I haven’t been near a microphone around here since the events of last November—the Diocesan Convention at which St. James’s parish status was approved, and the following Sunday when the vestry was elected and Cindy was called as your rector—so before I do anything officially preachy I’d like simply to say how happy I was to be part of the process that led to all that and how much I love, admire, and respect you and your rector. Her perseverance and leadership have been extraordinary. If Cindy hadn’t been here, St. James never would not have survived the onslaught it received, and this place would be a Shake Shack right now. Congratulations all around.
In August of 1973 I went east from Los Angeles so I could start seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I spent the few weeks before the start of school getting to know the other new students wandering around.
One of these was a Nigerian man named Joseph Omonije whom I soon befriended. He was reputed to be a tribal king back in his homeland. I soon found this rumor not so hard to believe.
One day after the start of school, I went to the Harvard Coop and bought a fancy binder for a project I was doing. As I walked back onto the campus, Joseph saw and stopped me.
“Hey! Where did you get that?”
“Down in the Square at the Coop.”
“You go down there now and get me one too!”
Without even thinking about it, I turned right around and headed back down Brattle Street towards Harvard Square. About halfway there, I stopped and said to myself, “What am I doing? He’s not a king; he’s a student like me. Let him get his own fancy binder.” But not, of course, in those precise words.
This encounter with Joseph taught me something about authority. Whatever else he had, Joseph Omonije had authority. When he spoke, you had to take him very seriously. Whether he had a claim on you was another matter.
As we hear in today’s Gospel, Jesus had authority. He preached and taught in a way that was surefooted and authentic. In our Gospel for this morning, we are told that the people at Capernaum “were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” [Mark 1.22] In the Judaism of Jesus’s day, the supreme religious authority was vested in the Torah, the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. The scribes were a class of Bible experts who would study the scriptures, render opinions, and resolve disputes about how to interpret Jewish law. When the crowd at Capernaum says that Jesus does not teach like the scribes, what they mean is that he does not ground his teaching in a claim of professional expertise or an appeal to someone else. He teaches as one who knows what he’s doing, with authority. He knows how to tell you something in a way that you will be sure to take it in. And he tells you truth that he knows personally, not that he heard from someone else.
According both to Mark and the crowd, Jesus has “authority”. The Greek word that we translate “authority” is exousia, and exousia (authority) is always contrasted in the New Testament with another Greek word, dunamis, which means “power”. In the Gospel stories of Jesus, we are told that he has authority, meaning that he speaks and teaches with an inner sense of the right to do so. In the Bible’s understanding, authority comes from within. It is an orientation toward what one is doing, a sense that one is entitled and privileged to do it. Jesus teaches as one with authority, not like the scribes. He does not talk or sound like someone who has spent his entire life in the library. He talks about God not with textual evidence and citations but from a living inner experience.
Jesus teaches with authority, with exousia. What he does not teach with is that other word, dunamis or power. Dunamis is the word from which we get the word “dynamite”, and it has less to do with inner confidence than it does with the ability to compel somebody to do something. If I teach with authority, you listen because I’ve convinced you I know what I’m talking about. If I teach with power, you listen because I’m holding a stick of dynamite to your head. Bad teachers teach holding the grade book in one hand, threatening students with their power. In the New Testament, power is a military word, authority a spiritual one. Caesar acts with dunamis, with power. Jesus acts with exousia, with authority.
One of the problems with being a Christian is that we have received this authoritative teaching of Jesus all wrapped up in a system of ecclesiastical power. It is perhaps only one of the ironies of the Jesus movement that what began as a critique of power (the state power of Caesar, the religious power of the scribes) became, for centuries, embodied in a world-historical power-projecting institution. When Christianity moved from an outsider movement to the official religion of Western culture, it became hopelessly enmeshed in questions of power. Look, for example, at the title Cindy now carries as the presiding priest of this parish. “Rector” comes from the Latin word, rex: king, ruler, power-wielder. (We’re all delighted she has this title, and in my time I had it too. And we’re delighted that she has the wisdom to understand the true source of her authority. But we should remember that much in the church’s governance is a vestige of the days when we thought of ourselves in worldly terms.) The Jesus we meet in the scriptures is not interested in power. He lets Caesar and Herod argue about that. The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is interested in authority.
And it is the authority, not the power, of Jesus that causes the crowds to follow him. In today’s Gospel he casts out a demon. In other stories he heals people, curing lepers and paralytics and restoring sight to the blind. Jesus can do these things not because he has a certificate from an institution telling him he can. He does these things because of his own internal connection to and grounding in a relationship with God. He does not force or compel people to be well. He draws them toward wellness because of the depth and quality of his inner life made visible in his outward actions.
Back in my teaching days I once tried to explain to my students the difference between “moral” and “moralistic”. What I finally came up with was this: “moral” people say, “I ought”. “Moralistic” people say, “thou shalt”. A truly moral person is concerned with his or her ethical obligation in a particular situation. A moralistic person wants to tell you what you should do. It is Christianity’s tragedy that we have often confused the two: over time, we’ve behaved less as a moral movement and more as a moralistic institution. Jesus taught not as one with moralistic power—the ability to compel other people’s assent—but as one with moral authority. He openly lived the Gospel he proclaimed from within. He drew other people into the expanding circle of his enfolding love.
There are, for me, two implications for us in all this. One has to do with our shared, Christian community stance toward the world. The other has to do with how we, as individual people appropriate God’s authority in our lives.
As to the first: as a community, the church is called to be moral, not moralistic. We are called to exercise authority, exousia, not power, dunamis. If we think we are still a world-historical power-projecting institution, we are kidding ourselves. There is lots of bad news in the decline in church membership and attendance across the globe these days, but hidden in all that loss is at least one gleaming nugget of good news. We are no longer the official religion of the western world. Therefore, we are free to live again as the church lived before Constantine. We can become, again, the Jesus movement, a group of fragile, faithful women, children, and men called into new life in the fellowship of Jesus and his table. As a body, we are now free from the burden of telling other people what to think. We can turn to the much more energizing and illuminating task of standing for what we believe: justice, compassion, inclusivity, love.
Freedom from having to live from power is our greatest gift as a people. As individuals, there is also an implication in the shift from power to authority, and living into it starts with seizing an insight in Thomas Merton’s book New Seeds of Contemplation:
Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art. (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 30)
You are who you were created to be. When you speak and act out of your authentic self, you do so with authority. Jesus had it, and so can you. Live your life not with power but with authority, with joy and generosity and compassion and hope. Resist the impulse to tell other people how to live, what to think, or to go get them fancy binders at the Coop. Live from your authentic self, out of what you know to be true. If we all did that, we’d be just like Jesus. And everyone around us would be astounded. Amen.
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