Disciples of Our Astonishing, Amazing and Authoritative Teacher, Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 28, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 28, 2024
Deut 18:15-20, Ps 95, 1 Cor 7:32-35, Mk 1:21-28

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, we see that on the Sabbath, Jesus entered the synagogue and taught. All those who listened to him, St. Mark tells us, were “astounded at his teaching, for he taught with authority and not like the scribes.” He then showed the tremendous power of his authoritative words by silencing and casting out from a possessed man a demon. That amazed the crowd even further. They asked, “What is this? A new teaching, with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”
• The same Jesus who entered the Capernaum synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath enters Notre Dame Church tonight on the Christian Sabbath. And here he teaches with the same authority he wielded two thousand years ago. He has just spoken to us in the word of God and later he who created the heavens and the earth with his word, who called fishermen and tax collectors to follow him so powerfully that at his word they immediately got up and did so, will do something far more amazing than cast out a devil or silence a stormy sea. He will change bread and wine into God, into his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity and cast himself into us. If we recognize what is really going on, if we awaken to the power of his words, we ought to be far more amazed than Jesus’ contemporaries two millennia ago.
• The Jews in the Synagogue had been prophetically prepared by Moses to await the one who would come to teach with astonishing authority. We see that in today’s first reading. The Book of Deuteronomy is, essentially, one long valedictory address of Moses to the Jews as he was preparing to die and leave them, after having been God’s instrument to free them from slavery to Pharoah in Egypt and lead them through the promised land. They obviously did not want to lose him. He told them not to worry but to wait because someone greater was coming. “A prophet like me,” he declared, “will the Lord, your God, raise up for you from among your own kin.” From among the Jews, he was saying, God was going to raise up someone with even greater authority than Moses. “To him,” the greater Jewish liberator continued, “shall you listen.” To him, he said, rather than to me. He then told them plainly what the Lord had revealed to him. Moses, of course, had spoken to the Lord on Mount Sinai for 40 days, and regularly consulted him in the meeting tent, and had the reputation for being the only one who had spoken to the Lord face-to-face and lived. Moses said that the Lord had told him, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kin and will put my words into his mouth; he shall tell them all that I command him.” This new Moses, this greater than Moses, would not just speak on behalf of God but would speak God’s very words. Jesus would in fact be the very Word-of-the-Father-made-flesh and would declare, “I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me” (Jn 8:28) and “I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and to speak” (Jn 12:49).” That’s why Jesus was able to speak about the accountability to which Moses alluded at the end of these prophetic words. God told Moses, “Whoever will not listen to my words that he speaks in my name, I myself will make him answer for it,” and so Jesus would declare, simply, “The one who rejects me rejects the One who sent me” (Lk 10:16). Therefore when Jesus was teaching in the synagogue, part of their amazement and astonishment was Jesus’ listeners were beginning to recognize that they were hearing the greater-than-Moses, the one in whom Scripture is fulfilled, speak to them live.
• It’s important for us to recognize what Jesus’ first hearers did: that Jesus teaches unlike any other teacher who has ever come, before or after. His contemporaries said he “taught with authority, unlike the scribes.” The scribes, the ancient Biblical scholars, always used to cite Sacred Scripture or Jewish tradition, to base their teachings on the authority of the word of God or the wisdom of the rabbis. Such references were obviously an appropriate way for them to teach, quoting Sacred Scripture and Biblical luminaries rather than present merely their own opinions. But Jesus didn’t need to cite the word of God, because he is — not just was, be is — the word of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus showed he was the fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy by contrasting himself to what Moses, their greatest teacher about the ways of God up until then, had said to them on behalf of God in the desert: “You have heard that it was said,” — in other words, Moses said to you — “‘you shall not kill…’ ‘you shall not commit adultery… ,’ ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth…,’ but I say to you, you shall not even be angry with a brother, … or look on a woman with lust in your heart, … or if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other as well” (Mt 5:20-45). By his miraculous deeds, Jesus demonstrated he was indeed capable of saying, “But I say to you,” in contrast to what the greatest Biblical figure until then had said.
