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It occasionally happens that a passage of Scripture comfortably familiar from youth comes back much later to haunt us with an unfamiliar severity. This can especially be so when rereading those teachings of Jesus typically cashed out in childhood as "sword drill" verses and Sunday school songs.
"The wise man built his house upon the rock … The foolish man built his house upon the sand … "—I can still hear the rollicking pentameter and anticipate the final, thunderous clap and clomp which nearly shook down the lights of our Baptist church when "the house on the sand went flat (splat)."
But before me now, in a somewhat more tentative middle age, is the whole text, the concluding sentences of the toughest teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!' Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; And it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall."
Now, the cheerful singing of my childhood notwithstanding, I have to admit that I have been one of those who from the time I learned that song until now have said "Lord, Lord" quite a lot and heard his sayings many times but have put them into obedient practice far less often than counts in this tough text as "wise." When now I read or remember that last sentence, it's not the church hall lights that get to shaking.
Anyone who teaches for a living notices further that it is the matter of authority which immediately sets the teaching of Jesus apart for his first hearers: "And so it was, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes" (Matt. 7:28-29). Attempting both to acknowledge and assuage my guilt when teaching this passage to the mostly cheerful pagans in my erstwhile secular university, I sometimes mischievously paraphrased this last as "He taught them as one having authority, not like our professors." The students' typically generous laughter indicates, their appreciation of both points: they had already learned about the gap between first-order and second-order discourse, and, without being taught it, that many who practice the second kind, in their second-hand fashion and self-interestedness, have lost what little authority they might once have had. As with the scribes in Jesus' day, lost authority has become a fact of contemporary life—in our universities as in other public institutions.
Even in the church.
Teaching now at a historically Christian university still rooted in the Baptist tradition, I have found the loss of authority in general an occasion for frequent reflection. Recently, as a background for our consideration of the modern British novel (from Joyce and Wilde to Rushdie and Julian Barnes), my students and I read and reflected upon Hannah Arendt's Between Past and Future (1961). Famously in this book Arendt declared that, as a viable concept, "authority has vanished from the modern world." She defines authority as "that which implies obedience in a context of freedom," not of coercion. What Arendt concludes about modernity is that foundations, or tradition, have little or no power to constrain either anarchic impulse or pragmatic temporizing; we have divorced ourselves from mutual obligations to objective, mind-independent realities wherever possible. As a lamentable result, we know a great deal about power and very little of authority.
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