Abstract
‘Authority’ and ‘repentance’: two words hardly conducive to the spirit of our age. The former meets suspicion, the latter incredulity: for if everything is society’s fault, if those in authority have failed me, then how can I be in any way to blame, what have I to repent? Yet authority is precisely the Sadducees’ concern, and Our Lord’s response is to prescribe repentance.
A glance at the newspapers, at least in countries where there is a free press, is enough to explain the contemporary mistrust for traditional figures and institutions of authority. It would be otiose to list the present panoply of opprobria charged against politicians, financiers, the famous and, of course, religious leaders—even to the extent that ‘hierarchy’ has become a dirty word. The open use of four-letter Anglo-Saxon expletives, meanwhile, enjoys public acquiescence, the most common of which is widely daubed on railside walls and under canal bridges throughout the nation by the graffiti literati, where it wittily prefixes the words ‘the Police,’ ‘the rich,’ ‘the Tories,’ or sometimes the name of whatever immigrant nationality is currently being scapegoated in that locale. Whether on real or virtual walls, proscribing anyone who seems to be doing better than us, and especially anyone who claims any authority over us, has become a popular pastime.
Figures in traditional roles of authority, including parish priests, have come to expect insolence, and perhaps in more masochistic moments even to feel that we deserve it. Such, after all, is the insolence that Jesus faced from the gang of religious leaders who said one thing, but did another. Affronted at his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and turning of the tables in their temple, they question his authority. The story he tells them describes two sorts of people: one who refuses to obey his father, but then repents and does so, and another who makes all the right noises but does nothing. Our Bibles say ‘the first’, but in an alternative and more convincing manuscript tradition, when Jesus asks the Sadducees which they think is actually doing the will of the father, they say the opposite: ‘the latter’. An insolent reply indeed, and one which makes more sense of Jesus’ hard words to them, when he replies that their lack of repentance and action makes them second class citizens in God’s Kingdom.
Note that the Sadducees, whilst keen to challenge and demolish Jesus’s authority, refuse to give a clear answer as to where true authority might come from. Our Lord asks them about authority of John the Baptist, and they say that they do not know. To make a modern parallel, it is all very well to virtue-signal on Facebook or scrawl your three-word manifesto above the urinal, but that is not really going to get us very far. Such unfettered cynicism cannot replace the traditional authorities it questions and undermines, nor does it even try to offer solutions. One might wonder whether in abandoning and despising one traditional forms of authority, we have unwittingly yoked ourselves to a new one: namely, the authority of the media barons who control the flow of information. To be sure, the most outspoken cynics end up unstuck when they actually try to achieve anything. A politician who makes a name for rebelling against the whips will struggle to secure his members’ assent when his day comes to rule. He may enjoy his lifelong rebellion of words, but when it comes to taking any action, nobody takes his authority seriously. The press will make sure of that, echoing his every utterance from former and more carefree years through the Byzantine echo chamber of social media. So all words become untrustworthy, all action hampered.
Where, then, might we find a genuine source of authority? Theologians have argued over the matter for centuries, their opinion vacillating between the traditional poles of Church and Scripture, with reason playing some part in the middle. Jesus here, however, seems to be pointing to quite a different kind of authority, and one which may strike us as naive. Jesus here claims that authority is found in a personal response to God and in action.
First, the response. Jesus calls us to repentance, literally meaning a changing of mind or heart (the ancients did not divide these two as starkly as we do today). This response must be personal: Jesus does not prove his authority to the Sadducees by referring to ecclesial bodies or sacred texts, but in both parts of his reply to their challenge, he asks them to think for themselves. ‘I also ask you a question,’ he says first; and later, ‘what do you think?’ In the end, it is he who judges them, but only on the basis of their own reply. If you think that words will suffice, pledging the correct creed or listing the correct one hundred beliefs before breakfast, then you are nowhere near the Kingdom, he says.
Second, the call to action: you shall know them by their fruits. Even if your words and thoughts are not right, repent and then go to the vineyard, do the will of your father. Thereby, even those judged lowest in the eyes of the world can get closest to the Kingdom.
This may sound naive, as I said. Yet one of the most profoundly revealing evenings I have spent in a church was when families affected by gang and knife crime came to pray and give testimony. One young father had abandoned his wife and son, denying any responsibility. That boy was stabbed to death at the age of 15, after getting involved in just the sort of lifestyle that his estranged father espoused. The father repented, turned to Christ, and now spends his life visiting prisons, schools and young people’s detention centres to tell his story and to wake people up to the effects of their actions on others. His grief, his genuine repentance and the way he spends his life now mean that he can speak with an authority which would soften even the hardest heart. Jesus’s closing point is that the Sadducees had seen exactly these sorts of transformations, conversions and changes of heart in the followers of John the Baptist, and yet remained hard of heart.
Perhaps people are sometimes inspired to repentance, a complete change of heart, character and way of life, by the outpourings of a humanist Twitter feed; perhaps an inane graffito might, like a Zen koan, open a sudden well of compassion. We could debate it online, trawling for an authoritative answer from the collective ocean of disembodied voices. Or, we could look within to our hearts, repent, and act.