• Authority comes from the Latin word auctor for “author,” and Jesus spoke with authority because he is the author, the creator, of man, woman and the world. St. Mark uses the Greek word exousia to express Jesus’ authority. It literally means “from his own substance.” Jesus spoke with authority because he, as God, is the ground of all reality. To capture just a little of what it must have been like to listen to Jesus talk about God, about the world, about man, and about faith and about morality, it would be far greater than listening to the Wright Brothers talk about airplanes, Henry Ford about cars, Thomas Edison about electricity, Steve Jobs about iPhones, or John McCarthy about artificial intelligence. They could all speak with stunning authority because they were the “authors,” the inventors, of life-changing advances that we now take for granted. But that’s just a small glimpse of what it would have been like to be in that Capernaum Synagogue listening to Jesus, who is the author of the world, the one through whom we and all things were made.
• The truth is, though, that even if we can’t go back in a time machine to the Capernaum Synagogue, we can have that experience of amazement and astonishment. We should have that experience. The reason is because Jesus continues to teach us, here and now, with the same amazing authority.
  • Jesus does so, first, at Mass. The fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in their Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, emphatically reminded us that “when the holy scriptures are read in Church, it is Christ himself who speaks” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7). That’s why we stand when the Gospel is proclaimed, because we rise out of reverence and respect for Christ who himself is proclaiming the words of the Gospel live through his minister.
  • Jesus speaks with authority through prayer, both whispering to us directly and especially when we meditate on his holy words, the authority and astonishing quality of which have no expiration date.
  • Christ also speaks with exousia to us through the teaching of the Church, to whom he gave his own amazing authority to continue his saving work. Before ascending into heaven, Jesus said to his apostles: “Full authority [— his total, astonishing and amazing authority —] in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:18-20). The Church has been given, we in the Church have been given, Jesus’ astonishing and amazing authority with which to proclaim his words to others. And so we need to hear and heed what Christ teaches through the Church.
  • Jesus gave his amazing authority in a special way to the visible head of the Church he founded. He told Peter that he was the rock on whom he was going to build his Church and then gave him the authority even to open and lock the way to heaven: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” he said, “and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Mt 16:19). The Church firmly believes that that authority was passed down to St. Peter’s successors — all the way down to John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis — when the Pope teaches in a definitive way about the faith binding for all Christians everywhere and in every generation. And so we should respond with rapt attention, gratitude and holy and fully free obedience.
  • Jesus also gave his authority to the apostles as a whole (and their successors, the bishops). Before Jesus sent out the apostles and disciples he had commissioned to proclaim the kingdom, he told them, “Whoever hears you hears me, and whoever rejects you rejects me” (Lk 10:16). That’s why we listen to the bishops with reverence, for, when they teach in communion with Christ, they share not just their opinions, but his words of eternal life.
• Jesus continues to teach with staggering power in each of these ways. The first question for us today, therefore, is: How do I respond to the Lord’s teaching? Am I amazed and astonished by it? Am I grateful for it? If we genuinely are, then we will do what people normally do when they’re amazed: we’ll behave as if we can’t possibly get enough of his teaching. We’ll devour the Gospels. We’ll seek to enter much more deeply into his words through Bible Studies, prayerful lectio divina, podcasts like Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, resources from the Augustine Institute, Word on Fire, Ascension Press, the St. Paul Center and more. We’ll long to meet those who can open up the Word of God to us and help us to experience anew Jesus’ amazing and astonishing authority. There are some Catholics who live this way. Their fingerprints are all over their Bibles. They can’t read, listen and watch enough commentaries, books and programs to help them to understand better what God is saying. They can’t keep themselves from sharing all they’re learning. They behave about God and the love letters he has given us in the Bible with even more enthusiasm than the fans of the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens, San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions are all cheering for their teams to win the Super Bowl. None of us, after all, is a “spiritual genius” with all of God’s wisdom infused so that we need to make no effort. We have to meditate on what Jesus teaches us with amazing authority in Sacred Scripture and the other means by which he teaches us. We need to overcome the spiritual immaturity that believes we learned everything we need to know about the faith by the time we were confirmed. There’s so much to learn — and this truth that we will learn will set us free. Everything, however, begins with an astonishment and amazement toward God and what he teaches. Today, January 28, is the normal feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, doctor of the Church and patron of universities and university students. After Jesus, he’s probably the greatest teacher in the history of the Church, but he never lost his amazement at Jesus’ teaching, because of his love for Jesus. That’s why he studied so hard. That’s why he worked so hard to pass along that wonder to others, writing 50 thick volumes of theology before he died at the age of 50. He’s interceding for us now that we will have that same love for Christ that will make us zealous to learn and live his teaching in all the ways that it comes to us.
