What does it mean to have authority, and where does it come from? How do we measure someone’s worthiness for the job to which God calls them?
There is a pervasive attitude of hierarchical authority in our culture; we consider those at the top to have the most power, and in descending order, those who have progressively less power. Someone can climb the ladder of authority when they show proficiency at the skills required to lead, leaving the least-qualified and -resourced at the bottom. This plays out in all sorts of communal spheres, most apparently in our military and government, but also in many modern church structures, and even in family dynamics. We gauge a leader’s authority on degrees, years of experience, communication skills, and, let’s face it, charisma and physical attractiveness.
One of the most revolutionary facets of Kingdom thinking in my mind is an authority that is based, not on some top-down allocation of power, but on a certain type of love. It is such a revolutionary idea, in fact, that I believe many in the Christian household have completely missed it. We continue to impose empirical notions of power and authority into Kingdom relationships and vocations, and the result is pain and disappointment often mirrored in the society around us.
We are cross-shaped people. It’s one way to understand what it means to be called “Christian”. Our lives are patterned after Christ, who although equal with God didn’t consider his position something to take advantage of for his own gain. Instead, he became nothing for us, humbled himself in the most profound ways possible, even unto death on a cross and descent into hell (a paraphrase of Philippians 2:1-11). That is Jesus’ power, that is the power of the cross. It is the pattern of all things “Christian”. Once we can reorient our notions of power and authority to his way of sacrificial love, we can better understand what qualifies our calling.
Everything Jesus said and did was a little vignette of this cross-shaped pattern of other-focused love. His solidarity with humanity, his co-suffering with us, is the very thing that grants him the power to lead us into new creation. When we miss this, we fall back into the very kinds of measurements for success that we have been saved from. Consider this quote from one of the so-called great military leaders of the modern era, Napoleon Bonaparte:
“Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.”
Jesus’ authority is based on his compassionate willingness to get close to us. Our authority in the Kingdom is the same. There is one especially poignant moment in the story of Jesus and his followers that show how we are reoriented to this type of calling, the first time he sends them out on mission.
For the early part of the gospels, Jesus’ disciples hover in the background. They are present to all he says and does, watching and listening and sometimes asking questions. This is what it means to be a disciple, to receive from the one to whom we offer our attention. There is a key pivot in their journey, in Matthew 10, that gives us tremendous insight into how Jesus might send us. Here is the pattern to consider.
We see at the end of chapter 9 a summary of all Jesus had been doing since the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew tells us, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd”. The word for compassion here, splagchnon in Greek, means “to have ones bowels clench”. Jesus looked upon the people, and he felt their pain in his gut. Have you ever felt that feeling when you saw someone in need? Have you ever been driven to get right up in the mix of someone’s pain, almost because you couldn’t help it? That is how Jesus felt all the time, and it was the source of his authority.
In the following chapter, Jesus sends out the Twelve as the response to this pain. Here Matthew calls them “apostles” for the first time. If being a disciple means “one who receives”, then we can understand this new designation as “one who is sent” or “one who gives”. Indeed, Matthew himself frames it this way in the directions Jesus offers: “Freely you have received; freely give”.
Yet Jesus doesn’t send the Twelve to begin a haphazard ministry without some helpful boundaries for them to learn what it means to freely give to others. We never stop being disciples of Jesus, but there does come a point in our maturity where we add unto that designation a call to be apostolic. He gives them three categories of people that can help us to understand how our growth in cross-shaped compassion equips us for work in our calling.
“Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’”
First, Jesus sends the Twelve to their own people, Israel. Why does he send them here? Because these are the people just like them. They speak the same language, have the same traditions and social cues, live in the same story. This gives us insight into the first category:
Your first calling is to the people who are just like you.
The writer Ann Lamott says the most powerful sermon we can ever preach is “me too”. She is speaking to this special form of authority we carry when we see others living a story we intimately know, because it is our story as well. Our hearts are more open because of empathy. The people who are “just like us” may be of a similar background, either ethnically or nationally, but it may be that they share that same spirit that dominated our lives before we met God. They also feel isolation, or rejection, or unseen. Your Kingdom authority is not because you have read all the right books, or done the proper courses, or are an eloquent speaker, but because you are drawn in by sacred familiarity. This is almost always your first and primary calling in your life’s work.
