Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

I always think that one of the most fruitful ways to go about reading the Scripture is to concentrate not only on what Christ said and did, though certainly that is the heart of it, but to concentrate also on the reactions of those around Him, what sort of an impression He made on those who saw and heard Him. Sometimes this provides us with really the greater revelation. Christ's words after all, were often enough mysterious things. Sometimes it is not perfectly clear just exactly what He meant when He spoke, what sort of a reaction He expects from us. And so it can be a real help to study the reactions of those who not only heard His words, but saw His face, His expression, the tone of voice... those who saw and heard what He did the rest of the day, the thousand and one small lessons of example, that give flesh to the skeletal teaching of Christ's words. So Christ's followers, His disciples, even His enemies, can be valuable aids to our own understanding, and we should not pass them over lightly. The two evangelists Mark and Luke are particularly good for this sort of thing. Mark because he had a great eye for local color and concrete detail, and Luke because being a doctor, he was a student of human nature. He seemed to have made a real effort to understand what was going on inside the heads of the people who lived through the events of the Gospel.

Today's Gospel reading is a passage from Mark, and it is a good example of what I have just been saying. Mark gives a couple of insights into the reaction of the people to the teaching of Christ. And the first one is really pretty simple. Mark says that when Christ spoke, people listened, and that they listened, the Gospel says, spellbound. They didn't always agree with what they heard. In fact, pretty clearly, a good number were violently opposed. But they did listen. And listened apparently because they were able to recognize, or at least sense, a certain quality to what He had to say. And in two places in this reading today, Mark gives a name to that quality. He calls it "authority".

Authority is a word that seems somehow to touch a lot of sore nerves in many of us these days. For the past couple of decades, ours has been a society marked by wave after wave of liberation movements. Civil rights liberation, youth liberation, women's liberation, gay liberation, even taxpayer's liberation, and more, I'm sure.

Now clearly, liberation, freedom, is a fine thing, a desirable thing. It is the birthright of each one of God's people. Self-determination, the right of each one of us to give direction to our own lives. It is an innate desire, and beyond question, it is the will of God that each of us be free to fulfill that desire to whatever degree the real circumstances of our lives may allow. Freedom is an ideal we must all pursue relentlessly, for ourselves, and for all those around us.

Unfortunately, we are too often a people who seem to find it much easier to be against something than for something, and so too often our pursuit of ideals degenerates into conflict, nothing more noble than guerilla warfare, whether it be with real guns and bombs, or simply with words. So many times the struggle for freedom degenerates into a struggle against authority, or at least what one perceives as authority. And when that happens, the noble pursuit of freedom can become nothing more than a kind of sullen defiance. "Nobody's going to tell me what to do."

And that is too bad. It is too bad because it is wrong. It is an inadequate understanding of freedom for one thing. It seems to set up some sort of necessary contradiction between the inherently Christian ideal of freedom for everyone, and the equally Christian insistence on the role of authority in the life of a believer, as it is reflected in this Gospel passage today.

Perhaps at least part of the reason why the exercise of authority has become the source of so much conflict over recent years, in the state, in the Church, even in families, is that the word can mean a number of different things. At least two. First, there is the authority of the lawgiver, the authority to govern. Most of the time, that is what we seem to mean when we talk about authority. That is the authority that is concerned principally with maintaining order, the effective, efficient functioning of whatever the community may be, Church, state, family, club, whatever. And that kind of authority is based on two things, compliance, and power. Compliance, in that the members of the governed community, when all goes well, respect that authority, see and affirm the need for order. And power because sometimes they don't.

And of course, a firm, consistent exercise of the authority of the lawgiver in any society is a necessity. The protection of everyone's rights, the attainment of the goals of the society, demand a certain amount of dependable, predictable order.

But there is another kind of authority, and that is the authority of the teacher, the prophet. And that is an authority that has little to do with power, and, strange as it may sound, little enough to do with acceptance either. The authority of the teacher flows from first knowing what you are talking about, and second from a personal integrity that compels the teacher to follow his own advice, live by his own words. This is the authority that says, "If you do this, you will be right. Free from error, free from ignorance." It is the authority that teaches by the example of a lifetime that the way that is proposed works. It brings happiness. The person who exercises this kind of authority looks for a response not simply of obedience, but of trust. In fact, trust is the first concern. Without it, obedience would be meaningless, so such a teacher does nothing that would betray that trust. This kind of authority seeks out not just subjects, but disciples.

Now, of these two, it is pretty clear which comes closest to the authority with which Christ speaks. Throughout the Gospels, one of the most interesting of the reactions of the disciples is how little impressed they were with Christ's power. All of the wonders, the miracles, these caught their attention certainly, but that was never really the reason for their faith. Perhaps that was because Christ Himself never really made very much of it. Perhaps it is because they realized that power alone is just too shaky a foundation on which to claim authority. Inevitably, it becomes too easy to ignore, inevitably someone else will try to take over that power. So Christ's many displays of power amazed the people, but it didn't convince them.

But they certainly were impressed, and convinced by Christ's authority in the second sense. It was His teaching that held them spellbound. They were impressed by the fact that He spoke from a deep personal knowledge of the Father. In fact, as in the first reading, where Moses and the other prophets would say, "The Lord says...", Christ would say, "I tell you...."

And they were impressed with His integrity. Every word that He spoke was a part of His own life. When He spoke, He meant what He said, and He lived it Himself, right up to the moment of His execution, and beyond. That kind of integrity invites trust. Trust invites imitation, and imitation is the fullest sort of obedience.

So. There ought not to be a conflict, a contradiction, between our natural hunger for freedom, and our Christian vocation to submit ourselves trustingly to the authority of legitimate governors and teachers. Where such a conflict exists, it is an artificial thing, something of our own making. It is in the trusting acceptance of just such authority, that ultimately we accept the authority of Christ Himself. Those who erect barriers of bitterness, and resentment, even anger between themselves and the governors and teachers in their lives, in fact erect barriers between themselves and Christ.. And nothing can be more destructive of an individual's freedom than that. St. Paul, in the second reading today, while he perhaps overstates a bit the joys of celibacy, certainly makes this point strongly enough. It is the clarity of our union with Christ that is the measure of our liberation. And nothing else. Masked by a hundred human faces, it is finally to Him that we offer our trust, our imitation, and our obedience.

Readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-20; 1 Corinthians 7:32-35; Mark 1:21-28.