The centurion understood authority because he stood under authority: and so he could tell Jesus that it would not be necessary for Jesus to come to his house in order to heal his servant. “I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave ‘Do this,’ and he does it” (Matthew 8:9). His recognition of the nature of authority gave him the confidence to declare, “Just speak the word, and my servant will be healed” (8:8).

The centurion thus functions in the Gospel of Matthew as the model of how the authority of Jesus applies in our lives. At the end of the gospel we will see that “all authority in heaven and on earth” has been given to Jesus (28:18); yet because of the centurion’s story, we are able to see that authority is not measured by the correctness of our doctrine of scripture, but by the fullness of our obedience to Jesus.

We are generally not good at obedience; we are better at disputing about the authority of Bible verses, and so we tend to spend more time disputing instead of obeying. Yet Jesus marveled at the centurion and commended his faith (8:10) – with more pleasure, I imagine, than he will have for our argumentativeness.

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Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (Psalm 119:105).
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I long to understand your word, O Lord, fully and deeply: yet I get so caught up in the need to show that the verse I like is more authoritative than the verse the other guy likes. Teach me instead to show the doctrine of authority by being quick to put into practice what you teach.

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). That’s what Jesus taught, and you might think we would have gotten it by now. But we are slow to learn: we go on worrying about whether we will have enough.

So Jesus went on to talk about worry. “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear” (6:25). And yet worry is one of the things we do best, isn’t it?
There are many things in this world that you can not change, Jesus said, no matter how much you worry at them (6:27). And so he gave us this command, which is really quite simple and straightforward: “Do not worry” (6:31). Yet we are reluctant to take that command seriously.

Deciding that we will serve God with full loyalty means that we will no longer worry our lives with the quest for wealth. It means that we will believe that Jesus was right when he said, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” confident that the Lord who knows what we need will take care of those needs, and all these other things will be taken care of, too (6:32-33).

And we do believe Jesus was right about that, don’t we?

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It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives sleep to his beloved (Psalm 127:2).
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Ah Lord God: we confess that we are worriers. It is hard for us to let go of those worries. Yet our hearts’ desire is to trust in you. You are the one who knows our needs. We set ourselves to follow you, setting aside the worry, setting aside the quest for wealth: confident that you will care for us, each step of the way.

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