Personally, I don’t want to move to far away from the heart of the matter that this Lenten Season is calling us to.That is, again, the act of love which brought Jesus to offer his life as gift to the Father on our behalf, that act of love which is meant to become more and more our act of love by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Nonetheless, the gospel today (Mt 20:17-28) really does require us to reflect further on the nature of power and authority in the life of the Christian community.
Let me share with you something from Fr. Yves Congar, which really does place the question of authority right at the heart of the gospel.Fr. Congar says that our relationship as Christians to authority demands “a radical conversion…We must, in fact, sacrifice, abandon our human relationships in the form in which we receive them from the physical world of our first birth, which consist of two terms only:man and woman, master and servant; and we must receive them afresh from the hand of the Father as Christian relationships, and let them shape our lives ‘in the Lord,’ so that we live in the unique relationship of love of God, of Christ, and of men as God and Christ love them, or, better, of the very love with which God and Christ love them…Only after such conversion can the relationship of authority exist and be lived in a Christian fashion” (Power and Poverty in the Church, 99-100).
You see, when it comes to authority, as in every other area of our lives, conversion is demanded.As a matter of fact, questions of authority often draw us immediately to the central gospel call to ‘radical conversion’.They do precisely because authority touches on human relationships, particularly those that impinge on my personal freedom.
In the quote from Congar, we are reminded of Jesus’ call to those who would be his disciples to leave father and mother, brother and sister, husband and wife behind.We must, because sin—original and actual sin—has so marked our relationships that they have been reduced to relationships of opposition:me verses you; us verses them; etc.This is exactly the fruit born of sin—division, antithesis, opposition, competition.
These relationships must be altogether abandoned that God our gracious Father by his precious Holy Spirit might work within us a transformation.A transformation which heals the way we view the other.So that rather then looking upon the other as a competitor, we might look upon them as a brother, a sister who in love we seek to lift up, advance upon life’s journey, and build up.A transformation from seeing the other as an obstacle to my self-fulfillment, a competitor, to discovering in the other and in their fulfillment my own way to fullness of life.
The desperate need we have for such a transformation is often most clear in our relationships with persons in authority.How often we see the person who has authority in our lives as an enemy to our happiness.So naturally—natural only in the sense that it is simply in us because of original sin, not because it is the way God made us—we resist those in authority, fearing that somehow to submit is to be weak, to be diminished in some way.
Of course, Jesus puts the first call to such transformation on the hearts of those entrusted with authority.They must be the first to sacrifice all—their desire for approval, lust for power, greed for advancement, insecurities which lead to defensiveness—so as to be free to give, rather then take.
And in this is found what the heart of one in authority must be like and, indeed, the distinction of all authentic Christian relationship.Christian relationship is marked by the freedom to give, even to the point of losing one’s own life, that the other might find full life.Just what we discover, by the way, in the act of love in which Jesus offered himself to the Father on our behalf on the cross at Calvary.