Teachable Moments?

Luke 20:1-26

My dad has always been an expert… on nearly everything. He reads a lot, listens to people, and shares what he learns, whether it’s about animals, history, health, sports, or life. As a kid, I wasn’t always receptive to these teachable moments, when my dad decided to share his knowledge with me.

One day, my dad suggested that our family play soccer in our backyard. (I had recently started playing soccer, and I loved it. Soccer was fun to play and a sport my dad knew nothing about until then.) That day, my dad decided to be the referee for this family game and eventually made a call that I disagreed with. I told him he made a mistake, but he stuck to it. As we went back and forth, I realized that my dad was right. But I continued to argue my point, because I had already invested so much in the argument and wanted so desperately to know more about my new sport than my dad. Eventually, I convinced him he was wrong, that I knew more than he did.

The Pharisees seem to be in a similar struggle in our reading from Luke 20. They want desperately to be right and to be more powerful than Jesus. They try to trap Jesus and fail. Jesus shares a parable that screams, “I am the Son of God!” But all they recognize is that he thinks they are the evil tenants in his story, and they want to arrest him immediately.

The Truth Jesus brings us is convicting and difficult to hear. We don’t like to hear that we’re desperate and sinful, that we need a Savior, or that we need to obey God’s commands. But if we don’t accept Jesus’ claim that he is the Son of God and receive him as our Savior, our pride is as fragile as my victory with my dad that day. In the end, it will be clear that it was based on a lie. When we resist God’s work of conviction, we short-circuit the work of the Gospel to save and transform us. What difficult truth are we resisting today?