Questioning Authority (Third Lent B)

Questioning Authority

Third Sunday of Lent (Year B)
15th March 2009
Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Readings: Exodus 20. 1 – 17; Psalm 19. 7 – end; 1 Corinthians 1. 18 – 25; John 2. 13 – 22

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Several years ago, I worked at an American Embassy in a small country in West Africa. One evening, I attended an evening dinner at my Ambassador’s residence with a visiting delegation of high-ranking American military officers. I was feeling a bit run down, and indeed was to become quite ill the next day with one of the many diseases so common in that part of the world. So I wasn’t at the top of my game in being a witty, engaging, and informative table companion. Mid-way through the meal, the Ambassador and I were called away from the table for a short time for a pressing phone call. As we were returning to the dining room together, she looked at me in her best “counseling” face and said, “I don’t know what’s got into you Tony, you’re just not helping out here tonight. You have a problem with authority, I know, but deal with it.” She had misread why I was so sluggish that evening, but had read with absolute clarity a leitmotif in my life—I did have a problem with authority, and had always had one.

I am not atypical of Americans of my age. I think that most people accept the commonplace that Americans in general have issues with authority and can be quite irreverent about it. It is a heritage, I think, from our commoner English and puritan cultural roots, and something we share with our Australian cousins, who believe they far outstrip us in their disdain for authority wrongly bestowed—something to do with their transported prisoner roots. Americans who grew up in the 1960s as I did have a particular problem in this regard—since a commonplace of the era, placed on T-shirts and lapel buttons alike, was “Question Authority.”

Moses receives the 10 commandments, Jewish prayer book, Germany, c. 1290
.

All of today’s readings have something to do with authority—the giving of the Ten Commandments as part of the law of Moses, Saint Paul talking about how the word of the Cross is foolishness when viewed by the accepted ways of thinking of his day, and St. John’s telling the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the people doing commerce in support of the sacrificial cult in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the reaction this provokes.

Many scholars studying organizational behavior recognize that there are two basic kinds of authority: the kind that grows naturally from the skills, expertise, character, and leadership of an individual or group, and one that is established by formal position in a hierarchy, rank, title, or some kind of external validation like a university degree, membership in an exclusive group, etc. The first kind is intrinsic, and rests on the person him or herself and the informal process of reputation-building in a society. The second is extrinsic, and depends on the formal processes of validation or ranking in society. A good example of the difference would be a small platoon in a desperate battlefield situation: the lieutenant who is the commanding officer present gives an order to advance, but despite his rank, the soldiers there are slow in responding to the order because they question his judgment and trustworthiness due to past experience. But a private in the platoon, loved and trusted by all and known to be physically brave, leaps out into the fray, guns ablazing. The whole platoon follows. The lieutenant is exerting extrinsic authority, the private, intrinsic authority.

In the last few weeks’ readings, we have seen several times Jesus challenging the authorities of his day. One of the things that we see clearly in the Gospels’ tellings of Jesus’ ministry is that the crowds of Galiliean peasants he attracted recognized that he exerted authority of some kind. Most of the Gospels associate this with his unusual success at faith healing and working wonders. (Matt. 4:24; Mark 3:10; Luke 5:15; John 2:23). Some passages write this off as an unworthy or inadequate response to Jesus: “Do you follow me simply because you have seen this wonder? Let me tell you, you will see much more” (John 1:20). “You follow me simply because I made you bread to eat” (John 6:26). But elsewhere in the Gospels, people follow Jesus, or mark him as an enemy, because they recognize in his teaching something unusual—they see that he is teaching “not as the scribes and the Pharisees, but as one having authority” (Mark 1:22; Matthew 7:29).

Clearly, from the point of view of rank, status, position, and publicly known pedigree, Jesus was not exerting extrinsic authority. His authority was intrinsic—it came from who he was, from his acts, and from the effect of his teaching.

This was not because he simply “questioned authority” as a knee-jerk reaction or default position. After healing a leper, he tells him to go and be ritually cleansed by a priest, as prescribed in the Law. St. Matthew has Jesus saying “I have come not to abolish the Law, but to complete it.”

Where he did question authority, however, was when he saw that the extrinsic authority of a person, group, or institution did not match their intrinsic authority, that is, when their rank, position, and legal or societal power was not matched with actual worth, value as an example, and honesty. It is for this reason that he uses the word “Hypocrite” in his sharpest criticism of his opponents. The Greek word simply means “actor.” By using the word, Jesus accuses the religious leaders of his day of just pretending to serve God and lead God’s people. “You are placing overwhelming burdens on others you are not willing to place on yourselves,” he says. “You bar the gate to salvation to others while you yourselves do not enter it.” He is particularly sharp in criticizing those he believes are using authority to exploit or abuse people.

It is important to understand this use of the word “hypocrite” by Jesus. It criticizes those who are failing to live up to God's expectations but use play-acting as a means of staying the way they are, where they can exploit and control others.

There is a big difference between that and actually trying to behave better than you think you are in order to amend your life. Sometimes our sense of guilt or unworthiness is such that we think we are being hypocritical if we go to church, try to avoid the situations that seem to lead us inevitably to our besetting sins, or actually try to replace good practices and actions for our past bad ones. “Fake it till you make it” means pretend you are better than you believe you are so that you can actually become a better person. To my mind, this is not “hypocrisy” to be condemned, but rather simply one tool of trying to respond to God’s call. "Hypocrisy" in contrast is pretending to be better than you are so that you can stay the same way or even get worse.


