January 29, 2015
The following is a homily based on the Scripture readings for Sunday, Feb. 1
Edward R. Murrow. John Cameron Swaze, Eric Severeid and Walter Cronkite. How much nostalgia these names evoke. In the ’50s and ’60s, TVs were glued to the reporting of people like Huntley and Brinkley on NBC and Walter Cronkite on CBS. From Khrushchev through Vietnam, these men spoke at first for 15 minutes, then a half hour, and everyone believed what they said. Now we raise our eyebrows about “fair and balanced” news, look quizzically at Al Jazeera, and think CNN exists only to stir up the next bit of hysteria. Breaking news. Extreme weather. Information you need to know. And the more news we get, the less we tend to accept it.
Some of this is because there are so many places to get news today, and each place tailors the news to its core audience. Other reasons for our suspicions revolve around the implicit commercialism of all news, now more than ever: the news exists to get us to watch those commercials – buy things from luxury cars to Chia pets – as networks fill in time till the next commercial. Global correspondents bringing us trans-national corporations. We long for authoritative voices that we can trust.
Mark’s Gospel brings us the first preaching of Jesus and, from the reaction of the crowd, Jesus was a big hit. Jesus is still in Galilee, his home province, but he is speaking in ways that astonish the crowd. He backs up his preaching, to be sure, with amazing signs: curing the sick and casting out demons, which shows a channel to the very power of God. Even the demons are astonished, and Jesus has to quiet them down because no one gets to say who Jesus is in the Gospel of Mark until Jesus defines himself as a servant who serves by suffering. No Jesus Superstar here. Rather, a Jesus who speaks with authority, with power.
But what does that mean? We can pick up from the first reading, from Deuteronomy, that people asked God for a prophet precisely to be protected from the power of God. When they ask for a prophet, God says, “They have spoken well.” The God we think of in this passage is the God of thunder and lightning, the God who strikes and smites, the God whose basic tactic is fear. “In place of me,” God says, “I will send a prophet. And people better listen to that one!”
But Jesus does no smiting and striking. He causes no dread in people. In fact, they come flocking to Jesus in droves. What does it mean to speak with power, with authority? If we learn anything in the readings, we learn that the best prophets were the ones who revealed God the most. Jesus speaks with authority because he unveils the God of creation and redemption, not as a God who threatens and kills, but as a God of unlimited love and life. Jesus, last week, said that the Kingdom of God is coming – that state where we see God fully – and now Jesus shows us the Kingdom in the deeds that liberate us.
Power has had such a funny role in the life of the Church. Half the time it looks like power was against us; the other half, it looks like the Church wielded the power, and sometimes with a heavy hand. But power, as force, is meaningless in the Kingdom. The only power God wields is that of love, and the healing and wholeness that love brings. And if you think love isn’t powerful, just think of the people who influenced you most in your life. Nine out of ten times, they were figures of love and help.
Our choice is to be wowed by the crowd and stare, or to realize that Jesus’ power has been given to us in the Holy Spirit. Oh, we may not drive out many demons, but every day we have an opportunity to advance life, foster reconciliation, perform deeds of love, and overcome the forces of darkness and death. Every day we have the capacity to unveil, in our own lives, God’s bringing of the Kingdom into our world.
Ancient people looked to a prophet to come; modern people look for trusted people of the past. But Jesus gives us a Kingdom of the present, swelling with God’s power because our lives are flooded by the love of the Holy Spirit.