I grew up in church as a pastor’s kid. There wasn’t a time I didn’t know God on some level. My journey with God has been one of steady growth rather than a pivotal singular moment of praying a prayer or a radical encounter. Sometimes in church circles we almost feel shame that our testimonies are not dramatic enough, hellions one moment and purified saints the next. However, as I’ve learned to embrace my own story, I’ve been able to connect with others who have grown up all their lives in some form of church, yet are left feeling that there must be something more. I know my authority to come alongside lifelong Christians and help them breathe new life into their spiritual heritage. I am familiar with the old adage “familiarity breeds contempt”, especially when it comes to a life of faith - scripture, worship, prayer, and so on.
Reflection:
Ask you look over your responses to the questions on Story, what are the kinds of people that may be your personal Israel - those to whom you can say, “me too”?
Jesus’ second category is a curious one - Samaria. We see Jesus interact with Samaritans only a handful of times, and he uses a good samaritan in a parable lesson in Luke 10 about what it means to love our neighbors. These interactions and this story in particular would have been downright offensive to the first hearers because of who Samaritans are to Jews. They are half-breeds, abominations, a heretical tribe of people who also claim to worship Yahweh but in all the wrong ways. For Jews of Jesus’ day, Samaritans were more suspect than the average Gentile because they should know better. This people group elicited a certain disgust in Israel. So what is Jesus revealing to us about our second calling?
Your second calling is to those people “over there”.
Perhaps you immediately know who I’m referring to in your story. If “Israel” is the people who are just like you, then “Samaria” are the types of people that make you uncomfortable. Maybe you feel straight contempt for them, as if their very existence is an insult to you. It might be an ethnic group like it was in Jesus’ day, or it may be more subversive for you. They voted differently to you. They love the wrong kinds of people. They make you turn up your nose when you read about them in the newspaper. They make you feel all fidgety when they walk into the room in which you were once comfortable. Perhaps they’re rich, or entitled, or “lazy”. Those are Samaritans.
If our first calling is based on the solidarity of “me too”, then the invitation in our second calling is to those with whom we don’t empathize. There is opportunity for growth outside our tribal allegiances and prejudices when we cross the border into Samaria. The challenge Jesus puts before us is to lay claim to another type of compassion that is no less powerful - the ability to come alongside someone and to say, “I have no idea what that’s like”. It is a chance to learn solidarity that is not based on mere understanding, but presence. I think it is problematic when we limit our compassion to being able to see ourselves in the eyes of others beyond the foundation human experience. If we do so, we risk loving people with an agenda to make them more palatable to us, to get them to be more like us, rather than seeing them encounter unconditional love that might open them to meeting Jesus. Samaritans offend us, but in doing so, they invite us to shed some of our biases in order to love better. In this way, enemies might become friends and our capacity to love is enlarged.
In learning to love our personal Samaria, we learn more what it means to be the Beloved of God. Our identities shift away from those more temporal markers of our own tribal instincts to a deeper place, an incorruptible place. Once we embrace that sort of understanding of ourselves, there become fewer and fewer boundaries to whom we can practice compassion. This opens us to the final category: the ends of the earth.
Reflection:
Who might you consider your personal Samaria? Who are the kinds of people you hold contempt for? Who do you know personally that might be in this category?
For Jesus, an enemy is anyone who, by their very presence, causes us to question what we think about ourselves. For example, a homeless person might make us uncomfortable because we realize we aren’t as generous as we think we are. Who do you consider your enemies? Take time to pray for them, that God may soften your heart as you do so.
The parallel text for this sending story in Matthew 10 comes right at the end of the Gospel. Jesus has been crucified, he has descended into hell to conquer sin and death, and has been resurrected as a vindication that he is God’s true messiah. He gathers his disciples on a mountain in Galilee to give them final instructions before he ascends to the right hand of the Father:
“All 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 I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Luke phrases it like this at the beginning of the Book of Acts:
“It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
The more we learn how to love in places that are not like our own, the more we are able to transcend our categories of who is or isn’t worthy of love, and the more we learn to inhabit our true identities as being “in Christ”. Steadily we find, as we go to the “ends of the earth”, that there is no real boundary to compassion that this cross-shaped love cannot overcome. It is Jesus’ care and consideration for this journey of love that he first sends us to our personal Judea, and when the time is right to our personal Samaria, so that we can expand the circumference of our love to meet all people, everywhere.
Reflection:
One of the most remarkable things about the Church is that is becomes the place where “God is making a family out of strangers”, as the theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it.
Who are some of the people who have surprised you as you have been bound together in community?
What are some of the biggest lessons you have learned from growing alongside people who are not like you?