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March 03, 2003
Jesus’ Authority, Then and Now
Psalm 9: 1-10 /Isaiah 33: 2-6
Luke 4: 31-37
March 2nd,2003
This past week America mourned the loss of Mr. Rogers. We learned more about him in the past few days than most of us knew before. I was struck most forcefully by his acceptance speech when he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. He began by saying, "Fame is amour-letter word." He said that with intensity on his gentle face.
Mr. Rogers wasn’t changed by his fame. He used the authority fame gave him in people’s imagination to address the fears children have, to be their friend, looking them in the eye, explaining to them the bewildering things in life. Many of them believed him. One of my Hebrew students, a very bright classics major, told me as class began on Thursday, “Mr.Rogers died. I’ll be OK.” She was serious. It was as if her dad died. She’d grown up on him. I thought of Jesus’ words, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
We seldom associate authority with the kind of person whom children are drawn to. Authority is the implement of the powerful, of the presidents of this world who can send hundreds of thousands of troops across the world to die in battle, or push a little red button, obliterate big cities, and change the course of history. Authority is power. Lord Acton said, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and in earth has been given me.” Jesus had absolute power, but the power did not corrupt him.
The Gospels begin their account of Jesus, describing an uncanny authority that radiated from Him. It was not because he was bigger or had a type-A personality. It was not the kind of authority achieved by rank or political position. He held no office. Yet He radiated authority.
Last Sunday we read of an attempt to lynch Him in His hometown. His townsfolk were angry when He used two stories of Elijah’s day to illustrate their hardness of heart that kept Him from healing people in Nazareth. Nobody likes to hear that their religion is bogus. He told them this without malice, even sadly, but it infuriated them. They couldn’t stand His sincerity exposing their insincerity. So they tried to kill Him. He walked through the crowd of His would-be executioners as easily as a hot knife passes through soft butter. His authority made their anger powerless. I visualize their angry faces melting in the face of His serene concentration as He walked through the crowd.
Jesus’ authority defies description. Those who watched Him asked, “What is this word? For with authority and power He commands the unclean spirits and they come out.” Diseases dissipated at His word. Cholera that makes people loses all their fluids simply dried up on the spot. Leprosy disappeared. Lepers saw their putrid white skin turn a healthy pink. We call Jesus’ healings “miracles,” but it wasn’t magic. It was His authority that numbed the power of sickness. How?
Calvin described the effects of the fall in one place in this way. Citing St. Augustine, he wrote: “Man’s natural gifts were corrupted by sin, and his supernatural gifts were withdrawn.”[1] Jesus had the supernatural gifts inherent in our creation in tact. He was able to use them naturally. It seems that part of Jesus’ intention for His disciples, and then for us, was that we should regain these supernatural gifts, and use them in announcing the penetration of the Kingdom of God into the kingdoms of this world. But as the disciples soon flagged in their capacity to use them, we have followed in their train. We trust that Jesus will one day totally restore us to God’s original design. Of course, at that time there will be no more diseases to conquer, no more demons to exorcise, no more tears to wipe away or death from which to rise.
When Jesus taught, His teaching didn’t have the heavy sense of vast learning, of impeccable logic, as the Scribes did. He didn’t cite authorities, intimidating the ordinary hearer. His was a different kind of authority, utterly sincere, altogether pertinent. He was not an intellectual bully as I sense some widely heard religious teachers are today.
He understood so clearly and believed so deeply what He taught, and it had to do with the simplest, deepest matters of life. He seized peoples’ hearts. He rang true. He told shepherds of a shepherd longing for a lost sheep, and said, “God’s like this.” He told a heart-broken father of a heart-broken Father, longing for his lost son, and said, “That’s how God is.” He told farmers of the ways of planting and harvesting—communicating to each one in the idiom he understood best how God cared for them. “Summer and winter and springtime and harvest, join with all nature in manifold witness to Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.” People could sense that the One telling them the stories loved them as God did. No one else who told such stories made people think they were listening to the voice of God. This was authority. It had the ring of truth.
