Love this lol!!!
Jesus at his sarcastic best in Scripture:
“At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, ‘Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.’ He answered, ‘Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry?’”
Oh, the Pharisees. They knew the Scriptures well, and they were constantly trying to trip Jesus up like they knew better.
“When Jesus asks them if they’ve read a Scripture before He explains it to them, it’s a taunt,” Bradley says. “They’ve read it; they just haven’t completely understood it or internalized it. This sarcasm isn’t just mean-spirited mockery; it’s strategy.”
“Again his Jewish opponents picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?’”
The Jews in this story wanted so badly to find a reason to get Jesus out of the picture. He had been claiming he was God, and he was threatening everything they thought they knew and understood.
“It’s a particularly tense moment that Jesus ramps up with a fairly brassy question,” says Bradley. “Christ reminds them of the many ways He has already established who He is. If they want to test the veracity of his statement, there are many witnesses who will corroborate. So, which good work do you plan on killing me for? It’s a fairly bold sneer for someone facing down a mob.”
“At that time some Phariseescame to Jesus and said to him, ‘Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.’ He replied, ‘Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’ In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!”
Here, we see Jesus calling Herod a name (doesn’t “fox” seem tame compared to what names we so readily call leaders and authority figures today?) and calling him out, essentially.
“Jesus goes on to make one of the driest, most melancholic jokes in the entire Bible when He says, ‘Nevertheless I must journey on today and tomorrow and the next day; for it cannot be that a prophet would perish outside of Jerusalem,”’ Bradley writes. “He’s basically saying, ‘I know you Jews love to kill your prophets. Far be it from me not to trek back to Jerusalem to give you the opportunity.’”
