Devotion #4: Alexander Cartwright
I remember the way that my father spoke about baseball when teaching me. He spoke with confidence and love, but I also knew that he was saying he had the authority to say these things because he had the experience. Think about some of the authoritative figures in your life. How did they speak? Did they speak with confidence, passion, and wisdom? Each of these qualities, we can find in authoritative people in our lives.
What was the biggest form of authority in your life? What made you want to listen to them?
Matthew 7:28-29 says, “And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.”
This passage is the ending to what is known today as the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus taught a large crowd about the law, worry, persecution, and many other topics. In this passage, the crowd listening to Jesus describes Him as teaching with authority, which was different from the way their scribes taught.
What different way of speaking could the crowd be alluding to? How would Jesus have taught differently than the scribes of the time?
Let us break it down like this and go back to the baseball analogy from earlier. I trusted my father to relay the information he knew about baseball because he played it. Yet, he was not the inventor. If I wanted to know all about baseball from the most authoritative source possible, I would have to ask Alexander Cartwright himself. (Bonus points if you knew the name of the guy who invented baseball!)
Using this analogy, how would Jesus differ from scribes?
John 10:30 adds, “I and the Father are one.”
Jesus states to all that He and the Father are one. This means that He has full authority over everything He is speaking. Not only that but the manner of which He spoke was different for other reasons.
Put yourself into a scenario where you need to teach about your favorite food. You want people to really like this food, but you are also going to have people who will not like it. In a fully honest answer, would you bend the information about the food to try to sell it to everyone? Would you leave ingredients out to fool others into liking it?
Jesus not only taught with authority because He was God but also because what He said was true.
John 14:6 says, “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
He was not afraid of pushing people away with truth and never bent His words to appease more crowds like we so often are tempted to do. He spoke honestly and confidently with the authority that He had over all things. This was a radical change for the crowd at that time because Jesus was exposing the sins of the teachers, calling out hypocrisy, and teaching truth in love.