• We need to ask: Why and how does it happen that so many Catholics don’t approach God, his holy word, and his authoritative teaching, with hunger rather than boredom or disinterest? Why do so many say the words, “Thanks be to God!,” and “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ!” at the end of the liturgical recitation of Scripture, with a ritualistic yawn rather than an enthusiastic exclamation? There are a few important answers from today’s readings.
• The first we learn today’s Responsorial Psalm. We prayed four times the words of Psalm 95, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Notice we didn’t say, “If today you hear [God’s] voice, harden not your minds” or your “ears.” Lack of astonishment is not a function of a hardened head or clogged ears but a stony heart. It’s not a thing of insufficient intelligence, or physical or spiritual deafness, but inadequate love. Those who love God are astonished and amazed by him and what he says and does. We all know what it’s like when people are in love. Enamored of each other, they’ll often talk to each other for hours, because their hearts lead them to be mesmerized at what the other person says and who the other is. We’re supposed to love God even more. The Psalm tells us today that many of the Israelites had hardened hearts “even though they had seen [God’s] works.” God had worked so many stupendous miracles for them — the ten plagues in Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the daily manna and quails, the cloud of fire, the water from the rock, the theophanies on Mount Sinai — but many still had a spiritually fatal hardening of their arteries. Yet God has done far greater works for us than he did for the Jews in Egypt and the desert, with what Jesus gives us, for example, in the Gospel and in the Sacraments. Sometimes, however, just like our spiritual ancestors, our hearts harden through sin, through self-centeredness, through distraction and through lack of love such that we fail to have a passionate amazement for God and for the gifts he gives us.
• The second thing we learn in the epistle, taken from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Christians in Corinth. There are multiple applications of what St. Paul says that shed light on the vocations to marriage and to chaste celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven in the priesthood, religious and consecrated life. But what I’d like to focus on is the priority he gives to be “anxious,” preoccupied, concerned, solicitous, and focused on the things of the Lord, not the things of the world. In Corinth at the time, because there were so few Christians, Christians who married normally had to marry pagans and they were divided between trying faithfully to love God and love their spouse and their family. In that context, St. Paul praised chaste celibacy so that one could be undivided in the love of the Lord. Soon, as we see in St. Paul’s later letter to the Ephesians, Christians were marrying Christian spouses and they were able to live as a sacramental sign of the love that is meant to exist between Christ and his Church (Eph 5:21-33). But the main point is that we’re not supposed to be divided, but to incorporate everything, at every stage of life, into a communion of life with God. If we try to serve two Masters — God and someone or something else — we will end up not responding to the Word of God the way we ought. It’s a simple rule of life. The other persons or other things, as Jesus teaches us in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, can be “thorns” — worldly cares and anxieties — that can choke the growth of his amazing and astonishing word and work in us.
• The third thing that prevents us from benefitting from the awesome gift of Jesus’ teaching — in his word, in prayer, in the teaching of the Church, the Popes and Bishops — we find in the Gospel. The devil is present actively trying to undermine what Jesus is doing. When Jesus was speaking the Word with amazing authority, the evil one tried to interrupt Jesus’ words. He cried out from within the possessed man, alleging that Jesus had come to destroy, not to save. Despite himself, he couldn’t help but underline Jesus’ authority, calling him “the” — not “one of,” but the principal, even sole — “Holy One of God.” But so much did the “father of lies” fear Jesus’ authoritatively teaching the truth that he tried to hijack the whole synagogue service. We shouldn’t be surprised that the devil always seeks to snatch away the seed of the Word of God before the seed can bear fruit. The evil one is at work right now to try to get each of us not to take the Word of God today seriously. Just like he tried to distract those in the synagogue, he wants to distract us. Even if he doesn’t possess us because we won’t give him that opening, he still wants to thwart the plans of the Holy One of God for our salvation. Pope Francis mentioned the devil’s work in his Angelus this morning in the Vatican, stating that the devil wants one way or the other to possess us and “enchain our souls,” to suffocate our free response to God. He does so, the Holy Father says, through addictions, impossible perfectionisms, consumerism, hedonism, lack of self-esteem, fear, pessimism, dissatisfaction, the idolatry of power and thought manipulation. The devil is, indeed, the one who really wants to destroy us and, if he can’t prevent our coming to Church to be with God, he at least wants to get us to get as little out of it as possible. He wants us to go through the motions rather than to convert and make concrete resolutions to live by what Jesus teaches us. We live in an anti-authoritarian age dominated by the devil’s ancient “non serviam,” his “I will not serve.” So many have been impacted by an exaggerated individualism that contradicts love. So many are, like the devil, suspicious, even sometimes paranoid, of any authority outside their own, whether parental, governmental, religious, or, after the COVID pandemic smashed the ideology of scientism, scientific authority, too. Like he succeeded with Adam and Eve in the beginning, so the devil wants to convince us to be suspicious of God and to resent his authority as if all he wishes to do is to destroy us, to stifle and suffocate our freedom. So we need to be on guard of what the devil is doing, even right now, right here. And the greatest way we defeat the devil is doing what he refused to do: to obey God with faith and love, to listen to him speak with authority and put his words into practice.
