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January 30, 2000
The following message of Pastor Gene Preston was given on Sunday, January 30, and immediately after it Mrs. Rosana Gaw was baptized.
People nowadays have a love/hate relationship to authority: And why not! Human beings have paid a terrible price against the most barbaric forms of authority in the century just ended. Millions of lives were sacrificed to defeat Naziism and Communism. And the greater value we now place upon individualism makes us skeptical of all institutional authority. Even democratic governments and traditional religion are suspect to many modern people.
But just as we can't live with authority we can't live without it. So as trust in secular government decreases increased blind trust in religion increases. Religious authoritarianism is on the rise. Islamic fundamentalism has come to political power in Iran and Afghanistan and Sudan; it aspires to power in many other countries. Hindu fundamentalism took over the national government in India, albeit by democratic processes. The Christian Right would like to govern in the US.
Some authority is new and is sneaking up on us. The greatest authority of our era is the new economic market economy of international trade, finance and multi-national companies, many of which now have more cash flow than most governments.
The popular challenge to its claim upon our lives is just beginning as we saw in the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization late last year and in last week's street protests at the elitist Davos conference in Switzerland.
And so we come to the theme of today's Gospel which is that of authority. Hear the Gospel:
"THEY WENT TO CAPERNAUM; AND WHEN THE SABBATH CAME, JESUS ENTERED THE SYNAGOGUE AND TAUGHT. THEY WERE ASTOUNDED AT HIS TEACHING, FOR HE TAUGHT THEM AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY, AND NOT AS THE SCRIBES. JUST THEN THERE WAS IN THEIR SYNAGOGUE A MAN WITH AN UNCLEAN SPIRIT, AND HE CRIED OUT, 'WHAT HAVE YOU TO DO WITH US, JESUS OF NAZARETH? HAVE YOU COME TO DESTROY US? I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, THE HOLY ONE OF GOD.' BUT JESUS REBUKED HIM, SAYING, 'BE SILENT, AND COME OUT OF HIM!' AND THE UNCLEAN SPIRIT , CONVULSING HIM AND CRYING WITH A LOUD VOICE, CAME OUT OF HIM. THEY WERE AMAZED, AND THEY KEPT ON ASKING ONE ANOTHER, 'WHAT IS THIS? A NEW TEACHING &endash;WITH AUTHORITY! HE COMMANDS EVEN THE UNCLEAN SPIRITS, AND THEY OBEY HIM."
The Jesus teaches with a kind of authority that amazes his listeners in the synagogue. He did not teach them like the scribes who piled up quotes after quotes from the scriptures, citation after citation to sustain their scholarly authority. And we may deduce that he taught with an authority at odds with the worldly authority about which we are so suspicious today. Worldly authority presumes to power. Truth is often sacrificed to retain power.
Jesus taught without regard for power. .He did not claim power unto himself nor promise power to his listeners.
Strangely we are not told in the opening chapter of Mark what it was that Jesus taught. We are only told he taught with a new authority. New because it came from a source beyond tradition and worldly concern with power. Later belief ascribed Jesus' authority to God, but the only thing his first listeners could grasp was that he taught from his heart. Jesus' authority was personal, and thus paradoxically modern two millenia before our present concern with the personal and individual.
It's puzzling that the writer Mark tells us here nothing about the content of Jesus' teaching. We learn nothing of what Jesus said which so impressed the people, only the manner in which he communicated. We also should note that while people were impressed enough with the healing that his fame began to spread, the authority he demonstrated did not at the time produce a single disciple. The only recognition of his ultimate authority came from the defeated demonic spirit which acknowledged him as the Holy One of God.
We will not hear that acknowledgement again until toward the end, after the crucifixion, when the Roman soldier makes the same statement at the foot of the cross.
Just a few verses earlier in Mark l, Jesus has called four disciples without any content of his message stated. Jesus simply said to Andrew and Simon and the others, "Follow me" and they just as simply followed. In these opening snippets it appears that it was not what Jesus said to people but how he spoke which conveyed novel authority to them. He spoke as one with a genuine personal authority capable of provoking a personal response in others.
In his manner Jesus was able to touch people at a place beyond the usual religious debate and argument.
I think we have all experienced times like that, when something someone said something to us which cut right through whatever tangle of thoughts, opinions, and prejudices tend to block our comprehension. We felt something new and it felt like truth.
This ability to speak to the human heart is a trait in all great literature and drama and poetry, so much so that the cutting power and appeal of truth often comes to us from someone who seems an unlikely source. Victor Hugo took an ugly character, a hunchback, and had him speak to the heart of l9th century French cynicism. In his current film, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, which has just won the Globe Awards as the best foreign film of l999, the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, presents an unlikely character, a transvestite and a macho tranvestite at that, and has this bizarre character not only become creditable as a human but appealing to straight audiences around the world.
Jesus was another unlikely source for truth. His truth would be rejected by many; viewed as scandalous by many; and yet it would endure. And that is because in addition to his style, Jesus acted with authority. The singular act reported in this episode is his healing of a man who was possessed by, as they said in those times, an unclean spirit.
Whatever we may imagine that to mean these days, I want you to focus on the word POSSESSED. It means to say that the man was not free to be himself, not free to be what God had made him to be. He was caught and held fast by an alien authority to his human nature and to God's love for him. He was liberated from bondage by the word that Jesus spoke.
