Epiphany 4: The Litmus Test of Authority

Deuteronomy 18:5-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28

The nature of authority looms high in the readings this morning, but also some of the inherent problems with discerning genuine authority. The western paradigm has ever been – and only relatively recently challenged – that all authority comes from God. And in the Hebrew Scriptures we find that God shares that divine authority, the divine power, firstly with prophets. So God grants authority to Moses, and the writer of Deuteronomy says of him that “never since has there arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face”. (Deuteronomy 34:10) In fact, Moses is considered by Jews, Christians and Muslims the greatest of the prophets. At the same time, the prophet is also the one through whom God’s power and authority is mediated and passed on to others, and we see also recorded in Deuteronomy at Moses’ death how “Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him; and the Israelites obeyed him.” (Deuteronomy 34:9) Equally in the second book of Kings, when the departure of Elijah is imminent, his servant Elisha asks to “inherit a double share of [Elijah’s] spirit”. (2 Kings 2:10) As Elijah is taken into the heavens his mantle is literally taken up by Elisha, and on meeting a company of prophets they declare “the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha”. (2 Kings 2:13, 15) It is through the prophets also that God’s authority is passed on to kings. Samuel the prophet is the one who anoints Saul the first king of Israel, (1 Samuel 10:1) and all subsequent kings are in the same way anointed. By the first century, after the period of kings and prophets, authority among the Jews is exercised by the official teachers of the law. Jesus hints at this in the Gospel of Matthew when he is quoted as saying: “The scribes and Pharisees”, he says, “sit on Moses’ seat’. (Matthew 23:2) Each of these would at some time been the disciple of an older, more experienced teacher who would have passed to him their knowledge, and thus bestowing on him authority.

And so, divine authority – the only real authority which has been understood as such through most of history – has been understood as passed down in succession from one generation to another, and only to a select group of people by a select group of people. However, the very exclusivity of such a system can encourage those commissioned with authority all too quickly to get into bed with the powers-that-be, if they do not become the powers-that-be themselves. And now that spirit and voice of God which they are meant to deliver, becomes simply the spirit of the age or the voice unquestioningly in support of kings, princes and their policies. Such a situation is a recurring theme in the Old Testament: prophets who are simply mouth-pieces of a particular ruler. The possibilities of this was envisioned from the start, and the writer of Deuteronomy warns of the end of such people: “any prophet…who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak – that prophet shall die.” (Deuteronomy 18:20)

But what is to be the litmus test? How are the people to know the genuine prophet from the false? Certainly, in part, by the integrity of their lives, but also the extent to which they align themselves with the powerful or the powerless, the extent to which invest themselves in the status quo or in the margins of society. The genuine prophet can be recognised as she or he speaks up for the most neglected, for the powerless, for the poor and dejected. The genuine prophet can be recognised as he or she speaks up for a renewed society of peace with justice, of freedom and transparency. So, it is not surprising then, how the people flocked to John the Baptist. The Gospel of Mark records that “people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people from Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him,…confessing their sins.” (Mark 1:5) Neither is the people’s astonishment at Jesus surprising, nor their observation that his “was a new teaching with authority”. (Mark 1:28) The people had come to realise how unreliable is the authority of the those with or close to power; and by the teaching, preaching and manner life they saw in John and Jesus, they recognised the genuine spirit of God at work, recognised them both as bearing God’s authority, recognised them both as prophets. John tells the people that God is at work in the world, and that the renewal of all things is imminent: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”. (Mark 1:3b) That certainly a reality hardly to be welcomed by those in power. By his ministry, Jesus proclaims the same reality, indeed demonstrates not that the kingdom is coming, but that it has already arrived and is growing, making its presence known in Jesus’ liberating acts. One commentator in considering the narrative of today’s Gospel writes: “The liberation of the demoniac is a miniature and proof of the coming liberation of the cosmos.” The nature of both John’s and Jesus’ prophetic activity, the nature of their prophetic identity and the nature of their authority, are marked by their being outsiders who speak up for the outsider, pointing people to a coming reality beyond the status quo, beyond the self-interest of kings, princes and even of religious leaders. Their authority comes not from a long line of succession handed down to them directly from another, but from their own encounter with reality, from their own careful reflection on the traditions of Israel, and from their own walk with God. They test their ministry by the critique of scripture, most particular by the record of the prophets recognised as authentic by the tradition. The authority of both John and Jesus finds its authenticity in its compatibility with the prophetic vision of a renewed creation and they act on that vision. In the case of Jesus particularly, the people recognise that his authority is manifested and vindicated in that act of casting out demons which is “a miniature and proof of the coming liberation of the cosmos”: “They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching – with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’ ” (Mark 1:27)

We often speak of the authority of the Church or the authority of the Scriptures, and we can certainly see how the Church has in some ways modelled her own practice on ancient ideas of passing on authority – ordination by laying on hands, and the tradition of bishops consecrated in apostolic succession. All that is certainly important, and I would even argue necessary marks of an authentic Church. However, the Church compromises her authority and credibility in the world when she forgets another aspect of the authority which Jesus himself confers on her and which his own contemporaries recognised in him, chiefly his ministry of liberation and his commitment to God’s vision of a renewed creation, as expressed most perfectly in the prophetic tradition. Sometimes the Church’s self-understanding gets bogged down in how she transmits her authority, most notably this can be evidenced by the vicious wrangling in the Anglican Communion over the ordination of women to the priesthood, and their consecration to the episcopate. Yet, first and foremost, the Church should ground her authority in the life and mission of Jesus as revealed in the gospels, expressing her authenticity in aligning herself not with the powers-that-be but with victims of that power; not with the status quo but with its casualties. Certainly, the Church bears in the world God’s own authority, but it can only be revealed as such in the world when it is experienced as truly liberating and unencumbered by facile allegiance to power structures which undermine the Church’s message and ministry. When the Church exercises her authority in this way, then people certainly recognise it as authentic. That is the challenge presented to the Church in every age, but most especially in the present, when people have become keenly aware that authority must display itself in integrity, in short that people and instititions make their authority legitimate when they practice what they preach. Simply saying that we have our authority handed to us by God is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. As a Church, ours must be an authority which resolves itself in the proclamation of liberation from whatever keeps people bound, and in speaking up for the world’s renewal along the lines of God’s justice and love. Like Jesus’ authority, the Church’s own authority must be different from the kind of authority exercised in the world at large, in order that her authority can be recognised as authentic beyond the simple boundaries of the instutional Church, so that what what people observed of Jesus ministry may be said of ours too – “What is this? A new teaching – with authority!” (Mark 1:28) As the Church, may we ever be worthy of such a proclamation.