Mark 11:27-33

Jesus Rejects the Temple (4) – Rebuffing the Authority of the Priestly Caste

Mark 11:27-33 – Chief Priests Challenge Jesus’ Authority

²⁷ He came again to Jerusalem.

As he was walking around in the temple,

the chief priests, scribes and senior men came up to him,

²⁸ and said to him, “With whose authority do you do these things?

Who gave you this power to do what you are doing?”

Jesus was questioned by some of the chief priests, scribes, and senior men. These three groups comprised the Jewish governing body, the Sanhedrin. That they came together and placed their question seemed to indicate that they had been summoned to discuss Jesus’ actions on the previous day.

As Mark narrated things, their approach did not appear to have been an effort at dialogue but a direct confrontation. This was probably hardly surprising. Jesus on his part had taken no steps to dialogue with them. Besides, their own sense of honour would have precluded their moving into dialogue with Jesus, the uneducated and presumed illiterate peasant from Galilee.

They appreciated the danger that Jesus posed to them. Their questioning may have been directed to discrediting him before the common people thronging the temple area. They approached him from the angle they well understood themselves: authority. Jesus turned the issue back on them.

²⁹ Jesus said to them, “I shall ask you one question,

and if you should answer me,

then I shall tell you with whose authority I do what I am doing.

³⁰ Answer me!

Was John’s baptism of heavenly or human origin?”

³¹ They discussed among themselves,

“What shall we say?

If we say ‘of heavenly origin’,

he will say ‘Then why did you not believe him?’

³² But if we say, ‘Of human origin …’

In fact, they feared the crowd,

because they all held John as a prophet.

As mentioned earlier in the narrative (9:12-13), John had been understood by many, indeed by Jesus himself, as embodying the role of the prophet Elijah referred to by the prophet Malachi in the last line of the Jewish Scriptures:

Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah

before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.

He will turn the hearts of parents to their children

and the hearts of children to their parents,

so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6)

The Jerusalem elite would have been well aware of this common interpretation of John’s role, even though they did not accept it themselves. However, the menace in the reference would not have gone unnoticed by them. They had not listened to “Elijah”, with the consequence that the land and all they represented would not be spared from God’s curse.

³³ So in answer to Jesus,

they said, “We do not know.”

And Jesus said to them,

“Nor shall I tell you with whose power I do these things.”

If they were unable to recognise or to accept the divine authority behind the mission of John, they would not have recognised the hand of God behind the works of Jesus. Jesus did not bother entering into further dialogue with them. The ignorant one from Galilee had outsmarted the elites from the centre.

Next >> Mark 12:1-12