Introduction
Changing your mind can be difficult enough when the decision only affects you. It becomes considerably harder when other people have been following your lead.
What happens when you have publicly defended a position, taught it to others, or built a reputation around it? What happens when reconsidering would mean acknowledging that someone you dismissed saw something you missed?
At that point, there is more at stake than whether you are right. There is your credibility, your authority, and the uncomfortable question of what people will think if you admit that you were wrong.
This week, Jesus tells a remarkably short parable about two children and a request from their father. We can recognize the situation immediately. One refuses but eventually goes. The other agrees but never follows through.
But Jesus tells this story in the temple, in the middle of a confrontation with people whose authority he has just challenged. The question of changing one’s mind is becoming dangerous.
And the people who most need to reconsider are the people accustomed to telling everyone else what faithfulness looks like.
Narrative Context
Last week, we were in a vineyard, listening to workers complain about the landowner’s generosity. This week, we are back in a vineyard, but a great deal has happened between these two stories.
Let’s get caught up.
Immediately after last week’s parable, Jesus again tells the disciples that he will suffer, be killed, and be raised. This time, he specifically names the chief priests and scribes as participants in his condemnation.
Then the mother of James and John asks for places of honor for her sons. While Jesus is describing the suffering ahead, they are still negotiating their positions of greatness and prominence. Jesus responds by describing greatness through service and offering his own life as the pattern.
Before reaching Jerusalem, Jesus also heals two blind men whom the crowd has tried to silence. Already, questions of authority, status, and whose voices deserve attention are gathering around him. The disciples need this teaching as much as anyone else.
Then comes the entry into Jerusalem that we associate with Palm Sunday.
Jesus enters the temple, overturns tables, and interrupts its commerce. He also heals people there, while children acclaim him as the son of David. The chief priests and scribes are angry. After spending the night in Bethany, Jesus returns to the city, encounters the fruitless fig tree, and enters the temple again.
That is where our reading begins.
The question about his authority has a very immediate context. Jesus has entered the space these leaders oversee and acted as though he has the authority to judge what happens there. Now he is back, teaching.
We should allow their question to carry that weight. Religious leaders do have responsibilities for the communities and practices entrusted to them. Asking about authority is understandable. Just think about if another pastor or religious leader entered your sanctuary and started taking things out of it, teaching, and holding court with his own followers present. I don’t think their reaction is out of the norm.
They are questioning him from a place of rightful authority as stewards of the temple. But that responsibility also calls for discernment. Alongside the disruption, there have been healings. There is something here that deserves their attention. What will they do when they encounter evidence that the authority of this person they are rightly questioning comes from God? Can they reconsider their judgment without treating that reconsideration as a surrender of their own responsibility?
This encounter also begins an extended confrontation. The following parables, the questions about taxes and resurrection, and the dispute over the greatest commandment belong to the larger temple sequence. Jesus does not leave the temple until Matthew 24:1. By the end of chapter 21, the desire to arrest him is explicit.
The conflict is moving toward the death Jesus has already foretold.
Why John the Baptist?
Jesus responds to their question by asking about John’s baptism.
John has been announcing repentance and calling for lives that bear its fruit since chapter 3. He also baptized Jesus, despite his initial hesitation, after Jesus connected that baptism with fulfilling righteousness. Their ministries have been connected from the beginning.
But John’s story also reminds us what can happen when prophetic authority confronts established power. By this point, Herod has had him killed. Matthew tells us that Herod had feared the crowd because they regarded John as a prophet, and the same concern now appears in the temple leaders’ deliberations. That echo gives the scene a threatening undertone. Public opinion can restrain powerful people without changing their hearts.
There is another connection worth remembering. John himself had questions about Jesus. From prison, he sent disciples to ask whether Jesus was the one they were awaiting. Jesus directed them toward what they could hear and see: healing, restoration, and good news for the poor.
Questions are not automatically faithlessness.
But the temple leaders’ discussion takes a different direction. They consider what each possible answer will cost them. Acknowledging John’s authority would expose their failure to believe him. Denying it would provoke the crowd.
Their uncertainty is presented as a strategy for avoiding accountability.
Answers from a Place of Authority
The parable gives us very little information about either child.
The first refuses the father’s request but later changes his mind and goes. The second agrees to go but never does. We do not know what prompted either response. Jesus simply asks which child did the father’s will, and the leaders answer correctly.
They know that agreeing to do the work is different from doing it.
But then Jesus brings them back to John. Tax collectors and prostitutes believed him. The leaders did not. And even after seeing others respond, they did not reconsider.
This is where the question of authority becomes critical.
The chief priests and elders have recognized authority. They are responsible for the temple and for guiding the people in faithfulness. John does not hold their position. He is a wilderness preacher whose authority they have not acknowledged. Yet Jesus asks them to consider whether God was speaking through him.
If they say yes, they have to admit that John was right and they failed to listen. More than that, the tax collectors and prostitutes recognized something that they, the religious leaders, did not.
