Authority
About this episode
Fr. Justin discusses the concept of authority in society and its significance in the context of the Gospel reading for the feast of St. Peter and Paul.
Today we are celebrating the great feast of St. Peter and Paul in anticipation, since it’s actually tomorrow. Given that, and given the content of the daily Gospel we just heard, I want to speak to you about authority. Authority is not a particularly popular topic in our society. In fact, we’re almost trained to have a rebellious attitude toward it. This goes all the way back to my childhood — the good guys are the rebels against the empire. That’s kind of how we tend to think about authority, if we think about it at all. We mostly try not to. We pretend, on some level, that we’re not really under authority. In fact, we are. Authority is all around us — it’s how things get done. As the centurion said in today’s Gospel reading: “I say to this one, go, and he goes; and to this one, come, and he comes; and to this one, do that, and he does it.” That’s how things get done, and we know this as human beings — that’s why we always have someone in authority, usually one person. And the centurion himself says, “I myself am a man under authority.” So there’s authority on all sorts of different levels, and it’s actually a pretty important concept for us to get right. This goes all the way…
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