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Holy Tuesday | Holy Week Day 3
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On Holy Tuesday, Jesus went face to face with the religious leaders — and what happened next has been called "the great unmasking." In this episode, I walk through Jesus' confrontation with the Pharisees, what it reveals about hypocrisy, and why Holy Tuesday is the perfect day to ask: am I genuinely following Jesus, or just going through the motions?
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Transcript
Introduction to Holy Tuesday Series
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, friends, and welcome back to Verity Podcast's Holy Week series. Today is Holy Tuesday. To follow along with this series, be sure to download your Holy Week guide FeliciaMasonheimer.com under our free resources.
Questioning Jesus's Authority
00:00:18
Speaker
Let's jump right into the text for today, which is Mark 11, 27 through 28. This is Jesus. He's been talking and teaching. And here's what it says.
00:00:31
Speaker
And they came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple area, the chief priests and scribes and the elders came to him and began saying to him, by what authority are you doing these things? Or who gave you this authority to do these things?
00:00:46
Speaker
I'm going to pause there. I would encourage you to read through the entire interaction that Jesus has with the Pharisees. But to summarize, Jesus asks them a question, and he challenges them to say whether John the Baptist's authority came from God or from man. And the Pharisees can't answer because they know they're trapped. They either have to admit that God gave John his authority and they didn't believe him, or say that The men, the the mob, the people gave John his authority. And if they say that, the people might get angry and they're afraid of the
Hypocrisy of Jewish Leaders
00:01:21
Speaker
mob.
00:01:21
Speaker
And so they don't answer him at all. And this interaction represents a series of of different conversations Jesus has, um what we believe on Holy Tuesday. So the day after he cleanses the temple. And one scholar ah talks about this as a great unmasking.
00:01:39
Speaker
So after cleanses, cleanses the temple of the hypocrisy, he begins to unmask the hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders themselves by showing them for who they really are.
00:01:52
Speaker
Now, these leaders are supposed to be the pastors, the elders, the teachers of the community, of the people of God. They're the supposed to be the purest of the pure, the smartest of the smart, the holiest of the holy.
Confronting Hypocrisy
00:02:06
Speaker
They're supposed to be the people who would recognize the Messiah when he comes, but instead they're trying to kill the Messiah because they think that he upsets their plans and their alliances and their hope for peace with Rome. They want to preserve their system instead of being open to God's system. And so Jesus is unmasking all of their hypocrisy.
00:02:31
Speaker
And in Matthew 24 and 25, he consistently confronts them with the truth of God's words. And he's he's going at it so hard that they begin to expedite their plans to kill him.
00:02:47
Speaker
This is a series of passages that really shows us that Jesus wants us to face lies and face inconsistencies in our life. And as we get closer and closer to Resurrection Day, this is something to think about. Yesterday I said, let's focus on cleansing our hearts. Today let's focus on facing these lies and inconsistencies. Jesus wasn't afraid to raise his voice to save us.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yes, he's about to lay down his body a little later this week, but right now he's raising his voice to say, this is wrong. This is not how you live. This is not God's way.
Hypocrisy and Repentance
00:03:21
Speaker
The way of God is righteousness and peace, and I'm going to lead you there.
00:03:27
Speaker
He confronts hypocrisy, which is saying one thing and living another way. All of us at some point in our Christian lives will be hypocrites. We can't help it. We're sinners. But the antidote to hypocrisy, Matt Chandler says, is repentance. If you feel like you are a hypocrite, you've not been living in alignment with God, all you have to do is repent and turn around.
00:03:51
Speaker
If you go to Mark 13 and Luke 21, also on on Holy Tuesday, we see the Olivet
Sincere Worship vs. Rule Following
00:03:58
Speaker
Discourse. And these passages really give us more of Jesus' teachings and his words as he's talking about the things that are to come in the end of days and the hope that we can have that Christ is going to fulfill all things.
00:04:13
Speaker
On a day like today, it's worth considering Do I genuinely worship God? Do I genuinely follow Jesus? Or is it just words to me? Am I just going through the motions? Am I just doing the next thing?
00:04:29
Speaker
It's a challenging question to ask. And for some of us, it's easy to just follow the rules. It's easy to just do what everyone around us is doing or what our parents tell us to do.
00:04:42
Speaker
But what God wants is a heart that genuinely follows and worships him of our own accord, that is submitted to him because we know he's good and he's loving and he has our best interest at heart. And he's God.
00:04:55
Speaker
He made us. He's the king.
Psalm 51 and Repentance
00:04:58
Speaker
And he's worth following. today, it may be a good idea to read Psalm 51 and pray Psalm 51, a prayer of repentance, where you have lived according to just the words and the rules instead of by genuine worship, repenting of any areas that you've been hypocritical or said one thing but not lived it out yourself.
00:05:24
Speaker
Matthew 13, 15 says, For this people's heart has become callous. They hardly hear with their ears, and they've closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them.
00:05:39
Speaker
Jesus quoted Isaiah here. He's talking about the hardened heart. Let this be a day when we don't have a hardened heart. Let this be the day when we give our hearts to the Lord.
00:05:50
Speaker
We turn towards him and we say, I'm not going to live in hypocrisy anymore.
Closing Remarks and Preview
00:05:54
Speaker
I'm going to live with you as my king and the center of my world. Thank you for following along in our Holy Week series.
00:06:02
Speaker
I hope you have a wonderful Holy Tuesday, and I will see you tomorrow on Spy Wednesday.