Articles

Jesus' Authority - Mark 1:21-28

If you’re reading a mystery or watching a suspenseful TV show or movie, is it a different experience the second or third time?  Do you read or watch it differently if you know how it ends?  Of course you do because now things that you didn’t even realize were clues, at first, now leap out at you as obvious.  Jesus’ preaching and teaching was doing the same for those that listened to him.  The authority of Jesus amazes the people that hear him because he was not giving an interpretation, like the rest of the scribes and rabbis of his day, but he was unveiling the Truth.  This is an important distinction because it transformed the lives of his hearers.  

Connections were being made for them that had never been made before, layers of the scriptures peeled back and exposed to reveal more about the person of God.  It was life-changing for his hearers because they could now see the signs of God’s love for them everywhere in Creation.  It gave them a hope that they’d never before been able to understand.

We are given that same possibility of hope by the words of Jesus.  However, to know the fullness of that hope, we have to recognize Jesus’ authority.  We have to allow the Truth that he speaks to help our faith.  We live and love for others because of the certainty we have in God’s mercy.  When we give Jesus the authority to direct our lives, we find ourselves seeing more and more clues and living our lives differently because we know how the story ends.