When we hear in today’s Gospel that Jesus taught with “authority” at a synagogue in Capernaum, some of us may bristle at the word. Even Father Michael admits to being “a card-carrying member of People Who Have a Problem With Authority.”
 
But the authority called out in today’s scripture is different. ”God’s authority is the antidote to our pride and our own self-destruction,” offers Father Michael. He dares us this week to listen to the authority of Jesus’s message, which “calls us into order out of our disorder and breaks through the din and chaos and calamity of human beings running in all directions, each of us chasing our own glory.”