The 21st chapter of Matthew is set in an atmosphere of unrest, controversies and confusion. It is the week Jesus dies on the cross. Our attention is drawn to issues of authority, self perception, obedience, repentance and God’s grace. The question is - who is in charge. That is why Jesus is confronted by the chief priests and elders who want to know by what authority he has entered Jerusalem in the fashion of the expected Messiah, thrown out the moneychangers from the temple, taught and healed. In good rabbinic style, Jesus answers their question by posing his own question. His question involves their understanding of the authority of John the Baptist. If the leaders answer that John the Baptist was God’s messenger, then they open themselves to the charge of ignoring God’s will and of being unrepentant. If they say that John’s authority was from human beings, then they risk offending the crowd that believed John was a prophet. Either way, they are condemned. And so they plead ignorance. What is at stake here? The truth or their power and position?

Then Jesus tells a simple story. There was a father who had two sons. The father asked them to go out and work in the vineyard. One of the sons impudently replies, “No! I won’t go.” But a little later, the father looks up from what he is doing and there is his son working out in the vineyard.

His other son, when asked to work, says agreeably, “Father, nothing would please me more than to go out and work in the vineyard for you.”

Two hours later, the polite son is still lying on the couch watching MTV.

Now think hard, says Jesus, which son do you think pleased the father more? The one who said no, but then went into action or the one who politely said yes but then did nothing?

So, is the issue authority or how you respond to God’s call to repent and God’s invitation to work among God’s people. The story indicates there are two kinds of responses to God: that of the person who has said no but who repents and whose life says yes; and that of the person who says yes but whose life says no. The religious leaders know the necessity of repentance; they know God accepts the penitent. Their resistance to John and to Jesus is not due to lack of knowledge but to lack of trust. They did not believe the truth about themselves and the truth about God. Jesus had not jumped through their religious hoops, he did not fit their image of the Messiah. Jesus shocks them even more in saying , that those who do believe, regardless of past behavior, even tax collectors and harlots enter the kingdom of God first. The outsiders are first, the insiders are last. Religious profiling by God’s grace.

Please note that Jesus does not exclude the religious leaders; he does not finally shut the door of God’s love in their faces. Rather, Jesus invites them to hear again John’s message and Jesus’ message, see themselves in a new light, repent and believe.

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. God’s grace at work in our world.

Flannery O’Connor wrote many stories in her life time. She was a woman who lived in the South and wrote during the forties, fifties, and sixties. Her story “Revelation” is like a mirror held up to our human nature and deals with some of the issues we have in our Scripture for this morning.
The story ‘s main character is Mrs. Turpin, a southern woman who along with her husband owns a small farm. A cow has kicked Mr. Turpin, so he and his wife are at the doctor’s office, having his ulcerated leg checked out.

Mrs. Turpin is a woman who is very self satisfied. She thanks Jesus for having made her who she is, and not someone else. She is for cleanliness, hard work, and her philosophy of life is to help anyone who is in need. That is what she says outloud, but in her heart and mind, she takes people apart, she thinks there is nothing anyone could tell her about people who are unlike her that she doesn’t know already. Everyone she meets, immediately gets pigeonholed. She is a bigot. In the night, she occupies herself naming all the classes of people, and then ranking them as to where they fit in her social scale. Some she ranks above herself, others below.

Mrs. Turpin has a hard time entering into a conversation with anyone whom she considers of a lower class than herself, but chats amiably with those she considers worthy.

One of the persons in the waiting room is a college age girl, who seems to be disconnected from everyone. She reads a book, and often scowls at Mrs. Turpin. Mrs. Turpin can’t figure out why this young woman seems to dislike her.

As the conversation flows in the waiting room, Mrs. Turpin is so overtaken by her own goodness that she vocalizes outloud. “If it’s one thing I am, it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, “Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!”

At that precise moment, the college girl hurls the book she has been reading at Mrs. Turpin’s head and attacks her. The girl is quickly subdued but before she is taken to the hospital she implants a new image in Mrs. Turpin’s heart and soul. She whispers at her “Go back to hades where you came from, you old wart hog.”

Mrs. Turpin can’t let go of this shocking attack on her. She ponders and tosses around this new image of who she is. Even when she gets home and tries to rest, the instant she is flat on her back, the image of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face and horns coming out behind its ears snorts in her head. She tries to deny to herself that this is a true picture of who she is. But her denial has no force, even to herself. This new image has been imprinted on Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman.

Not able to rest, Mrs. Turpin gets up and goes to work. She walks to the pig pen and starts to hose down the pigs. She demands of the hogs how she is like them. Then she shouts in agony at the absent girl, “How am I like a wart-hog?” She is in torment all afternoon.

Finally, at sunset, she has a vision: she sees a vast swinging bridge is extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls are rumbling toward heaven. There are whole companies of classes of people that she in her mind has always segregated from each other, all in white robes. There are whole battalions of those she considers freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession is a tribe of people who are just like her, They are marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they have always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. She notes, they alone are on key. Yet she can see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues are being burned away. In a few moments the vision fades, but Mrs. Turpin is totally immobilized by it.

It is fully dark when she slowly returns to her home. In the woods around her the invisible cricket chorus has struck up, but what she hears are the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. Come on, let’s join that chorus!

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. God’s grace at work in our world.

Amen.