Thoughts on Luke 20

      Opened up to the beginning of Luke 20 in my GNT just now. This is the passage where the high priests, the scribes, and the elders come and question Jesus, shortly after He tosses the merchants outside the temple for the second time, "by what authority are you doing these things, or who is giving you this authority?" To this Jesus responds with another question, asking them where John's authority came from, God or human beings. They of course, sensing a trap, respond politically, "we don't know," because they were afraid of either the crowd's response, or Jesus' own.
     Thing is, they knew perfectly well where John's authority came from, and Nicodemus in John 3 states this in no uncertain terms because, "No one can do what You are doing unless God is with him." They were neither blind nor ignorant that the only source of Jesus' demonstrations of power could have been God Himself, no matter what they said publicly. They knew and they still actively worked to discredit and destroy Him because He wasn't doing things their way. He wasn't teaching what they considered to be sound, Torah based teaching. And, most grievously, He was calling them out for not following the Spirit of the Torah themselves, but only pretending to.
     Understanding all of this though, this wasn't just Jesus trying to one up them, be clever, or even humiliate them. This was Jesus giving them the chance to turn around and admit the truth publicly. This was Jesus with an outstretched hand saying, "repent and turn away from this path that you're on. Just tell the truth and admit what you already know."
     And with their answer, they slapped that hand away and refused to admit it. It is after this that He tells the story of the deranged tenant vinedressers who beat the servants and murder the son of the landowner who is just trying to collect what he is rightfully owed. Why does He tell this story? He's warning them about what is about to happen to them if they keep going down this path they're on. They do, and it does. Forty years later, the temple is torn to the ground brick by brick, and those Judeans in rebellion are slaughtered in what has been called a Roman holocaust. If we were to take the metaphors of the story as they are, then the armies of the landowner coming and destroying those tenants represent Titus and his legions coming and ending the province of Iudaea and the hypocritical abomination which the temple worship had become.
     All they had to do was turn around and follow what Jesus taught. Had they done so, Rome would have had no need to keep its legions in Iudaea, and would have sent them somewhere like Germania or Britannia where they were more sorely needed. But they refused to give the Owner what He was rightfully owed.