Jesus has authority. He commands, he teaches, he rebukes. Altogether, this authority is “astonishing” to his observers, for he teaches, unlike “the scribes,” as one with authority. I put it in that strange way because the observation is strange. What exactly could it mean to have authority unlike . . . the authorities? For that is what the scribes are. Does he teach with a strange, inexplicable charisma? Does he teach more clearly than anyone else?
The scribes represent the scholarly class of ancient Israel—the professional interpreters of Torah. But a good interpreter of Torah, everyone knew, was an unoriginal interpreter. If you stood up in the synagogue and said, “Here is this amazing new idea I have about Leviticus,” you’d be rejected as a false teacher. For the whole point of the Jewish authorities was that they represented the authority of a tradition, the authority of a received wisdom stretching back to Moses. There were variations in that tradition, small discrepancies and disagreements about how to interpret questions of the law or its history of interpretation. But no one disputed the central authority of tradition. The disputes were meaningful because they were disputes about what was or was not the authentic tradition. They were not disputes about the tradition itself.
What is strange about Jesus—and this strangeness is represented most clearly by Mark in Jesus’ rebuke and exorcism of demons—is that his authority is not, primarily, the authority of the tradition he has received. It’s not just the charisma of his person or the clarity of his words—though surely those things left their impression as well. It is that he speaks on his own authority. He doesn’t couch his teaching in terms of “here is what the rabbis really mean,” or “here is the correct answer to this dispute among the teachers.” He pronounces on matters of truth in an absolute and personal way, without reference to another.
He is, if we can look back to our passage from Deuteronomy, the new Moses, the one who speaks directly the word of God. We know that he is the incarnate Word of God, so unlike Moses, he speaks the words of God not simply because he hears them from another, but because he embodies them at the core of who he is. But our passage in Deuteronomy is instructive in its note about Israel’s fear of the direct contact with God’s words. Moses, for them, represents a comforting mediation. Hearing God’s word directly is dangerous, like stepping too close to the Holy Mountain. Better to keep it at a distance. Better, to fast-forward several centuries, to keep it wrapped up in generations of rabbinical reading and rereading. Direct authority like Moses or, God forbid, the Word itself, is a thing of fear and dread.
Or blasphemy. That’s an option, too, as Moses makes clear. To claim God’s authority and not have it is just about the worst thing you can do. So we’re faced again, in context, with C.S. Lewis’s well-known quip about our Lord: either he is God, as he says he is, or he is a complete lunatic. Either he is the new Moses or he is the most diabolical false prophet yet to appear. He is certainly not the nice generic Jesus of popular liberal culture—both conservative and progressive—who pops up now and then to rubber-stamp our pre-approved messages.
Maybe it goes without saying that the apostles and evangelists accepted that he was not a complete lunatic. So his authority became, for them, not mere astonishment, but blessing—for here God speaks to us himself, on his own terms, face to face. Yet they did not die. That is a point to reiterate: before, in God’s dealings with Moses, to see God face to face was to die. So something has changed, not in God’s unchanging eternal nature, but in us. And it can be nothing but the fact that God the Son has taken to himself a human nature. Therefore, seeing God is no longer death, but life: for to see God is to see ourselves and our nature elevated and enlightened.
I wonder if one reason the gospels spend so much time on demonic activity and exorcism is to contrast these diabolical activities with the same thing that they mock. There is on the surface a similarity between possession and incarnation. The demon inhabits a human person as a parasite, forcing nature to its own will. This subjection and enslavement is a perversion of the Incarnation; Christ isn’t the enslavement of human nature, but its liberation. He takes a human soul and body as his own, not so that human nature can be forced to his will, but so that human nature can regain the power of its own free dignity. We are not, as Satan would have us, mere pawns on a cosmic chessboard. We are rational agents capable of our own good work.
This is why the New Testament spills so much ink on what that good work looks like. Contrary to certain popular, largely Protestant conceptions of justification, salvation isn’t anything like possession. It is not about slapping a big poster of Jesus on top of our irretrievably horrible nature, nor is it about doing good works out of some weird sense of self-loathing, hoping the Spirit will just take over, since we are utterly incapable of doing anything on our own.
I think a lot of modern Christians ignore St. Paul’s comments about marriage and celibacy precisely because they have this cynical understanding of salvation. Elsewhere, Paul says it is better to marry than to “burn,” so mainstream Christian subculture treats celibacy as something suspicious precisely because human nature is so depraved that surely no one has any chance of doing anything useful without being married. This attitude combines with secular pagan notions of “the one” and the “soulmate” to such an extent that the Christian marriage is seen as somehow both the fulfillment of all our desires and the only way not to fulfill our desires. What’s lost is Paul’s sense of urgency about our vocation in Christ. Ultimately, marriage is a sign of a spiritual reality—our vocation toward union with God. Celibacy in this life is closer to the end goal. But the point of both is that they assume the positive possibilities of Christian work and life. Because, in Christ, we have taken into ourselves the Word of God, our lives become witnesses to his goodness. We aren’t merely vessels; we actively participate in his work. Christ isn’t a lunatic, and his authority is real—so when he delivers us from the powers of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that deliverance isn’t just an illusion, a legal trick, but reality. We can follow him in the confidence that he really will give us the power to win over the forces that threaten us.
As we enter the “pre-Lent” season (today is Septuagesima, the third Sunday before Lent), it’s a good time to remember the single most important weapon Jesus gives us over the forces of darkness: the sacrament of penance. Fr. Gabriel Amorth, the late exorcist in Rome, suggests that Satan fears confession far more than he fears exorcism. Exorcism reclaims a body from him. Confession reclaims a soul. We might think of confession as a moment of weakness, and it is in many ways. But in that great sacrament we embody the weak and vulnerable power of Jesus on the Cross. We take claim of God’s promises and say to the powers of darkness, No.
I can’t think of anything that matters more.