The sermon text this morning will be eerily familiar to some of you. Jesus has cleared out the temple, dramatizing its future destruction, and now He has set up shop at the heart of Judaism, teaching in the temple courts. The leaders of Israel, the chief priests and scribes, want to take Him down, and they come to Him with one challenge after another in an attempt to discredit Him with the people and regain control of the temple. All this is done before a crowd of people, and that is certainly part of the strategy: They want to humiliate Jesus in public, so that the crowds who are hanging on His words will lose their faith in Him and perhaps even turn against Him.

The challenges come at several specific points. First, the chief priests and scribes and elders question Jesus?Ecredentials for teaching in the temple. Priests and scribes are the teachers of Israel, and part of their task was to evaluate teachers who arise in Israel. Jesus is no priest, and He has no formal training, no PhD in Torah. What gives Him the right to take His stand in the temple and act like an authority? He is unaccredited, so why should anyone listen to what He has to say?

Another line of attack was the effort to make Jesus out to be a political revolutionary. This is a method used very effectively throughout the centuries: When the apostles go throughout Asia Minor preaching the gospel, they are charged with treason because ?They say there is another king?Eand ?they do not conform to our customs.?EIn the centuries that followed, Christians were persecuted for refusing to sacrifice to Caesar, an act that was construed as revolutionary. Long before that, Haman incited the Persian king against the Jews by claiming they were not loyal subjects, as did the persecutors of Daniel. The scribes and chief priests use the same tactic against Jesus, attempting to catch in His words so that they can ?deliver Him to the rule and the authority of the governor.?E

Finally, the Sadducees resort to ridicule. By proposing a complex scenario about a series of sons marrying the same woman, they are trying to show that Jesus?Eteaching on resurrection is an absurdity.

These all, as I say, have the ring of familiarity to them, and that is no accident. Jesus?Ework is unique and once-for-all, but especially in Luke and Acts, the life and sufferings of Jesus provide the pattern for the lives and sufferings of His disciples. Stephen, Peter, James, Paul ?Ethe major characters in Acts live out the life and suffering of Jesus in their lives; their lives are conformed by the Spirit to the pattern of Jesus?E

And we can expect the same kinds of strategies to be used against the church, against our churches in Moscow in particular, and we can expect it all to be played out in public. We have come to see this almost daily in the newspaper: Monday there is a challenge to the credentials and accreditation of New St Andrews College; Tuesday there is a letter claiming that we are a dangerous political group within Moscow; on Wednesday and Thursday someone writes in to ridicule us for believing that God created the world in six days, or for believing that the Bible is the word of God. As our sermon text shows, these tactics are nothing new. They are the standard operating procedure of the enemies of the church.

The responses of Jesus give us an idea of how to respond. Jesus rebuts insincere questions with questions of his own, questions that tie His opponents in knots. He gives an answer to the question about taxation that befuddles his opponents. He quotes from Scripture to refute the reduction offered by the Sadducees. What He does NOT do, what He never does, is back off. Our stance should not be apologetic, but aggressive; we should not play defense, and if we are put on defense we should be looking for opportunities to turn it into an opportunity to play offense.

Of course, unlike Jesus, we are not sinless, and not everything we say should be defended. The scribes and Pharisees could bring no true charges against Jesus, but that is not true of us. One of the central features of our response to all challenges and attacks is open confession of sin.