Canter Bridge

Jesus’ emerges from his strange encounter with destitution, abandonment, and triumph over satanic manipulation to re-enter civilization as an extraordinarily empowered teacher. Clearly, something happened to him out there.

The heavenly voice of Jesus’ Father had expressed its satisfaction with his filial beloved, only to drive him into the desert for forty days. There he was to encounter, seemingly alone, the intelligent and articulate shrewdness of his worst enemy. Jesus, by Mark’s account, won that battle by persistent simplicity. He countered satanic sophistry with the simple declaration of the relevant truth. Only a man well acquainted with Scripture and its interpretation could have done so. Yet Jesus’ cut and thrust were not complex. He knew reality, articulated it in the face of other-worldly enmity, and let the chips fall where they may.

They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.

Not unexpectedly Jesus finds himself in these early days pressed into freeing slaves of evil from the crushing burden and maniacal frenzies that have fallen upon them. Satan was all argument and word-smithing in the desert. Back in the hubbub of Galilean village life, his footprint is less elegant. Sickness, insanity, and contagion drool cover the human beings whom he has taken captive. Jesus liberates them, one after another, though this merciful combat does not squeeze out the time he takes to teach them. Rather, it serves as its context.

Mark’s comment about the deficient teaching of ‘the scribes’ is ripe for over-interpretation in a day like ours. We quickly label assiduous study irrelevant, the geeky idiosyncracy of people too clueless to get to the dance on Friday night. Jesus’ would scarcely have sympathized—nor Mark his chronicler—with such intellectual laziness.

Yet there was something thin and pale in the scribes’ teaching, something that might have gone unspoken and imperfectly observed had Jesus’ very different instruction not occupied its space alongside. Probably it was derivative, constructed of the arguably expert collocation of arguments that had somehow lots its grip on its reason for being.

Jesus, it seems, came quickly to the point. He spoke of a mercifully invasive King who would no longer allow his detractors to believe that he had left his subjects defenseless in the face of an impiously ravaging enemy. He would heal them, free them, reshape their minds. Jesus, having been identified as this King’s beloved, represented him with an immediacy that shook people from the somnolence of no hope.

Jesus brought unforeseen authority to bear on this context:

Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’

Fresh from conclusive victory over Satan in the desert, Jesus went about sacking his storehouses, freeing his slaves, showing him up in the public eye. He asked no permission. He walked in and, amid the convulsions and screaming, restored insane men, women, and children to wholeness and trust.

Authority is the word that came to those who looked on.

There exist other data that testify to the authority of this or that potency. Jesus left in his wake a trail of healthy, sane, trusting human beings who could still remember the stench and terror of who they had been. People choked out astonished words about his authority and his teaching, then turned back to embracing loved ones they thought had been forever lost to them.