Those who responded to John do change. We do not have to be defined forever by our first answer. There is grace in the chance to turn, and there is responsibility in what we do next.

Today, as we mark Truth & Reconciliation Sunday, this parable asks something particular of the church. We know that churches were involved in the residential school system. We know that words spoken about love and care did not prevent terrible harm. We cannot hear a story about saying yes while failing to act and imagine that it has nothing to say to us.

At the same time, we should resist the temptation to assign ourselves the role of the first child too quickly. It would be comforting to say that the church has acknowledged the harm, has begun to learn, and is now doing the work. But that is not a judgment we can make simply because we have held a service, spoken a prayer, or expressed good intentions. Reconciliation asks for attention over time. It asks whether our actions match our words, and whether we are willing to listen when Indigenous people tell us they do not.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered 94 Calls to Action. Call to Action 21 calls upon the federal government to provide sustainable funding for existing and new Aboriginal healing centres. It names the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual harms caused by residential schools, and it identifies healing centres in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories as a priority.

That is a specific call. It does not ask us only to feel sorrow, important though sorrow may be. It asks us to recognize that healing requires lasting resources and that people harmed by the residential school system must have access to support. The call is directed to the federal government, but it gives us something to consider as citizens and as a church community. Will we learn why this support matters? Will we pay attention to what has and has not been done? Will we listen to Indigenous communities about the forms of healing they seek, rather than assuming we already know?

There may be work close to home as well. We can ask whose voices shape our understanding of this history. We can examine what we have been taught and what we have overlooked. We can consider whether our relationships are built on listening and respect, or on our wish to feel that we have done enough.

None of that can be accomplished in a single Sunday. Healing cannot be rushed to fit our desire for a hopeful ending. Yet neither does the size of the work excuse us from taking a step. The first child in the parable did not begin with a perfect answer. They began by changing their mind and going into the vineyard.

Perhaps that is where we are invited to begin again. We can come before God without pretending that our intentions alone have made things right. We can ask for humility when we would rather defend ourselves, patience when we want a quick result, and courage when what we learn calls us to act. We can remember that reconciliation is not something the church offers as a gift to others. It is work we must enter honestly, with a willingness to be changed.

N. T. Wright asks not only where we have been like the second child, saying yes to God while going another way, but what followers of Jesus might do today to challenge the powers of the world. That is a searching question. In today’s passage, authority is not merely a matter of who has the standing to speak. It is bound up with what happens when a call from God reaches us and we must decide whether to respond.

So perhaps we leave with the question Jesus placed before his listeners: Which son did the will of the father?

And perhaps we hear other questions beneath it: Which son are we? Did we make it to the vineyard? What will we do when we get up from here?

We may not have every answer. We may still have much to learn. But we can listen, we can change, and we can take the next faithful step. May God give us the grace to do more than say yes. May God help us live it, in our care for one another, in our commitment to truth, and in the patient work of reconciliation.

Amen.