tracing it back to the Source

The Word for today:
Mark 1:16-34

mark this:
They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. (Mark 1:21-22)

 

I can’t remember where I first met Jesus. I can approximate when, but not where. It is wholly understandable that I should not remember such details because when I met him I was at the tail end of a two-decade alcoholic haze.

That does not mean I was less than sober when I first read the gospels. Most chronic drunks get sober every day. The problem is that they are also drunk every day, which puts memories of dates and places into a blender and turns it up to high speed. Memories become unsorted.

But the heart, even of a drunk, is not confused. Hearts remember the who long after the mind has forgotten the when and the where. Thus I remember absolutely everything about Him, right from the start, whenever that was.

I vividly remember having the very same reaction as those, in today’s reading, who are meeting him for the first time:

They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. (Mark 1:21-22)

The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, "What is this? A new teaching--and with authority!” (from Mark 1:27)

Up to that point, I’d been literary all my life. That sounds sort of pretentious, but I don’t mean it in that way. I mean it in the same sense that if a kid next door sat on the porch all summer picking at a guitar and a banjo, we’d think of him as musically oriented. Or if that kid’s brother was out practicing basketball all day, we’d think of him as athletically inclined. I was the nerd next door with his nose in serious literature all day.

So when I first read the gospels, I was aghast at the injustice of it all! The so-called great authors had all ripped this guy off. Either blatantly or subtly, either in concurrence or in refutation, either consciously or subliminally, they were all cribbing (a polite word for plagiarizing) from this guy.

I could actually feel my eyes growing wider and wider, trying to take it all in. I could actually feel the revelation crystallizing: this is the Source; the seminal ideas in literature could be traced back to him, and no further!

He spoke, as the people were saying, with authority. What that meant to them was that he cited no references, which was the teaching methodology in the synagogues. Whenever a thought was expressed, its attribution was noted: “According to Rabbi Feinstein, whose commentary has been heavily influenced by Rabbi Schoenberg’s analysis of this issue…”

But there were no footnotes in Jesus’ presentation. How could there be? His thought was derived from no one. He was the Source. He was as far back as the stream of thought could be traced!

I knew just enough literature to know that I’d stumbled into the presence of the only author on earth who had never cadged a thought. I was in absolute shock and awe. I’d met the Beginning. And how deftly poetic to wait for the last page of his book before he calls himself that!--
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. (Revelation 22:13; cf. Revelation 21:6)

Since then, of course, I’ve come to know him as the Source in so many other, more “spiritual” ways. But for me, in those earliest days, he was the fountain of ideas before he became the fountain of life.

In his grace, God met me as I was, with a bottle in one hand and a poetry anthology in the other. I remain convinced that I never would have met the Author of Salvation (1) if I had not met the Primordial Poet first.

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(1) Hebrews 5:9, 12:2