Unaccredited Authority
Certifications and those who don't need them | Epiphany 4, Year B
It seems that there is a certificate for everything these days, along with some official group to issue it and, most likely, take our money for the service. One can become a Certified Special Event Professional (CSEP), for instance, or hold a Certificate in Career Readiness. There are certificates for the mastery of various software programs, planning methodologies, and fitness routines. There are Certified Dog Psychologists and Certified Beer Judges. From one top tier university I found 31 certifications in leadership alone, from a Certification in Critical Thinking Leadership to one in Innovation Management.
Not all certifications and degrees are bad, of course, but their growth signals a crisis of legitimacy. What were once basic human skills, shared freely and developed in community, have become certificates that are given only after the consumption of some educational product. And our judgement of those who are competent no longer requires our discernment of clear outcomes (are they really any good at X) but rather a glance at the frames on a person’s office wall.
This increase in certifications also reflects a general dissolution of community coherence. In a settled and thickly bonded community no one needs some organization to tell you that Mary knows how to help new mothers through the difficulties of lactation. She is part of a community of women who have learned from one another how to live into the gifts of their bodies. Together they help one another, unembarrassed of their biology, and it becomes clear that Mary is especially good at troubleshooting issues that arise. But in a fragmented and unsettled world, how would a nursing mother know where to turn when she needs help? In a culture where health has become the domain of experts, Mary’s gifts can only be exercised if she is a Certified Lactation Consultant, awarded not for her clear abilities as judged by her local community, but by some abstracted professional organization.
Further, in a world of certifications, a person might feel devoid of the proper knowledge to do the most basic tasks or fulfill the most immediate responsibilities. I remember talking to some friends who were glad to send their young child to a specific daycare because the center had a nutritionist on staff. These parents said they weren’t sure how to provide healthy food for their child and they trusted the daycare could do a better job. These parents both held advanced degrees and yet, though they were certified authorities (and perhaps because they were trained into the ideology of certification), they had been disempowered in their basic human responsibilities and competencies. Such is the crisis of authority in which we find ourselves.
Though there was no proliferation of certifications in 1st Century Palestine, the Gospel of Mark presents us with a Jesus who is stepping into a similar crisis of legitimacy. There were a host of religious teachers who were presenting their varied solutions to the challenges of faithfulness. And yet for too many that work had become a matter of abstract debates, concerns with minutiae rather than an ongoing encounter with the living God. As Dallas Willard has written, when the holistic reality of the soul is left out, everything becomes technique. So it was with many of the debates in the synagogues of Israel.
Jesus, the Gospel of Mark will later tell us, had mercy on the people because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Those who were supposed to be the shepherds of Israel, the living caretakers of the convenient relationship with God, had become more focused on the dead concerns of their expertise rather than the husbandry of Israel’s life of faithfulness. So is that when Jesus takes up the scriptures in the synagogue in Capernaum he gains credibility not through certification, the stamp of approval by the reigning officialdom, but by the clear living reality of God’s presence made manifest in his word and body. His authority wasn’t from any set of letters by his name or certificate on his wall, but his evident power to effect the reality of God’s reign.
Jesus is here living into what had long been understood as the role of the prophet in Israel. The prophet was not to be someone bound to any lineage or program of training in the way that priests were. Instead, the prophet was someone chosen by God to communicate the ongoing work of God’s faithful relationship, the free and loving dynamic of God’s covenant.