Good morning everybody.
This week’s passage from Mark seems to be about authority. The people who heard Jesus were amazed at his teaching because “He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”
My background reading suggests that this means Jesus spoke, not just with confidence but with the assurance that his God-given words were true.
My first thought when I read this was, so, how did the scribes teach and how was Jesus different? It turns out, according to some of the background on this passage, that the scribes were the scholars of the day; scholars who, like scholars today, are always looking for answers, which they hope to achieve through research and study. Those scribes certainly knew the Bible, and they knew the history, traditions, customs and laws of their people. They were literally the people of the Word. The scribes were, like their listeners, seekers after truth. But Jesus is the Word, and when he spoke with authority, he spoke in a way that his listeners recognized as carrying the truth of one who doesn’t just read the Bible, but hears from God.
When I first read this passage, I confused the word “authority” in Jesus’ teaching with self-confidence, but that’s not quite right. I’m sure Jesus felt confident in his teaching, but authority, in this context, means the power to influence others due to a commanding manner or recognized knowledge. In the dictionary I consulted, this was the third definition of authority. The first definition was the power or right to give orders, make decisions or enforce obedience – or to be authoritarian. Jesus made a demon submit to his authority — his ability to enforce decisions — when he drove it out of the suffering man. Again, the crowd hears “a new teaching — with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.”
The second definition of authority is a person or organization having power or control, usually in a political or administrative sphere, which is the definition I was most familiar with while I was growing up in the 1960s. One of our mottos was “Question authority.” Dr. Timothy Leary, the guy who introduced our generation to LSD, is credited with this saying, but the thought probably goes back to the ancient Greeks and perhaps before. As a journalism student, I was taught not only to question authority, but to question EVERYTHING, which believe me, is pretty exhausting.
As a young person, authority seems to be everywhere you look — from your parents, your teachers, your bosses, the government and even God. Everyone seems to be trying to control you, to tell you what to do. And our generation definitely didn’t want to be controlled, certainly not by the military industrial complex, organized religion, or by university administrations. We questioned authority until we became authorities ourselves, with young people questioning us.
But I don’t think this is the kind of authority that those people in the Capernaum synagogue recognized. Based on what we’ve seen in the rest of the Gospels, Jesus didn’t try to control people in our sense of the word. He spoke in parables and sometimes poetry. He spoke in a way that receptive listeners could recognize as the truth.
But I often wonder about those listeners who weren’t swayed, those who laid down their cloaks before Jesus on Palm Sunday and shouted for his death a week later. Have you ever loved someone, and then wished that they were dead? Somewhere along the way, they chose the Jewish and Roman authorities over Jesus. I’m sure they felt that was the safest course. That was before Jesus had fulfilled his destiny of rising from the dead. Even Jesus’ closest friends were completely at sea until after the risen Christ appeared to them.
When I was a child, there were evangelists on television who cured people, at least that is what I saw. Someone would roll up to the preacher in a wheelchair. The preacher would pray fervently and get everyone else to pray fervently, and then he would usually push the person in the wheelchair on the forehead and command him or her to walk — and they would! These preachers spoke with authority, but even in that faraway time, I didn’t quite believe this was genuine. I figured if that was all it took to cure people, we wouldn’t need hospitals. Even before J-school, I was skeptical about a lot of things. I learned fairly early that crooks often seem more credible than the average person, hence the phrase “confidence man.”
I’ve often wondered if I would have recognized Jesus if I’d been one of His listeners, or would I have just figured that, at best, here’s another well-meaning preacher, one of many who wandered around Roman Israel, and at worst, that he was a con man trying to stir up trouble.
I’d like to think that I would have been like the folks in Capernaum who recognized his authority through his power to influence them, a power that would continue to enthrall people throughout the future millennia. This power didn’t tell people what to believe, but told them how they could figure out the truth. The commandments he gave were to love God, and to love others as ourselves. Sometimes I’m not sure I like myself that much, but I do love living. And I’ve found that, although I usually don’t want to be controlled, I do want the guidance and love of Jesus’ authority.
I came on a saying recently that you’ve probably heard, but it was new to me. “Religion offers a compass, but not a map.” An accurate compass has an authority of its own. Christ’s authority sprang from his intimate relationship with God. It is that relationship that provides the compass. But each of us can use it to draw our own maps. Amen.
