By What Authority Do You Do This

I recently rewatched the movie Good Will Hunting with my family. It’s one of our favorite movies and tells the fictional story of Will Hunting who has a genius-level IQ but has little formal education. He works as a janitor at MIT and secretly solves some of the math problems that have stumped the experts. One of the PhD professors takes Will on as an apprentice and is both awed by Will’s talent and bothered that Will doesn’t have the “appropriate” respect for the authority of academia and the formal training that the PhD’s have.  

I think we see something similar happening in today’s gospel.

Jesus is out teaching and the religious authorities come over to him and essentially say, “Show us your credentials! Who authorized you to teach – let alone teach like this?” They’re bothered that he attracts crowds, speaks in such a compelling way and, maybe more importantly, contradicts some of their teachings. It also bothers them that he did not train for years like they did yet possess an understanding of the law and prophets that runs circles around them.

Jesus doesn’t answer them but instead asks them a question about John the Baptist’s authority. His question puts them into a bind, and they choose not to answer. So he does not answer their question either.

So often in our world, we are conditioned to think that religious or spiritual “truth” can only come from sanctioned sources or from “experts.” But Jesus knew that spiritual authority doesn’t come from human institutions, popularity, elections or the approval of others. It comes from God. And through his deep and personal relationship with God (and his tradition), Jesus found truths that he shared with the world.

Passages like this one get me thinking a lot about “authority” – the various kinds that might exist, who has it, who thinks they have it and what it takes for us to believe our own inner authority.

So many of our Advent characters had to discern and listen closely to their own inner authority, and many had to defy the powers that be in order to be faithful to what they knew to be true. I can also imagine that it was not easy for Jesus to assert his truths knowing that the religious and political authorities would be angry with him (and actively sought to harm and discredit him). Even his family did not understand him. They thought he was out of his mind (Mk 3).

Part of our Advent journey is to slow down and to listen deeply to what is stirring in our hearts, our bodies, our dreams and in the world. And in the biblical tradition it is often the “authority” of those on the margins that has the most to teach us.

This is not to say that any authority outside of us should be rejected or distrusted. But in the words of Richard Rohr, OFM, “only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. Christianity in most of its history has largely relied upon outer authority. But we must now be honest about the value of inner experience, which of course was at work all the time but was not given credence.”

In the same reflection on authority, Rohr quotes Fr. Thomas Keating, one of the great teachers from the contemplative tradition, that I want to offer here:

The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from [God]. If we get rid of that thought, our troubles will be greatly reduced. We fail to believe that we are always with God and that [God] is part of every reality. The present moment, every object we see, our inmost nature are all rooted in [God]. But we hesitate to believe this until our personal experience gives us the confidence to believe in it. . . . God constantly speaks to us through each other as well as from within. The interior experience of God’s presence activates our capacity to perceive [the divine] in everything else—in people, in events, in nature. 

So part of the “work” of faith is actually believing our own experience and listening for how (not if) God speaks to us and through us and how (not if) God is speaking to us through others and through our world.

Currently I’m reading a book by Mariann Budde called How We Learn to Be Brave. You may remember Maryann’s name because she is the Episcopal bishop of Washington and gained a lot of attention because she spoke directly to President Trump in her sermon the day after his inauguration. She asked him to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” because of his many comments related to gay, lesbian, and transgender children, as well as undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. 

I see her actions as a form of trying to be true to inner authority in the face of an external authority. As she said in an interview after the event, “I try my best to ground my views on the teachings of my faith…And I was aware of the magnitude of the moment, to be sure. I was conscious of the fact that I had been given uninterrupted speech to a very important group of people at a very important moment. I felt the awe and the weight of it.”

Our lives may not offer us such momentous occasions! But they will offer us opportunities. Maybe as we go through this week, we take to this to heart as we discern what to do in our daily lives. Maybe we work to develop a new confidence in what is being spoken into the world through our lives. Maybe we work to listen more closely to the authority of those who speak from the margins. Maybe we work to listen to the authority of this earth as it speaks to us.

Certainly there will be external sources of wisdom that we can turn to for guidance and direction. But it is also likely that these external sources might be saying or doing things that go against our experience or wisdom. Learning to listen to and trust our own inner authority may be an important pathway to our own transformation in a world so in need of transformed people (and not just people who do what they are told).