Sermon – “By what authority?”
Mark 1:21-28, I John 1:1-7
On Christmas Day I went to my parents’ church in Melbourne. I found the sermon quite fascinating as it asked a question I don’t think I have ever considered before – namely if Jesus were in Australia on Christmas Day where do you think he would be? I guess I have always pictured Jesus as a baby lying in a manger around Christmas time, so the thought of what the adult Jesus would do on Christmas day was a new one for me. The speaker referred to an article that had been in the paper in the lead up to Christmas, which had asked the same question. Various clergy in Sydney had been asked for their responses, most of them said things like “he’d be at a BBQ” or “I think he would go to the beach” but the Catholic archbishop had said “He would go to mass”. When one of the Protestant clergy was told this he said rather shamefacedly, “Oh yes, he might have gone to church first.”
I think it is rather fascinating that the first public act of Jesus in Mark’s gospel is that he went to the synagogue, particularly as Mark makes it pretty clear that Jesus came to a sticky end because he wasn’t seen to be religious enough. We have heard from the research of the “Jesus all about life” campaign that even though the general population have a high degree of respect for Jesus as a person, people are no longer interested in institutionalized Christianity. How do we as a church respond to this? Where does it leave us when we are spending the first few months of the year preparing to take part in this Canberra-wide evangelistic campaign? We are focusing our preaching on outreach. We have invited a prominent speaker to challenge us about sharing our faith in an ever-changing society. We are spending hours rethinking our church’s goals and mission. Are we doing something valuable or are we wasting our time? Is our church or is any church still a meaningful place to be in our world today? What shape will our witness take in this environment?
It is interesting that Jesus went to the synagogue but what is more fascinating for the writer of the gospel of Mark is the fact that straightaway he began to teach, and that he taught “with authority”. It may be that his teaching stood out because it was different to the scribal tradition, which quotes from a variety of authorities but does not make any affirmation about which of those experts are right or speaking the truth. Jesus doesn’t appeal to any human authorities, or even biblical authority. We don’t know what he taught about on that occasion but we can be fairly sure he announced the way of the Kingdom of God and that he announced it with certainty.
For Mark more than for any of the other gospels Jesus was “the teacher”. Several times the gospel mentions that Jesus taught, and always with a tense of the verb that implies a continuous action. So it was characteristic of Jesus. Notice even as this story goes on the event of exorcism seems to be there mainly to affirm the authority of Jesus’ teaching (quote v. 27). Yet Mark’s gospel, which is the shortest of the four gospels, has little of the actual content of Jesus’ teaching in it. There is no Sermon on the Mount, There are very few parables. There are hardly any wisdom sayings. There are no “I am” statements. If we only had Mark’s gospel what would we know about what Jesus taught? I went though the gospel quickly to see what topics his teaching covers and this is the list I came up with:
It is a limited collection of teachings and doesn’t give us a lot of information about how to conduct ourselves in our everyday experience. But it seems for Mark, since he uses the story of the healing of the demoniac to emphasise the authority of Jesus’ teaching, that the authority in Jesus teaching lay in its profound effects. I think we can see Jesus distinguished himself as a great teacher not because he taught something completely different, but because he taught with such authority that things happened. The casting out of the demon shows that as he speaks the word heaven breaks in and hell is banished. Lives are affected. The authority is in the experience of being changed by Jesus.
When we are called to share the good news with the world around us, what is our authority going to be? Many people today are uncomfortable with the idea of “objective truth”. We’ve been reminded at Sunday@seven recently about the little booklets “two ways to live’ or “the four spiritual laws” that many of us were encouraged to use as we spoke to our friends about our faith. They were neat ways to convince someone that all of us have fallen short of God’s standards and need forgiveness. In addition to having these books we were encouraged to prepare ourselves with arguments that could prove the tomb was empty or that the resurrection really took place. But I suspect this approach to evangelism that depends upon apologetics may not be as effective today, particularly in a world dominated by a post-modern sensibility. Post-modern paradigms are comfortable with truth as multi-faceted, as story rather than proposition, as a combination of many experiences rather than attesting to one experience. Our conviction about the truth we have found needs to be aware of this climate. We are speaking into an arena where many voices have authority.
So it is difficult to imagine that you could argue someone into faith. Nor do I think it is possible to set up an experiment that empirically proves faith. How can you objectively show that prayers have been answered, or test for the sense of God’s peace that is present at a time of particular need? Statistics and control groups and carefully designed research are probably not going to convince people they need God either.