Where did Jesus get this authority? We are tempted to answer this by saying, “Well, He was God made flesh. What do you expect?” But I remember that Scripture makes clear that “Jesus emptied Himself,” or as the wonderful old KJV puts it, “He made Himself of no reputation.”[2] Charles Wesley’s great hymn has us sing, “He emptied Himself of all but love.” It was so. Could Jesus have passed on His authority to His disciples if it was a function of His God-ness? I don’t think so.
I’m tempted to think that Jesus’ authority did not derive from His God-ness, but was something like we can have if our hearts are available to God. In Isaiah we read this morning, “The Lord . . . will be the stability of your times, abundance of wisdom and knowledge.” Isaiah is describing the fount of Jesus’ authority. I’ve seen analogies of Jesus’ inner strength in other arenas of human endeavor. His mind was fixed, His heart set.
At the great university in our city I’ve met some people who are so single-minded that they have brought to bear their intellect and determination to master their science. Some of these attend Faith Church. Such as these talk, and people listen. The “authority” they have achieved as scientists is due to their focus. When I see this, I have some sense of Jesus’ concentration on His task.
I watched our splendid Purdue wrestlers grapple with Michigan State a week or so ago. Before the match I could see those powerful young men walking around, in intense concentration. They were in a zone, seemingly oblivious of the crowd. They didn’t strut or flex, show-boating. This was pointless. They would soon prove what they really were on the mat. They practiced their moves. When their match time came, they moved quickly to the mat and their concentration exploded. I had the feeling that a few of the matches were won in the mind of the winner before he won on the mat. The authority of single-mindedness is powerful.
It was Jesus’ single-minded devotion to doing the will of the Father that resulted in His authority. In every battle of will, beginning with the famed three temptations in the desert, to the times when He was disappointed with His disciples, to the times when He was weary with caring for the endless stream of needy people who came to Him, what held Jesus together was His determination to do the will of His Father. It was as a man that Jesus did the willow His heavenly Father, not as the Son of God. Yet, He was not a fanatic. There was balance in His life. He was a loving friend, able to give and receive friendship.
This is why, when Jesus called the twelve disciples, He could pass on some of this authority to them. Jesus expected them to do as He did and more. I visualize what can happen here at Faith Church, if we bring to bear on the tasks we have accepted, the concentration of devotion to Jesus. I think we’ve yet to use the authority Jesus offers us in our little corner of His vineyard. Jesus’ authority translates our efforts into His work.
Jesus called men to be with Him, because He needed their friendship, but also to equip them to carryon His task. He gave them authority over unclean spirits.[3] They lived with Jesus day and night, breathing the air He breathed, listening to His every word, watching His responses to every situation. They learned of Him because they had greater things to do. He told them, “Greater things than these you will do because I got to the Father.” (Note: John 14:12.)
Jesus sent them out on brief “internships,” and there were times when they returned saying, “it worked.” When they were filled with Jesus’ concentration on doing the will of God, they found their personal weaknesses overcome. When Thaddeus spoke, it was as if Jesus Himself was commanding sickness to be gone. Bartholomew rebuked the demons, and they abandoned the bodies they tormented. “Doubting Thomas” taught and it had the ring of truth.[4] These learned from Jesus the authority of His devotion.
When they grew complacent, their authority evaporated. Do you remember after Jesus’ “transfiguration,” He came down from the mountain top to find His disciples failing miserably. He told them, “This kind of demon can only come out if you have prayed and fasted first.” I think Jesus meant, “You can not succeed in doing the work of the Father if your hearts are not fixed on it.” It is still the same for you and me here today. If our hearts are not fixed, we have none of Jesus’ authority. It is only available to those intent on doing His work for His sake.
