GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 11:30
Traps
In Esther chapter seven, King Xerxes ordered officials to hang Haman on his seventy-five foot-high gallows. Greedy, self-serving, and conniving, Haman, as the story goes, plotted to hang the Jew Mordecai on a gallows and kill all the Jews who had been transcolonized to Babylon, but he found a profound turning of the tables.
An axiom holds that a trap is a trap, no matter how beautifully camouflaged it is. Haman had been feted and honored in the days before chapter seven, unaware that he was on a slippery slope toward the gallows.
St. Mark wrote that the chief priests, scribes, and elders wanted to trap Jesus by asking him under what authority he had driven the merchants out of the temple court, for they knew he had none of their authority. Nor would he have authority from the Roman governor, either. If he said he did the cleansing under his own authority, he could be arrested; if he said he was acting under Yahweh’s authority, they could charge him with blasphemy. Thus, he was trapped.
Jesus, however, turned the tables on the dignitaries when he asked, “Was the baptism of John from heaven or from men? Answer me.” (Mark 11:30) This is a vivid example of what happens to those who will not face the truth. They have to wiggle and twist and, in the end, get themselves into a position in which they are so helplessly entangled that they have nothing to say at all. When they do not face the truth, they have nothing but the prospect of deeper and deeper involvement in a situation that renders them both helpless and ineffective. One who faces the truth may have the humiliation of admitting that he was wrong, but at least his future is strong and bright.
These temple dignitaries surely knew Psalm 141:10: “Let the wicked fall into their own nets, while I pass by safely.” The truth never leads to a trap.
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