Tuesday after Lent 1

The presence of Jesus poses the question, What counts for real and effective power in the world?  What figures as genuine authority?  In the Gospel narrative, Jesus teaches and heals with an inexplicable authority.  His capacity is unlike that of the "scribes' who are the learned authorities but who in fact have no capacity for transformative power.  They are custodians of the status quo. 

Paul takes up the same issue of authority.  He writes of the conventional authority of the scribes who are credentialed with social authority based on "wisdom."  But then he contradicts such conventional authority by the self-giving authority of Jesus, who seemed foolish and weak but who was i truth laden with uncommon authority to effect positive change. 

In the Gospel narrative, Jesus calls four fishermen to be his followers and to participate in his particular authority.  Paul also carries the case for alternative power from Jesus to the Christian community.  The church, when it is faithful, does not specialize in worldly wisdom or worldly power.  It is a community of the foolish, the weak, and the uncredentialed.  It turns out, however, that in Jesus' own life and in the life of the faithful church, real power to transform is not administered by learning or by leverage but by self-giving presence.  That self-giving presence from time to time has brought to naught the exploitative power and too-certain knowledge.  These texts invite us to consider our own exercise of this particular transformative power for the sake of our part of the world. 

It is one of the things I find most convincing in the Christian tradition that most of the important figures in the Gospels are from the lower and lowest rungs of society, certainly among those, Jesus, himself.  I would compare that with most of the other comparable scriptures, even Moses, though born to, in effect, a slave is the adoptive grandson of Pharaoh,  the Buddha is a prince, many of the major figures of Eastern religions are from the elite priestly classes, from the intellectual elite. 

These days I'm finding all of those elites to be undependable.  I have yet to be let down by the teachings of the laborer, Jesus.