When Jesus left, His disciples He reminded them that all authority had been given Him in heaven and earth. He sent them out equipped with this same authority. The power with which Jesus equipped them came from the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit’s authority could only “work” in people whose hearts were available. Luke tells us that a man named Simon Magus tried to buy the Holy Spirit’s power, and it didn’t work.[5]
What has become of the authority Jesus gave to His disciples? I often have pass through my mind the encounter between Pope Innocent III and St. Thomas Aquinas mentioned in F.F. Bruce’s commentary on The Book of Acts. Historians have reckoned this 13th century pope had more muscle than any other man in Church history. The great philosopher came to the pope as he was admiring a chest filled with gold coins and precious stones, some of the profit of his power pouring into Rome. The Pope said, “We sure can’t say ‘silver and gold have I none’ can we, Thomas.” To which St. Thomas replied, “Neither can we say ‘Take up your bed and walk.’”
The pope could bring a country to its knees with the threat of excommunication, but he had no power over peoples’ hearts, or over sickness. Jesus intended the Church to have authority, but not the power to bully people. Jesus’ power seems largely lost in the teeming multitude of churches today. You have heard me more than once mention my perplexity that the influence of Christians is so meager in the direction that Jesus taught us most clearly.
Jesus told His disciples at the moment when the Church was conceived, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”[6] That’s pretty heady stuff. It’s not exactly clear what Jesus meant. I believe that Jesus meant in particular that the forgiveness we grant to those who offend us is ratified in heaven. It also had to do with the other side of Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness—if we will not forgive people who offend us, neither will our Father in heaven forgive us our offenses.
But the Power of the Keys that had to do with the authority to forgive in Jesus’ name as well as from our hearts, was translated into the kind of power that corrupts. Jesus’ authority that nerved His disciples to teach winsomely, and to loose people from their diseases as well as their despair, got skewed so that it came to resemble a more bullying kind of power. Wealth came to theChurch, and with it the authority of splendor. But lives are not changed toward God by either money or political muscle—or even by the triumph in the battle of ideas about God and His ways.
The Church has lost nearly completely its influence in Europe which once seethed with religious fervor, because the authority of Jesus’ fame was badly used. The corruption of the Church’s authority forced the Protestant Reformation. And the force of arms as a way of settling the battle for truth in the 17th century killed all confidence in Europe’s heartland in the name of Jesus. We read the tale of Christianity in the days since Martin Luther boldly claimed the authority of the Bible over his heart, and it is a sad story.
Again and again I think of Jesus. Owning nothing, with no political power at all, with no weapon in His hand, with no oratorical muscle, He won the hearts of twelve uncultivated men. His authority probed deeply and planted hope and trust in folk accustomed to being trampled by people with power. John’s Gospel tells us, “Whoever trusts in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.” Trust is not confidence. It’s not that strong. Trust is the response of need. How various are our needs this morning. Some of you here have incredible need, and you’re too proud or despairing to admit it. Oh to learn to submit to Jesus’ authority. What place we forfeit. What needless pain we bear.
I will offer you again the bread and wine of Jesus’ Communion Table. I invite you this morning to trust your heart to Jesus. Your helplessness is accentuated in the fact that you cannot see Him. But look at this bread, and look at this cup of wine that you will hold in your hand, if you are indeed coming to Him, and trust that as surely as you can eat and drink that bread and wine, so surely can you receive the authority of Jesus. With this authority you can focus your life on doing the will of God. You can focus your attention on learning of His will, and then find His authority adequate to create the desire to do it. It is a quiet authority. It works deep within us, if it works at all. I invite you to Jesus. Hear Him say, “Come, trust me. Let me give you a life.”
Let us pray: O Lord God, how meagerly we understand our depths, or how Jesus probes to satisfy our deepest needs. But we don’t ask to understand, but simply to receive. Offer us Your Son, O God, again. And help us to receive Him—in spirit and in truth. Amen.
Stuart D.Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
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[1] Institutes of the Christian Religion, II, 2.12.
[2] Philippians 2: 7.
[3] Mark 3: 15.
[4] Mark 6: 7-13. Luke 10: 1-12, 17-20.
[5] Acts 8: 9-13, 18-24.
[6] Matthew 16: 19.
Posted by admin at March 3, 2003 03:00 PM