Authority

Twenty-second Sunday, 1996

Authority

This passage from Matthew is direct continuation from that famous recognition passage that was read as the Gospel last time. You remember, "You are Christ, the Son of the living God. And you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church, etc..... " Some people have said that the author was ... using a kind of pun ... to talk about Peter as the rock, and then, a few verses later, to talk about Peter as a stumbling block ... We don't know, historically, whether this happened. Whether Jesus was able to predict his passion, I mean at this point in his career He may well have been. He was a Jew. He knew what happened to prophets. But this business of Peter's recognition ... I don't know. And it is really not terrifically important, except ... if this did not happen historically, and if this is somebody's reflection, later reflection, on the state of the Jesus community, then this is extraordinarily revealing. In what way? Well, the figure of Peter has a certain prominence in the Gospel of Matthew, and in John, and in other places, too ... But please note, it's Peter who is depicted here as the great obstacle to where Jesus is evolved. So you have this moment of recognition, and yet you have Peter, this leader figure, presumably if there was something like a "Petrine Office" or a successor of Peter in the early Christian movement, and that's not itself clear, but certainly Peter's prominence was clear. We already, if this did not happen historically, already the followers of Jesus were sensitive to the fact of how easily the following of Jesus can be distorted in such a way that it just looks like "business as usual." What Paul talks about as being "conformed to the world." And what does it mean in this instance to be "conformed to the world?" Well, "the boss is the boss, and that's the last word...." Again, as I said last Sunday, that's the whole business ... that every time Jesus, in the gospel, mentions authority, He warns against it ... Every single instance..., where authority is mentioned, boss-hood, leadership is mentioned, it's followed immediately by a warning ... Okay ... probably, some of you have looked at this or heard about the fact that at Oxford University a few weeks ago the former Archbishop of San Francisco, a guy named Quinn, gave a talk in response to John Paul Il's insipico "Let All Be One" where the Pope asked for people to help him decide what the Papacy is supposed to look like in the 20th century. Assumed, the assumption, of course, is that the way it was is not the way it was supposed to be. Therefore he was asking for help and so this former Archbishop gets up and gives this long talk ... and says, "yeah, we've got big problems ... " And the biggest problem, in his view, was the fact that the Roman Curia, all these bureaucrats and the three thousand officers and the officials that work in the Vatican.. have really got in the way. People have been saying that for centuries. But it is still those bureaucrats that, you'll remember, that the Pope, whose decisions the Pope has certified. So what I want to talk about today, is this whole business of, ... of the nature of authority ... and how things are working in the Church because I think, and the Pope implies it too, it's not working very well. I've never seen a sociologist or an anthropologist work this out, but I think there is, I'm going to propose a theory about the relation of the individual to a bureaucracy ... or, the organization. Including the organization of the Church. I think most of us feel ... miniaturized in some way in the face of a bureaucracy, whether it is the President at Western, the Principal at King's, the Head of the Bank of Montreal ...., the Head of my department ... And I think there is a functioning assumption that they are right, if push comes to shove, and I am not right. I mean we may resist and browse about, but I think deep down in very basic places many of us, maybe most of us, maybe even all of us, that there is this assumption that "those guys know what they're doing and I don't." And God knows there's plenty of instances of that ... "oh, they must know more than I do." I mean, you don't have to go to the U.S. army, or the strange spectacle of the United States political season ... I don't know psychologically why, why, if it's true, that that happens ... I know it's true for me. They look so finished ... so well put together. And I, who operate from my own self consciousness about certainty, and turbulence, and confusion ... well, I'm simply overwhelmed. That typically, I think that is the typical situation. And maybe it's out of that sense of inner helplessness that we then invest ... all kinds of pertinences to make the bosses seem even more securely in place and stable as the residential holders of the last word. So we give them big cars, we give them big offices, we give them official toilets, to which only they have the key, we give them fancy clothes ... We do all that kind of stuff. And we do all these kinds of stuff ... Why do we do that? Well, if we're talking about the way the world works, you need all that stuff. It's like the "Wizard of Oz" or the Skexus in 'the Dark Crystal." They have to be dressed up in all this stuff because we know it's really puffery. But we have to carry on this charade because psychologically there's seems to be some ... impulse, some almost necessity for that. We have to convince ourselves that out of our insecurity there really is some locale where things are not in such shifting shape as they are inside me... And God knows ... the church ... the church has done that. Remember, we thought it was a big event when the flambella were taken away. Remember those big, some of you may, those big ostrich plume fans on those twelve foot poles that they used to surround a Pope with... the Pope was carried on the sedis gestatory carried ... on the shoulders of a bunch of husky Swiss Guards up and down the aisles of the Vatican ... Think about that stuff ... And then think about the Jesus of that Rembrandt sketch. Because this is what service is folks ... I think about the Jesus of Eichenburg's sketch on the other side of this screen. The Jesus of the bread line .... the Jesus who locates himself ... there ... so that whatever he says, whatever he does has its authoritative locust in that situation, not being in charge. All of this was stirred up not just by this meeting but by archbishop Quinn's thing and, interestingly enough, several people have noted that Archbishop Quinn when he was in fact in place as head of the Archdiocese of San Francisco refused to let some of the major theologians in North America speak in his Diocese on the very council to which he regularly applies in that document. Richard McCormick, the great Jesuit moralist, teaches at Notre Dame, wrote a letter to Common Wheel which published all of Archbishop Quinn's texts and said "well, I really appreciate that he said...But, please remember this is the man who didn't let me talk in his seminary ... on Vatican II. Where does all this leave us? We're supposed to hear the "Good News"... when we come together here. What is the "Good News?" It is a radically different perspective on reality than the one within which we normally operate ... because a bureaucracy is not always right in our instance here. To refer to what I said last week, that above all, the Grace of God, for leadership is the Grace to hear .... the Grace to hear, the grace to attend. And that, I put it to you, is precisely what authority's very first and primal instincts must be if it is to be faithful to the gospel ... It's the capacity to hear .... to listen. And not to just stand and give orders ... First of all, you don't know who you're ordering, and the orders do not come out of some kind of interaction between people who are equal. And this too is in Matthew's gospel. Matthew, interestingly enough, is the only gospel that has "do not be called 'father' because you have only one Father and He is in heaven. Do not be called 'teacher' because you have only one Teacher ... " Which suggests that the author of this text and that social situation really was being bedevilled by the fact that the world ... and worldly visions ... and worldly shapes ... and worldly understandings of leadership and authority ... were beginning already to distort the life of his community. So .... it is Good News, I put it to you, it is Good News to say "yeah, by God, I don't have to be ... violated by my bosses. it is Good News to believe that what is true in the world is the capacity to be taken seriously by somebody else. That is Good News. Whether it happens or not is irrelevant. It is Good News which breaks through the cynicism within which I regularly operate that says "no, the bosses are the bosses, and no matter what I do, are gonna have the last word." That kind of world construction, to make some little chink in that. To precisely put it out, as not only questionable, but radically wrong! That's Good News, I think ... I think that's Good News because then out of that ought to go the courage to say: "yeah, by God, I should be able to do what Paul did to Peter in the Letter of Galatians and say 'Peter, you're wrong ... you are a coward ... And that too, I put it to you, is Good News because the last thing I want to do is stand up to my bosses and say "listen, we've got to do stuff differently here ... listen, you're mucking this operation up in a major fashion." For Trojcak to be transformed into a character who can do that, without spite .... without self agrandisement ... That might be the Best News, as a matter of fact.

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