Jesus And The Agnostics - Mark 11:27-33 Series

And that’s not all. There’s something else Jesus wants to accomplish here. These men think Jesus is on trial to prove whether or not he has authority from God for what he’s doing. But whenever someone puts Jesus on trial, those people end up being the ones on trial, and it’s no different here. Jesus wants to put these men on trial and raise the question of whether they have authority from God or not. He wants to expose whether or not they are worthy to be followed. Yesterday he called them a den of robbers—now he needs to justify that accusation. This is a showdown. Jesus isn’t just trying to survive their trap. He’s not playing defense. In an honor shame culture like this, where nothing in more important than honor in the eyes of the community, Jesus is going to make this a battle to the death. It’s Jesus vs. the Sanhedrin, and one of them is going to walk away utterly discredited.

But at this point, it really does seem like they’ve got Jesus on the ropes. If they are trying to discredit Jesus, you have to hand it to them—this is a masterful away to do it. If they just walked up to him and said, “You don’t have the authority to do this,” that wouldn’t have the impact of Jesus himself admitting to something that made him lose face. By asking this question, now they’ve put Jesus in a spot where no matter what he says, they’ll be able to use his own words against him. But if he just refuses to answer, that would speak volumes too.

So Jesus needs to carefully respond to their question, he needs to defend his words and actions, he needs to expose their motives, and he needs to put them on trial and build a case against them before all the people. How is Jesus going to accomplish all that?

How would you do it? I know how I would do it. I would preach one sermon on who Jesus is, another sermon on Jesus’ authority, then another sermon or two on their various sins and bad doctrines. As for their motives, I don’t know what I would do there. I could try a line of questioning to see if I could tease it out somehow, but really, if someone is determined to hide his true motives, there really isn’t much you can do.

Jesus’ Question

So how does Jesus respond?

29 Jesus replied, "I will ask you one question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

What is that? Is Jesus dodging the question? No. Look what he says: “…I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things.” Jesus has no problem publicly answering this question. He commits to answer it as soon as they answer one question from him.

I love it that Jesus does this. They ask him about his authority, and his first response is to assert his authority. Now he’s the teacher questioning them. The highest authorities in the nation are suddenly on trial before the uncredentialed, non-ordained Galilean carpenter.

He’s interrogating them, but he lets them know up front exactly how many questions he’s going to ask.

29 … "I will ask you one question.”

Just one? You’re going to accomplish everything you need to accomplish in just one question? Yep. Normally, if you’re dealing with someone who has bad motives that they want to keep secret, it takes an extensive line of skilled questioning to expose that. So Jesus, are you sure you don’t want to leave the option open for a couple follow-up questions just in case? “No, just one question is all I’ll need.” “But what if they don’t respond the right way?” Doesn’t matter. One, single question will do the job no matter how they respond to it.