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 at

Felicia Masonheimer.com under our free resources.

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. 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? 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 mob, the people gave John his authority.

And if they say that, the people might get angry and they're afraid of the mob.

And so they don't answer him at all.

And this interaction represents a series of different conversations Jesus has what we believe on

Holy Tuesday, so the day after he cleanses the temple.

And one scholar talks about this as a great unmasking.

So after he 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. 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. They're supposed to be the people who would

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