Those in Authority
1992 (Year C) 20 September / Pentecost 15
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
‘You must all obey the governing authorities. Since all government comes from God, the civil authorities were appointed by God, so anyone who resists authority is rebelling against God’. ‘You must obey all governing authorities’ – no exceptions. Now I guess those of you who saw last weeks headline in the Hackney Gazette about the family on Holly Street who haven’t paid any rent for the last eleven years with the result that they now owe £23.000, will be scratching your heads by now. ‘You must obey all governing authorities’ – even the inept ones? Well according to St. Paul even those, for they all come from God.
Now St. Paul wrote at particular time, with a particular group of people in mind. He couldn’t have possibly have conceived a time like ours. For the evidence grows that the long-standing concentration of power and authority in our world is under heavy assault and in great jeopardy. Every traditional authority in this country is in a state of crisis. The monarchy is under attack. Newspapers predict that soon it will not exist. The police and the legal system which for years seemed untouchable are constantly fending off critics. How can we have confidence in them when they get things wrong or have operated unjustly. Doctors, once gods, are now mere tired, underfunded mortals, prone to making mistakes in a system which can’t cope with the demands made on it. The Church – well nobody accepts the church’s authority – not even those who work in it. The church – or the political system – I can’t begin to think which is held in most contempt. The educational system has lost authority. It no longer decides what and how young people are taught and the family, well you’ve only got to ask parents to discover it has lost whatever authority it once had.
Maybe I’m wrong, but as I thought about this, the only people whose authority seems to have increased in recent times are pop stars, film stars and athletes of all kinds. None of whom I would entrust my life to.
This state of affairs is not new and there are ways of explaining what is happening in society. If you are a politician there are political reasons for it all. If you’re an historian you could trace all sorts of social trends which’ve brought this about. When such things happened in Old Testament you would’ve been told that God was finally losing patience with his creation and bringing it to an end.
What often seemed to happen in the Old Testament, in the face of such crisis, is that the prophets urged the people to turn back to the old traditions. They appealed to the power of the old authority, so they interpreted God as saying, ‘Come back to me’ ... return to how things used to be. Modem day prophets do exactly the same, Mrs. Thatcher, of blessed memory, said that we should return to the values of 100 years ago – that’s the answer for our society. Victorian values.
Sometimes this call to return to the old ways worked and for an exhausted despairing people, who saw nothing new, who hoped for nothing new, and who could speak nothing new such appeals have much to recommend them.
But there appeared, at a particularly crucial time in Jewish history, a new way of dealing with such crises. In 587 BC the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the people taken into slavery. The traditional authority, the old dynasty ceased to exist. What happened then holds lessons for us now.
For what did happen was that prophets emerged whose imagination was such that they could discern in the situation that God was acting in new ways. They were poets, Jerimiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, who asked impatiently of their listeners, ‘Do you not perceive it?’ They could discern God where others could not. They wrought the new actions of God by the power of their imagination, their tongues, their words. And new poetic imagination evoked new realities in their communities.
It meant that new hope was created for a community so deeply in crisis that it might have abandoned the entire enterprise of faith. Such interpretations, which can envisage the destruction of old idols and the emergence of a new community inevitably evoke resistance, not least from those who exercise authority in the faith.
Hopeful imagination sees presently, not terminal chaos in society, but the hand of God. The hand of God is present in the apparently frightening emergence of new communities, which we experience as revolutions and wars, with their own dreams of justice and equity. They are paralleled in our own society by the dreams of justice and mercy that dare to affirm that old structures may be transformed to be vehicles for the new gifts of God.
And so we find ourselves at a very risky point indeed. We are at a point of receiving from God what we thought God would not give, that is a new way to be human in the world. That is the challenge which God holds out for those with the imagination and the hope to see. AMEN