Cy Kellett is joined by Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin to explore how Jesus passes authority throughout the gospels.
Transcript:
Caller: When Jesus is on the cross, he says to John, “Behold your mother.” The Church interprets that as all disciples, therefore, including Mary as their mother. I was wondering, in what context does that not correlate to, say, John 21, where Jesus gives his disciples the authority to forgive or bind sins on earth? How do those two play with each other, or how do those two work together?
Jimmy: We’re going to see if Cy Kellett can answer this question for us. So I’m going to break it down into sub-questions. Jesus tells the beloved disciple, “Son, behold your mother.” He tells Mary, “Mother, behold your son.” We’re told that from then on, the beloved disciple took Jesus’ mother to his own. What did that mean in terms of what John did for Mary? What did he do for her once he took her to his own?
Cy: Well, a woman was dependent on a man in those days, so he took her to his home and watched over her.
Jimmy: Took care of her, particularly in her declining years as she was getting older. And, yeah, okay, good. First question answered correctly.
Cy: I’m glad we broke it up into bits, so at least I’m going to get some right.
Jimmy: Second question. Do you or I or any other Catholics today have Mary living in our house, and do we provide food and shelter and warmth and clothing and stuff for her in her declining years?
Cy: I feel bad about this one. I don’t know if I was supposed to, but no, I do not. I apologize if I was supposed to.
Jimmy: Okay, second question answered correctly. Ding, ding. So we are not receiving Mary as our own mother in the same way that the beloved disciple did. One way of expressing that would be to say that Jesus literally gave the care of Mary as a fictive mother to the beloved disciple. The rest of us share the maternity of Mary in a broader spiritual sense, but it’s not the literal sense.
Okay, now let’s look at the other points. Bryce actually mentioned two things. He mentioned binding and loosing, and he mentioned forgiving sins. Jesus gives binding and loosing to the disciples first before he gives them the ability to forgive and retain sins.
From what we know from Jewish sources, binding and loosing was a Jewish idiom that meant the power to make or modify laws. You could say, for example, “It’s a law. Today is a fast day. We’re all going to fast today.” Or if today already is a fast day, you could modify that law and say, “Okay, everybody, today’s no longer a fast day. We’re not going to fast today.” Jesus gives that power first to St. Peter in Matthew 16, and then he shares it more broadly with the other disciples in Matthew 18.
So here comes the question related to that. Could the power to bind and loose, and thus the ability to make or modify laws for the entire Christian community, be exercised by the entire Christian community? Or at most, could it be exercised by some subset of Christians, like the leaders?
Cy: Ding. Three in a row, man. I am killing it today.
Jimmy: So again, like in the beloved disciple example, Jesus is literally giving the ability to make and modify laws to the leaders of his Church. Any application that has to others is a derivative, extended spiritual sense.
Now let’s go for the other one that he mentioned, which was the power to forgive sins. He gives that to the disciples in John 20, and he says, “Whoever sins you forgive, they are forgiven. Whoever sins you retain, they are retained.”
Is it plausible? Here’s the question. Is it plausible that Jesus gave the power to forgive sins to absolutely all Christians and made them judges of their own cases or the cases of other Christians with no discernment or training in discernment? Or is this a power that would have been given only to some Christians who could serve as objective judges of other people’s cases and whether they ought to be forgiven or retained in their sins?
Cy: Yeah, it’s gotta be the subset. We need a…
Jimmy: Ding. Fourth question answered correctly. So, Cy Kellett, Bryce, he’s provided the answer to your question. The literal sense of all of these passages applies to a subset of Christians, namely the beloved disciple in the first one or a group of the Church’s leaders in the second two. Any application that is there to the entire Christian community has to be in a different and extended sense that is not the literal sense of the text.
Cy: Bryce, what do you think?
Caller: Oh, that’s a fantastic answer, and I really appreciate it. I want to correct one thing real quick. I’m not in Arlington; I’m in Farmington.
Cy: Oh, Farmington.
Jimmy: Okay. Yeah, we have a Farmington, Arkansas, here too. But it was…
Caller: Answered the question perfectly. Thank you.
Cy: So you’re saying everything Jimmy did was perfect? All I had to do was name your town, and I got it wrong? Is that what you’re saying?
Jimmy: Bryce, don’t be hard on yourself. Sigh. There was a miscommunication. It says Farmington on… It says Arlington on the whiteboard.