You who are cat owners know that cats sometimes behave as though they are responding to the beat of a drummer no human ear can hear. One woman tells about her cat Missy, who, once a day, usually in the early evening, gets the crazies. Suddenly, for no reason, she jumps up, gets a wild look in her eyes, and starts to run. She takes off up the stairs, bounding three at a time, tears into the bedroom, bounces across the bed, ricochets onto a windowsill, shoots into a closet, then leaps downstairs again, rolling somersaults onto the sofa.
Other times, though, the woman tells us, Missy’s excitement is focused. She will be sitting in a windowsill, staring upwards, almost frozen, except for a few very quiet cat chirps. When her owner goes to see what she is looking at, almost inevitably it is some flying insect. Sometimes a mosquito, sometimes a fly, sometimes a wasp. No matter what the woman does to distract her cat, Missy just can’t seem to let it alone. And the cat won’t quit until either she or her owner gets rid of the offending insect ― as if the cat is saying to her owner, this thing doesn’t belong in here.
So it was when the chief priests and the scribes wouldn’t let Jesus alone. They looked at him as some kind of offending creature that had to be removed before they could get on with their work. Or, maybe they felt it was their work to get rid of him.
For whatever reason, they kept following him around, waiting, trying to devise a way to trap him.
The fact is, Jesus was smarter and quicker and more astute than they were, so every time they set a political or theological trap, Jesus set