This incident gives us a major clue as to the kind of authority we can respect and trust. Is the word of authority a liberating word? Does it loosen the grip of that which holds us in bondage - our fears, our unexamined commitments, our inappropriate ambitions, our pride, our need to save face, our easy gratification of our desires and our senses? Does the truth we hear depossess us of our bondage?
And the second major clue to the uniqueness of Jesus' authority goes right back to his style: Jesus taught through persuasion rather than coercion.
Jesus was persuasive because his authority was holy and holy power always is relational and seeks to persuade us of its truth for us. God's power to influence us is precisely just that; God wants to influence us, to enter into our lives, and to evoke the highest receptive, self-creative and persuasive power in us.
Not everyone is ready to be persuaded; some want to be coerced. We have seen in the nationalistic sponsored seminar in Japan last week that some element of the public there still want to be remain brainwashed…the participants denied that the Nanking Massacre had ever taken place. I presume they believe Japanese face must be preserved, even at the price of the big lie, in the hope that one day nationalist authoritarianism will have another day in the sun. The new strength of the ultra right in Austria with its reliance on the big lie of scapegoating and denial that Naziism pogroms ever took place in Europe represents a parallel return to the power of coercive authority.
But Jesus always spoke persuasively except when he encountered evil. The demonic spirit flatters Jesus with acknowledgement that he is holy, but Jesus declines that self-serving flattery of evil and squashes the demonic spirit on the spot. But with humans he aimed to persuade.
And he did this in part by keeping his truth deliberately simple so that we could understand him and decide about him. What does God require of us? To love God as we adore ourselves and to love our neighbors as we should love God? What does the Lord God ask of you? Nothing more than to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly. What is God's will in our lives? That we should contribute to the building of God's kingdom of justice.
These are not complex instructions from an immutable authority. These are lifelines to bring peace and joy to our forlorn situations; they are simple, straightforward truths to chasten the authority of all our institutions including the religious ones and the family as well as the economic and political powers.
The simplicity and voluntarism of Jesus' basic teachings are in contrast to the convictions of numerous Jesus followers who pronounce with total certainty that they know the mind of Jesus on a variety of issues about which he never spoke, either because he did not think them central or because they arise from modern situations which were unknown to Jesus.
When I hear someone declare that Jesus would have said this or that, or done this or that, I suspect the exhorter is mainly interested in tapping into the authority of Jesus in order to advance a personal agenda based on coercion.
Given the poor job we Christians have done on implementing the few teachings we do know come from him, how much greater would be our guilt, or the need for our covering hypocrisy, if Jesus had pronounced on hundreds of other situations which we would equally ignore. It seems to me that Jesus was both very gracious and very practical to leave many life decisions up to our informed moral sense. Jesus was not interested in entrapping us but in freeing us.
Scripturally and wisely the Church Universal requires only a few declarations from candidates at baptism: Do you believe in God? Do you wish to renounce your old bondage and lead a new life in freedom through following Jesus? Are you touched enough by Jesus to welcome him as the authority in your heart and life?
Jesus probably felt he could trust his followers to do what is right because he gave to them the Church to support and help them and the Holy Spirit to quicken and enlighten them.
Charles Curran has been one of the brilliant voices of progressive catholic thought the last forty years; so progressive that some years back he was silenced by Rome and forbidden to write or lecture on the several matters on which he was a world respected scholar, matters precisely about the appropriate role of power in the church hierarchy.
When he was silenced by his church as being an unreliable authority, he was asked how he could be sure that he was right and the pope was wrong. He replied in this statement which I respect as expressing genuine discipleship:
"In that last analysis the dilemma of every Christian is that I have to act in accord with my conscience, but my conscience might be wrong. In the end I think that the criterion of a good conscience is in accord with the mystical tradition, a conscience which is at peace, a peace which only the spirit can give. Even in the midst of all the complexities and the tensions, if one is honestly trying to respond to the word of God and the call of God and the needs of one's neighbor, I think that the ultimate criterion is the peace and joy that comes and can co-exist with the fact that one is never totally sure. One is always a pilgrim."
What these early Marcan stories are about are the possibilities which are open to people when the decision of faith is presented to them. Discipleship is no accident nor is it derived from compulsion. Discipleship is the antidote to possession; it is accepting an invitation to have spiritual freedom and then to exercise it in some very difficult choices whose resolution can involve dying to self and following the cross in the way of love, service, and humility. We need to be persuaded of that way; we can never be coerced there.
If we are not prepared to go down the road of discipleship, we need go no further with Jesus than the one healing episode. We can watch for the moment, applaud the healing, and then go onto the next performance. As I look out to central Hong Kong I see those magical tents under which The Cirque Soleil is performing. If we grow tired of Jesus we can go there for momentary entertainment. But authority derived from entertainment values, just as authority stemming from coercion, do not endure. They are fragile. The walls tumble down as ten years ago in Berlin and all along the Iron Curtain just as certainly the Cirque Soleil tents will be pulled down in a few days notwithstanding the months of hoopla we have experienced in Hong Kong as the promotional run up.
The power and the attractions of this world are fragile compared to the enduring and transforming truth of God.
The text from Mark puts the question which the demon got right: Who is Jesus?
I am glad that one among us has asked the question and given her answer - "He is the holy one of God" - and now she will come forward because she wants to be baptised in the name and under the authority of Jesus which authority is freely offered and voluntarily received.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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