Fresh from weeping over Jerusalem, Jesus goes into the temple and acts at once: he 45"began to drive out those who sold." The outer court, where non-Jewish worshipers could come and pray, had been taken over by selling, a convenience for pilgrims that crowded out the one space set aside for outsiders to seek God. Jesus names what has happened with two prophets: Isaiah's vision of a house of prayer for all peoples (Isaiah 56:7) and Jeremiah's charge against a temple corrupted from within (Jeremiah 7:11). The space meant to draw the nations has become a marketplace that crowds them out.
Having cleared it, Jesus uses the temple for what it was for, and Luke adds that he was teaching the people and preaching the gospel there (Luke 20:1). The temple is cleared so that the gospel can be preached in it. 47"he was teaching daily in the temple." The response splits along familiar lines. The chief priests, the scribes, and the principal men of the people are seeking to destroy him, while 48"all the people were hanging on his words." The leaders find nothing they can do, restrained by the crowd's devotion to him.
Unable to act directly, they try to undercut him with a question: 2"Tell us by what authority you do these things, or who it is that gave you this authority." The question comes from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders, the three groups that make up the council that will condemn him (Luke 22:66). The question has teeth. Jesus had no credential from any recognized school, and the question is designed to expose that gap in public. Jesus answers with one of his own: 4"was the baptism of John from heaven or from man?" John's baptism was a baptism of repentance (Luke 3:3), which is why believing it would have required the leaders to repent. The trap closes on the questioners. If they credit John's baptism to heaven, they must explain why they did not believe it. If they call it merely human, the people will stone them, since the people are convinced that John was a prophet. They retreat into a non-answer: they did not know where it came from (verse 7).
Jesus' closing line is a mirror held up to their evasion: 8"Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things." He owes no explanation to men who have just shown, in front of the crowd whose opinion they were protecting, that they want whichever answer costs them least. Authority is recognized or refused by people who decided, before the question was asked, whether they were willing to submit to what the answer might require.
Ask what in your own life has become a marketplace where prayer was meant to happen, and clear one small corner of it today. Then answer one honest question honestly, even if the answer costs you something.
Prayer
Father, forgive us the ways we have let your house, whatever form it takes in our lives, become crowded with the ordinary business of getting by. Give us the honesty the chief priests and scribes refused, willing to answer a real question honestly even when the answer costs us. Where your Son's authority has been made plain to us, let us not stall behind we do not know. In Jesus' name, amen.