Teaching with Authority
Homily for Tuesday of the second week in Easter
In the very first chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel, Jesus enters the synagogue of Capernaum and teaches. The reaction of the people is one of amazement. “The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.”
St. John illustrates how Jesus taught differently than the Jewish elders in the story of the meeting with Nicodemus. The Jewish rabbis and scribes loved to press the impossible meaning of a word in order to exclude it, and to draw forth the true meaning. “You cannot mean that a man is to enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born. What is it, then, that you do mean?” However, Jesus will not enter into this kind of dialogue with Nicodemus. He teaches without entering into the usual argumentative style of the rabbis. “You are the teacher of Israel and you do not understand this?”
Nicodemus will eventually come to faith in Jesus as he appears in two other episodes of St. John’s Gospel. So while his first meeting with Jesus doesn’t go all that well, we can still find something in his example that leads us to an understanding of what Jesus asks of each of us; namely, that we differentiate between human wisdom and heavenly wisdom.
Human wisdom is also at odds with heavenly wisdom in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning. The early community set aside their natural inclination to protect their individual property in order to provide for the needs of everyone in the community.
Faith in the resurrection of Jesus also asks us to embrace heavenly wisdom. As we continue in our celebration of this Easter Season, we will continue to be challenged to make that faith a very real and powerful witness in our 21st century life just as it became a powerful witness in the first century.
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