Homily for Tuesday, 3 September 2019– Memorial of St. Gregory the Great

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6, 9-11; Psalm 27:1, 4, 13-14; Luke 4:31-37

Tuesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Luke’s Gospel says today that the people of Capernaum, where Jesus taught “on the Sabbath,” “were astounded at his teaching because he spoke with authority.” How did Jesus speak “with authority,” and what would it mean for us to speak and act “with authority” after Jesus’ example?

Our Gospel gives us some indication of ways in which Jesus “spoke with authority.” Today, we hear how Jesus healed a man with an unclean spirit in the same synagogue at Capernaum. Simply by placing this scene on the Sabbath in a synagogue, Luke is relating that Jesus had a sizeable audience for his teaching. A few years ago, during a pilgrimage I was on to the Holy Land, our group visited Capernaum. For the time, Capernaum would have been a sizeable community for a population centre other than Jerusalem in Roman Palestine, a town of about 1 500 people built around fishing on the Sea of Galilee. And its synagogue from Jesus’ time, now an archaeological site, is an imposing structure with its Greco-Roman columns. I easily imagine this space having been full that day for Jesus’ teaching and healing of the man with the unclean spirit. Jesus’ reputation as somebody who not only spoke well but backed up his teaching and preaching with actions like this miraculous healing would have spread quickly from a place like Capernaum.

But speaking well or powerfully is not necessarily enough for somebody to be regarded as authoritative, at least in a good way. Might we say that actions that show power, even in the presence of large crowds, are not in themselves enough to constitute authority?

Can many of us not think of a long list of world leaders and dictators who have spoken and acted with power, even people who were considered “authoritative” in their time? But there is a difference between authority and tyranny. Gregory the Great, the sixth-century pope whose feast we celebrate today, made this distinction between authority and tyranny, even within the Church. Gregory said, “No one does more harm in the Church than he who has title or rank of holiness and acts perversely.”

The rightful exercise of authority is never about me; it is about God. Authority empowers another and empowers our Church as a communion of faith with God’s grace. This is what Jesus did on that Sabbath in the synagogue in Capernaum and what Jesus continues to do through us today.

And it begins with our baptism: By baptism we all, not only ordained members of the Church, are given the power and the responsibility in Christ to speak and act with authority; to speak and act in a way that channels God’s grace to one another; to speak and act in a way that reconciles and forgives sin; to speak and act in a way that brings us to salvation together.