Today’s Gospel reading is John’s retelling of the story of Jesus turning over the tables of those doing business in the outer courts of the Temple. The different Gospels tell the story variously. The Synoptic Gospels put the incident on Monday of the week that Jesus was killed, the day after his entry into Jerusalem. John puts it at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Most scholars believe that John has moved the incident for theological purposes and think that historically it was probably this incident that forced the hand of Jesus’ opponents and led to his death.

Jesus is pictured causing a major disturbance in what is probably the Court of the Gentiles immediately outside the restricted precincts proper. Using violence or threats of violence, he turns over the tables and seats of business people who made the sacrificial cult of the Temple possible. These are the money changers who take in Roman and Greek coins–ritually impure because of the images minted on them—in return for kosher ones without images that could be used in the sacred precincts, and those selling the small animals needed for the sacrifices. In the Synoptics, Jesus drives them away saying they have made what should have been a house of prayer for all nations into a refuge for thieves. This means he is accusing them and the system their commerce supports of robbing the people of the land, of exploiting them and cheating them. John’s Jesus gives a reason less critical of the system itself as oppressive: he criticizes the commercialization of what he calls “my Father’s House.”

Either way, Jesus’ disruption is a critique of the system of Temple worship as it existed in his day. Like the Qumran covenanters who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls before him and John the Baptist, he not only questions, but outright rejects the authority of those who run the Temple. The priestly class and its high priests were in varying degrees collaborationist with the Roman occupiers, having been put in their positions by the Herodian ruling elites, the local enforcers. The Temple as center of Jewish cultic life was a key part of the national life, and as such was watched over closely by the Roman authorities, especially at highly politically sensitive times like the Feast of Passover, which, after all, was a feast celebrating national liberation in an earlier time.

It is a prophetic act of symbolism, like Amos taking back his unfaithful wife Gomer, Isaiah walking naked and barefoot for a year, or Jeremiah not marrying. He seeks through the act to reveal God’s assessment of the Temple establishment.

In the story as John tells it, the people whose authority Jesus has just denounced reply by questioning his authority, “What sign can you show us that this little tantrum of yours really reflects God’s mind as you seem to think it does?” They want unassailable evidence, presumably in the form of another marvelous deed performed by this Galilean wonder-worker, that Jesus truly is speaking on behalf of God. But John’s Jesus replies not with another healing, or calling down armies of angels to defeat the Romans, but by saying “tear down this temple, and God will raise it up again in three days.” John explains this as a prediction of Jesus’ his own death and resurrection, and notes that those questioning Jesus misunderstand it to be a reference to the actual Temple.

John’s Gospel, alone of the four canonical Gospels, portrays a Jesus who has perfect knowledge of everything, and is only play acting when he asks any question. It is John’s way of expressing that he believes Jesus was indeed the eternal Word of God made flesh. The other Gospels portray a Jesus much less certain about the future. If the historical Jesus said anything like “tear down this Temple and in three days God will raise it up,” he probably was affirming the trustworthiness of the miraculous power of God to raise up his people when struck down wholly in words borrowed from the book of Hosea, “[the Lord] has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence: (6:1-2). It was only after the surprising events of Good Friday and Easter that a disciple like the writer of the Gospel of John could say with confidence that this referred to the “temple” of Jesus’ body.

Another of those post-Easter disciples is Saint Paul. In today’s epistle, he refers to the demands for various kinds of signs for authenticating authority. He contrasts the intellectual demands of two of the major systems of moral authority in his era by saying, “Jews demand signs [indicating God’s power] and Greeks look for wisdom.” That is, in Jewish legal interpretation and practice, one needs to establish the bona fides of someone claiming God’s authority by seeing whether adequate evidence of God’s intervention existed to warrant such a claim, while in Greek philosophical systems, one claiming our intellectual and moral allegiance needed to demonstrate the internal coherence and consistency of their teaching and its congruence with accepted standards of prudence and wisdom. The world seeks to authenticate authority by either power or wisdom.

To such standards of establishing authority, Paul says, “we preach Christ crucified” or “we proclaim the Messiah on a cross.” He says this is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” And indeed it is a problem for anyone—regardless of religion or nationality—who seeks authenticating evidence based only in our external experience and what we can see in this world only. If we take just what we experience here as the basis for our judging authority or God’s intention, there is little if any room for any justice, fairness, or possibility of hope. There is only meaninglessness, randomness, and despair. Bold, existential attempts at creating meaning and hope within an empty universe begin to appear rather hollow if we base our judgment only on what see here.

But Christ on the Cross was followed on the third day by Christ raised from the dead. And that risen Lord, though gone from our sight, still speaks and calls. He is the ultimate intrinsic authority. When we hear his voice, everything starts to fall into place. He calls to us all. As we hear him, we begin to learn that here is reliable, trustworthy, and empowering authority. The risen Lord is the ultimate sign of God’s intent, God’s love, and the universe’s meaning. He is the ultimate cohering principle and moral standard. "Christ on the Cross," says Paul, is "foolishness" to those who are perishing in a limited, hopeless world. But to those who hear God's voice, regardless of whatever limited standard of power or wisdom they once used, "Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

In the name of God Amen.