The Amazing and Astonishing Authority With Which Jesus Teaches Us, Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 31, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Harlem, NY
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 31, 2021
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 today’s homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, we see that on the Sabbath day, 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 a demon from a man. 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 this chapel of the Missionaries of Charity 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 himself, into his body and blood, 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 even more amazed than Jesus’ contemporaries two millennia ago.
• 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 scholars of the Mosaic law, always used to cite Sacred Scripture or Jewish tradition, to base their teachings on the authority of the word of God. That was a totally appropriate way for them to teach, sharing their interpretations of God’s word rather than merely their own opinions. But Jesus didn’t need to cite the word of God, because he is the word of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he routinely contrasted 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). Jesus was capable of saying, “But I say to you,” in contrast to what the greatest Biblical figure until then had said, because he himself was the auctor of all creation. Jesus spoke with authority because he is the author, the creator, of man, woman and the world. 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 greater than listening to the Wright Brothers talk about airplanes, Henry Ford talk about cars, Thomas Edison describe electricity, Steve Jobs talk about Mac computers, iPads, iPods and iPhones. They could all speak with stunning authority because they were the “authors,” the inventors, of what we now take for granted. But listening to them would be just a small glimpse of what it would have been like to be in that Capernaum Synagogue listening to Jesus, the author of the world, the one through whom we and all things were made. Jesus could command even the seas and the wind (Mk 4:41) and the demons and they would obey him, because he is the Lord of all.
• 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 that same amazing authority.
• He does so, first, at Mass. The fathers of the Second Vatican Council 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 through his minister.
• Christ also speaks 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, he 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 teachingthem to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:18-20). The Church has been given, we have been given, Jesus’ astonishing and amazing authority with which to proclaim his words to others.
• Jesus, third, gave that 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, 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 to Pope Francis.
• And Christ also gave his authority to the apostles as a whole (and their successors, the bishops). Through Moses in the first reading, God had said in prophecy about Jesus, the prophet God would raise up from among the Jewish people, “Whoever will not listen to my words that he speaks in my name, I myself will make him answer for it.” When Jesus, that long-awaited messenger of God the Father actually came, he authoritatively spoke about how he was giving that authority to his apostolic ambassadors, saying in St. Luke’s Gospel, “Whoever hears you hears me, and whoever rejects you rejects me” (Lk 10:16).
• Jesus continues to teach with staggering power in all of these ways. The question for us today is: How do we respond to the Lord’s teaching? Are we amazed and astonished by it? Are we 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 Study and prayerful lectio divina. 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 enough commentaries to help them to understand better what God is saying, and 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 rabid Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans are preparing for the Super Bowl. Is that the way we live? All of us who read, moreover, have our favorite authors whose works we generally devour. Each of us is called to have more zeal for what the Holy Spirit writes us through the Word of God and the teaching of the Church than kids in recent years have had for Harry Potter books.
• If God amazes us, if his Word astonishes us, then we — you and I — need to show it by reading the Bible, particularly the Gospels. We can hear a little bit of the Word of God at Church, but if we never study the Word of God on our own, we’re no better than a student who just shows up for class but never does homework. That might work in kindergarten, but it would never work in college and especially in grad school. None of us 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. We also have to ponder what he teaches us with astonishing authority through the Church he founded, through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, through the writings of the Popes and the bishops. We need to overcome the spiritual immaturity of thinking we learned everything we need to know about the faith by the time we were confirmed. It’s simply not true. There’s so much to learn, and this truth that we will learn will set our lives free. But all of this begins with an astonishment and amazement toward God and what he teaches.
• Why and how does this happen, that so many Catholics don’t approach God, his holy word, and his authoritative teaching, with hunger rather than apathy? The Responsorial Psalm gives us a clue. We prayed, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Notice we didn’t say, “… harden not your minds” or your “ears.” Lack of astonishment is not a function of a hardened head but of a stony heart. It’s not a thing of inadequate intelligence but of insufficient love. Those who love God are astonished and amazed by him and what he says and does. That’s where we need to begin. You know what it’s like when people are in love. Enamored of each other, they’ll talk to each other for hours on the phone, because their hearts lead them to be astonished at what the other person says. 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 [his] works.” God has done far greater works for us than he did for the Jews in Egypt and the desert, but sometimes, 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.
• 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.” The lyrics summarize the type of amazement we’re supposed to have to God’s word. We sing, “Word of God, come down on earth, living rain from heaven descending; 
touch our heartsand bring to birth faith and hope and love unending. Word almighty we revere you; Word made flesh, we long to hear you.” Can we really pray those words, that we “long” to hear God’s word more than a parched man longs for water? 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.” When God speaks to us, he is pouring out his love! The third verse focuses on the power of God’s word: “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.” 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. Jesus is the One who comes down on earth, to touch us, to enter into Holy Communion with us. 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 and opening whatever hardness there is in our hearts, so that, led to all truth and fed by him and with him, we may become the 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.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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