But no-one can argue with someone else’s experience of being touched by God, being changed by Jesus, being moved by the Spirit. Last week Jim reminded us of the story of the blind man who was healed by Jesus as told in John’s gospel. The healing was a simple act of spit, mud and washing. Jesus went on his way but the man became the centre of a sociological and theological controversy. In the face of disciples, neighbours, family, synagogue leaders and Pharisees all debating the method of healing and its eschatological implications, the man just kept telling of his experience. “I was blind. He put mud on my eyes. I washed, and now I see.” Or think about another story in John’s gospel – the story of the woman at the well. This time we hear a lot more about the encounter between the woman and Jesus, about her past experiences and their conversation, but at the end of the story, we are told, many in her town believed in Jesus because of HER testimony. All any of us are asked to do is to share our experience. That is our authority.
My favourite commentaries on the synoptic gospels are written by Eduard Schweizer, a Swiss theologian who taught Thorwald and Athol Gill and others who were my teachers. Schweizer has an interesting statement to make at the end of his commentary on this passage. He says the exorcism in the synagogue “destroys false peace and security and leads to healthy doubting and questioning.” If all we do as we tell of our experience is raise doubts and questions, then maybe that is enough. Maybe we will have sparked an interest that will culminate in someone discovering their own truth about who they are in relation to God.
Today we also read from the first epistle of John. There an early Christian or group of Christians said “we declare to you what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands.” These early Christians were obeying the last command of Jesus – put in different ways in the different gospels: “Go and tell” (Mark 15:7), “Go and make disciples” (Matt 28:19), “you are my witnesses” (Luke 24:48). Witnesses tell what they have heard, and seen, and touched.
In the art world there is a popular image of the Risen Christ as the Judge of humankind – think of Michaelangelo’s fresco on the wall of the Sistine chapel for example. Jesus is in the centre, an imposing figure meting out reward on the one hand and punishment on the other. But these gospel passages give the impression that if it is a courtroom that Jesus and human kind occupy, it is Jesus on trial and we Christians who are called as witnesses. The judgement in the court may have a lot to do with our testimony. Some years ago an American preacher used this image. He said “Jesus may be dismissed as irrelevant to human life on the basis of what we have to say. Jesus may be judged indifferent and uncaring depending on the way we care for each other. Jesus may be pleaded unfit for trial on psychiatric grounds due to our lack of unity. Jesus may be found guilty of making no difference at all by what we do or do not do. Jesus may be sentenced to suffer human apathy and nonchalance on account of our witness” (Patrick Willson, Pulpit Digest 1997). He went on to admit that perhaps it would be appropriate for defending counsel to rise and object that the preacher was badgering the witnesses, but he is making a good point. How will the world know about Jesus and what he stood for unless we are witnesses? Unless WE share our experience. We are only asked to witness to what we know: what we have heard and seen and touched. A witness has seen something, heard something, experienced something, and then all that witness is asked to do is to speak the truth about that encounter. That is our authority.
Our witness is to Jesus. Who Jesus is and what he has done in our lives. When we are called to follow him, we are asked to model our lives on him and be like him. Why would we want to do that? What was it that was so attractive about Jesus, what was it that gave his teaching authority? What was it about him that might appeal to others if we tell of our experience?
I have talked today about the authority of experience. All I am asked to do is to share my story. And yet witnessing to that story has another dimension to it. We can trust the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ gift to his followers, to be present in our speaking. Personally I am often aware of this as I prepare sermons. I may feel what I have put down on paper is pretty ordinary, but so often it has touched someone in a particular and appropriate way that I can only attribute this to the active participation of the Holy Spirit.
And don’t forget those words “go and tell”, “go and make disciples”, “you are my witnesses” were not spoken to preachers alone, but to all of the followers of Jesus. At the end of Mark we are told the women who were given the command to “go and tell” said nothing, because they were afraid. But clearly they did say something at some point because the story was told, the gospel was written. And millions of lives have been changed as a result. Jesus has subpoenaed each one of you. Not to be publicly humiliated, or forced into awkwardness. The reason for witnessing, says the first letter of John, is so that our joy may be complete. (read verses 1-4). Good news is unfinished, incomplete, until it is shared with someone else. Many of you will know that when that has happened, it is a joyful experience. Heaven has broken in to everyday experience. May that be our authority as we share our experience here and now.
Jeanette Mathews January 2006