That is a difficult admission for people whose role is to guide everyone else. They would have to receive instruction from someone they had dismissed. They would have to acknowledge that people they regarded as sinners had responded more faithfully than they had.
But denying John’s authority also puts their standing at risk. The crowd regards him as a prophet. Rejecting him publicly could undermine their credibility with the very people they are supposed to lead.
Either answer seems to cost them authority.
So they say that they do not know.
Matthew lets us hear their deliberation before they give that answer. They are weighing what each response will do to their standing. The question of whether John came from God gets caught up in the question of what acknowledging him would mean for them.
And that is why the parable matters here.
The first child has to change his response in order to do the father’s will. His initial refusal does not prevent him from going into the vineyard. But he cannot go while insisting on maintaining that refusal.
The leaders have been given that same opportunity. They did not believe John, but they have seen others respond. They could reconsider. What seems to stand in their way is the cost of admitting that they need to.
The second child exposes another part of the problem. These leaders have committed themselves to serving God. They have said “yes.” That is the calling behind their authority. But their commitment requires them to respond when God’s work comes through someone outside their own leadership.
We do not need to assign the leaders neatly to one child or the other. Together, the two children make the challenge clear: an earlier refusal can be changed, and a stated commitment still needs to become action.
The leaders know this. They have already given Jesus the correct answer.
Now, will they do it?
Their responsibility to discern John’s authority is real. But protecting their own authority has become a reason to avoid that responsibility. They are so concerned about what an answer might cost them that they choose an answer that asks nothing of them.
Jesus will not let that stand as faithfulness. They can reconsider without abandoning their calling. In fact, reconsidering may be exactly what their calling requires.
Matthew’s Community and Ours
Why is Matthew telling this story to his own people?
This is more than a historical account of a confrontation that happened years earlier. Matthew is placing this conversation before a community that must also discern how to respond to God. The people hearing his Gospel have their own leaders, their own conflicts, and their own reasons to worry about what a faithful response might cost.
As we have considered in previous weeks, I suspect Matthew is trying to hold together people who are struggling over their community’s identity and future. Some may fear losing traditions through which they have known God. Others may find their faithfulness questioned because they do not fit established expectations. Those responsible for leading such a community would have plenty of reasons to choose their words carefully.
They would also have plenty of reasons to say nothing at all.
Before making that connection, though, we need to address a history of interpretation that has allowed the church to avoid it. This parable has been read as a story of Israel being left behind and the church taking its place: one people failed to respond, while another did the father’s will.
That reading turns a confrontation with particular leaders into a judgment against an entire people. Jesus is speaking to the chief priests and elders. The tax collectors and prostitutes he names are not presented as gentile replacements for the Jewish people. The argument takes place within Israel’s life.
And when the church identifies itself as the child who did the father’s will, we can stop hearing the question. We become the people who already answered correctly. The failure must belong to someone else.
But Matthew’s own narrative gives us little reason for that confidence. The disciples have just been caught up in a dispute about greatness and position. They need to learn how to exercise authority, too. Following Jesus has not freed them from concern about their own standing.
I suspect Matthew’s community needed to hear this confrontation precisely because the temptation to protect oneself always exists within the church.
We know that temptation.
We say that we care about the poor, that all are welcome, that we seek peace, and that every person bears God’s image. Those declarations are important. But then a situation arises that asks something particular of us, and the conversation changes.
Who will be upset if we speak? Who might leave? What will this cost us? How will people interpret it? Can we find language that commits us to as little as possible?
These questions can reflect real responsibilities. Leaders should consider how their words and actions affect the people entrusted to them. The temple leaders’ responsibility was real, and so is ours.
But concern about consequences can gradually become the only thing we consider. We can spend so much time anticipating everyone’s response that we never make one ourselves.
That is where we enter into quietism. We continue affirming our convictions in general while avoiding the situations in which those convictions would require us to speak or act.
We may never openly refuse the work. We may keep saying all the right things about it. Yet the work remains undone.
Matthew’s telling of this story asks the church to examine that possibility in its own life. Where have we confused protecting our standing with fulfilling our calling? Where has careful discernment become a way of postponing a response? What have we already seen that should cause us to reconsider?
The first child gives us hope here. An earlier refusal does not have to determine the next response. Neither does a history of saying the right things without following through.
We can acknowledge that we have been afraid. We can admit that we have avoided a conversation or failed to act. We can listen again to people whose experiences we have dismissed.
By God’s grace, we can change our minds and go into the vineyard.
Preaching Possibility
Changing our Response and Action
A guiding question might be: Where has our concern about how people will respond kept us from responding faithfully ourselves?
That question gives a sermon room to consider the pressures on a congregation without pretending that faithful decisions are easy. There may be real disagreement and real costs. But there are also neighbors living with the consequences of our silence.
The promise of the parable is that our previous response does not have to be our final one. We can reconsider. We can speak. We can begin doing the work of God’s faithful people.
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Micah Krey 
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