The chief priests wanted to put Jesus on the spot, asking him “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” (Matthew 21:23). It’s a classic ploy, trying to turn the tables on Jesus. You want him struggling to answer your difficult questions, instead of you struggling to answer his. You want him trying to justify his actions, instead of you trying to justify yours.

Alas, their strategy didn’t work as well as they hoped. (To be fair, I’ve never had much success at outsmarting Jesus, either.) In this instance, Jesus turned the argument right back on them, asking whether they thought John’s ministry of baptism was from God, or just a human project that John had dreamed up (21:24-25).

It wasn’t a question they wanted to answer. They could see that if they said that it was a genuine movement of God, they’d be in trouble for not following it; but if they said it was a mere human phenomenon, they’d be in trouble with the common people who all regarded John as a genuine prophet. So they opted to say, “We do not know” (21:25-26).

Yet surely they knew quite well what they thought about it. They just didn’t want to say they actually thought. They didn’t want to say that they considered themselves to be honest and true, but they thought that John was a fake and that Jesus was a fake. They didn’t want to say that – even though that’s what they really thought. So in the moment when they were trying to think of themselves as honest and true, they didn’t go with the honest and true answer: instead, they came up with a response that was fake. Oops …

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All our fake answers stand exposed before you, O Lord, and all our efforts to put you on the defensive just show how little we qualify as honest and true. Teach us to set ourselves in humility before you, and grant us the grace to live in repentance instead of arrogance.