From the Gospel of Jesus the Christ according to Matthew 21: 23-32 comes one of those tough choices stories we love to hate. It’s about authority and how some things are not really part of the Kingdom of Heaven plans, but if you must………..
One of my favorite rejoinders to my mother when she told me not to do something was: “Who says so?” Of course her greater authority, though highly questionable in my mind, won over—sort of. I somehow found a way round it when she told me to stop sucking my thumb, an activity of consolation that seemed to me to be absolutely and indispensably necessary to my salvation at the time. After all, they’d gotten rid of the dining room table under which I hid to assert my own authority and to hold my secret one-sided conversations with God whom I’d met in a book. All I had left for my soul’s comfort after that table was gone, was my thumb. I practically sucked it raw as I grieved the loss of my hideout.
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In this gospel story, Jesus asks the Temple authorities where John the Baptist got his authority to baptize people. Was it divine or human? Not easily fooled, they conferred and knew that if they said “divine” Jesus would ask them why they refused the baptism? BUT if they said ’human’ the people would rise up against them, because they understood John the Baptist to be a prophet sent from God. So they answered, “We don’t know.” to which Jesus replied Well then, neither will I tell you by what authority I do, and say, the things that I do and say.
Brilliant!
Now, substitute abortion for baptism for a moment. You can see, even experience, the authority bind: is it “God’s will aka divine authority,” that we all have equal rights/freedom of will? Or is it by divine authority that we do not murder ever and under any circumstance whatsoever—even under the best, most loving/caring/compassionate/true circumstances.
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Most all our worldwide current quarrels, uncertainties, even murders or executions are about one thing: AUTHORITY. Are you, and can you be, the AUTHOR of your own divinely given freedom—no matter what? "It depends" really doesn't cut it—or does it?
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