A homily by: Fr. Gene
Tucker
Given at: “BY WHAT AUTHORITY?”
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” the chief priests and the elders ask Jesus in today’s text from Matthew.
Put another way, their question comes down to this: “What right to you have to do what you are doing, and where did that right come from?”
Of course, the chief priests and the elders ask this question because Jesus has become a direct threat to their power, their position, and their authority.
The reason
for this is clear: before now, Jesus was
teaching and performing miracles in other places, place like Galilee . To those in Jerusalem ,
Galilee might have seemed a long way
away. But now, Jesus has come to Jerusalem
Things are coming to a head as we move toward Good Friday. A showdown is coming between these religious leaders and Jesus, and today’s exchange is only one of the preliminary skirmishes between these two opposed forces.
The chief priests and the elders question Jesus’ authority because He has directly challenged their authority.
But let’s put ourselves in the place of the crowds who had gathered around Jesus to hear His teaching and to see Him heal. For they, too, must have asked this question to themselves, “Where does this man get this authority, and who gave it to him?”
Jesus’ growing popularity shows that many had come to believe in the authority He possessed. Many had answered the question about His authority and His believability. After all, the gospel writers make it clear that Jesus taught “with authority”, and not like the scribes.
This question has everything to do with a response to Jesus’ teaching, for if Jesus’ teaching does not rest on God’s authority, then there is no reason to believe Him at all.
But if
Jesus’ teaching does rest on God’s authority, then we are compelled to respond
to it. If we respond to Jesus’
teachings, then we must amend our lives to bring them into line wit what He
says.
Is God at work in Jesus Christ, in His teachings, in the miracles, in the way which He lived and died and rose again.
Can we trust Jesus’ leadership? Can we see that He has authority from God the Father?
For an answer to those questions, we should consider the integrated life that Jesus led.
Jesus leads an integrated life in three ways:
1. By showing that He has authority from the Father: Jesus’ miracles show that He has the same creative power as God has. When He healed a person, He restored them – recreated them – by conquering the destructive powers of disease. When He calmed the storm on the
2. By living an integrated life: Jesus’ manner of life matched what He said. He put into practice in daily living the things He taught. So the way He lived encourages us to live the same way.
3. By encouraging others to live the same way He did: Jesus seeks to bring His disciples into the same lifestyle that He lived. An example of this can be seen from His teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: He said, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall do no murder.’ But I say to you that if you hate your brother, you have already committed murder in your heart.” Jesus seeks integration of the inner life and outer actions.
By all these measures, the chief priests, the elders, the scribes, and the Pharisees all flunk the test:
- They lacked the power to heal and to control the forces of nature. Moreover, their teaching wasn’t consistent with the teaching and the tradition they’d received. Their teaching was lifeless, formal, and legalistic.
- They didn’t live out what they taught. Jesus criticizes them for that disconnect. He said that they loved their places of honor at banquets, they loved going about in long robes and being greeted in the marketplaces, they made the garments look like they were especially religious and devout people. But Jesus called them “whited sepulchers”. Put another way, Jesus said they looked good on the outside, but were full of dead bones on the inside.
Can we
trust the Lord to have the same authority today that He claimed 2,000 years
ago?
I believe the answer is “yes”, for these reasons:
- Jesus’ teachings remain consistent with the truth of God that He received, and which He passes on to us.
- Jesus continues to heal today, just as He did long ago. Just this past week, I heard of a situation in which a young person now shows no signs of the precancerous cells that the tests had shown she had. God is at work!
- Jesus integrated life stands as a model for all of us. No one else lived the integrated, sinless life that He led.
- Jesus’ power recreates the lives of those who believe in Him. We become new creations, as