• Today is an opportunity for us to stoke our amazement and astonishment at the great gift of Jesus’ authoritative teaching, in all the ways that he conveys to us the truth. Jesus teaches us tonight, just like he did during his own day, because he loves us and knows that we need to know and live by what he teaches. He speaks to us day-by-day, subject-by-subject, through prayer, through the Word of God, through the school of the Church and other means, to help us overcome our ignorance. The more spiritually mature we are, the more we recognize how little we know, how much we need to learn, and how grateful we are for the education in faith and life Christ provides us through his Bride and Body the Church. The real litmus test as to whether our heart is hardened or astonished and amazed is how we respond to this gift of God’s teaching. Today is a time to make resolutions to live astounded by Jesus’ teaching, by listening to the Word of God at Mass differently, by studying Sacred Scripture on our own, by bringing Jesus’ words to prayer, by coming to Bible Studies, by listening to Pope Francis, to Cardinal Dolan, and to those God sends us to teach authoritatively in his name, and by attending the doctrinal courses available at the Merton Institute or in so many online sources. And to do so with the ears of a grateful, awestruck heart.
• One of my favorite Catholics hymns, one that I had sung at my first Masses and regularly sing or say to God in prayer, is “Word of God Come Down on Earth.” It’s number 513 in the Worship hymnal. The lyrics summarize the type of amazement we’re supposed to have to God’s word. We pray, “Word of God, come down on earth, living rain from heaven descending; touch our hearts and bring to birth faith and hope and love unending. Word almighty we revere you; Word made flesh, we long to hear you.” We’re called to long for God’s word more than a parched man longs for water and to desire to be touched and pierced by it in the heart. The second verse continues, “Word eternal, ‘throned on high, Word that brought to life creation, Word that came from heaven to die, crucified for our salvation. Saving Word, the world restoring, speak to us, your love outpouring.” We need to remember that when God speaks to us, he is pouring out his love, not gushing forth arbitrary and soul-crushing demands! The third verse focuses on the power of God’s word, a power that is meant to be at work in all those who believe: “Word that caused blind eyes to see, speak and heal our mortal blindness; deaf we are: our healer be; loose our tongues to tell your kindness; Be our Word in pity spoken; heal the world, by our sin broken.” Tonight we ask him by that power to defeat the ways that the devil wants us not to take the Word of God seriously. And the final verse turns to the union between the “two tables” at Mass, the table of God’s word and the table of the Eucharist. We sing, “Word that speaks your Father’s love, one with him beyond all telling, Word that sends us from above God the Spirit, with us dwelling, Word of truth, to all truth lead us, Word of life, with one Bread feed us.” Jesus is that Word of God that seeks not only to lead us to all truth but to feed us with himself, the Truth incarnate. Today we turn to him and ask him to touch us in such a way as to make us burn for him with longing and amazement, softening whatever hardness there is in our hearts, so that, led to all truth and fed and strengthened by him, we may become focused about his affairs and echoes of his astonishing and amazing Word among all our families and friends in this world and, one day, among the choirs of saints and angels in eternal awe around the heavenly throne. As we prepare to hear from the one whom Moses foretold the most astonishing words in human life, “This is my Body!,” “This is the chalice of my blood!,” we ask him for the grace to be able to cry out with love at the elevations and as we approach the altar what the devil couldn’t help but confess, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God!” And he amazingly and astonishing comes here for us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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