When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. (Matthew 22:33)When Jesus spoke, it was with a natural authority that those who had been educated in the finest schools couldn’t match. It wasn’t that he was so much smarter than they, or more talented. It was that he was much more in tune with the will of God that they were.
They had a lot of knowledge and a lot of training. They had studied philosophy and homiletics (the art of preaching), they had studied debating and polemics. They had studied a lot of stuff.
But in all the study, they forgot to study God.
Several years back, it astonished me when I found out that a man could get his DMin, the highest degree you can get in ministry and never study the entire Bible.
Now he would study a lot of it, but the bulk of his study was not the word, it was what people had said about the word.
When I visited a prominent liberal seminary thinking about going there, the director of admissions asked me to sit in what he considered a representative class. It was something on a book about Jesus. Not the Bible, of course, something someone had written.
When the teacher broke the class up in small group discussions on the miracles of Jesus, I found myself with four women: two Methodists, one Disciple of Christ and one Unitarian, a group that for the most part denies the existence of God.
The Unitarian started the discussion with the statement, “I don’t even know why I am doing this. I don’t even believe in the miracles.”
The other three women were quick to make an agreement and my thought was, I’m sure not in Kansas anymore. To my mind that was as far from my roots as I could go.
I left and didn’t go there. I do not want to give my money ($30,000 for a Master of Divinity) to a group that tears down what I believe.
That was why Jesus was so popular. He knew what he believed, and even more importantly, he knew the God behind the belief. And it just came out in spades in his teaching.
People are starving for the grace of God and the knowledge of God and they rarely get it. Instead they get 11 minute sermons on social inequity and feeling good about yourself.
The crowds were astonished at Jesus’ teaching because it was real and authentic. It related to them and to their relationship with the Lord of Hosts. And they listened.
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