Where is Power?

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

The theme of this sermon is power, and now that our invasion of Iraq is underway we have, for those who watch television, a constant and vivid example of the crudest of all forms of power, sheer physical force. Clearly this is not the form of power that the NT has in mind when it tells us what true power is. True power, Paul tells us, is seen in the Cross of Christ, so let us focus our meditation on the Cross. Let us think first about the weakness of violence and then of the strength of love, of the weakness of human wisdom and the strength of the divine foolishness.

Our two previous sermons were on Satan and Temptation, respectively, both traditional Lenten themes, and now we come to a third Lenten theme, power. The temptations in the wilderness were all temptations to use the wrong kind of power. According to Matthew 4 and Luke 4, the first temptation is to use the power of miracle to provide bread and thus buy people’s allegiance, the temptation of pork barrel politics and the purchase of power. Another temptation is to use the power of miracle to impress and intimidate people (by throwing himself down from the temple roof and not suffering harm), the power of personal charisma, to dazzle and trick people, the politics of personalities not policy. The last temptation is the political temptation par excellence, to employ Satan as campaign manager, and adopt his methods of slander, lying and fraud. (I recall that the late Lee Atwater, father of the politics of dirty tricks and personal destruction, repented on his early deathbed of the corruption of civility he so successfully deployed in the campaigns for Ronald Reagan. Too late he called for a return of the genie of filth and slander into the bottle of self-control and fair play). Jesus refused all the kingdoms of the world when Satan the father of lies and dirty tricks, offered them. Jesus would not use the power of this world because he incarnated that other polity called the Kingdom of God.

I am not artificially updating the NT by making it speak of politics we recognize today. Politics is the pursuit and deployment of power, power is the ability to control and coerce other people, and the rudest, crudest form of power is the power that emerges from the barrel of a gun, to paraphrase that other great Satan, Chairman Mao. The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness is all about political power, in this case the nature of the power of the Messiah, whom many took him to be. Like most of the NT the temptation narratives are a correction of the militarist, triumphalist notion of the Messiah, the one who smashes God’s enemies and restores Israel to the center of wordly power. There is a  messianic tradition in US self-understanding, planted here by our Puritan forebears who read the same  Bible as the Messianic Jews of Jesus’ time. It encourages us to see ourselves as the exceptional nation, the messianic people, whose wars are not like other nations’ wars, who cannot imagine that invasions launched by us are like other nations’ invasions. Ours wars are messianic and therefore our violence is redemptive. We are doing Iraq and the world a favor. How many of you secretly, or openly believe that?

This is the point at which I must tell you what I have written in the latest “Grapevine” about the invasion of Iraq. I opposed it up to the minute it started, as a member of the “loyal opposition” who owes my country involvement in debates about policy. Once the invasion started, however, I left behind the stage of opposition, graciously I hope, accepting that my side had lost that debate and moving on to the next stage of loyal opposition. I now support the troops in the sense of wishing them safety and success, I pray for the swift attainment of our short-term goals, and I shall work to hold our government to its long term promises to Iraq and the region. It is now irrelevant whether the war is just by traditional standards; our duty now is to do what we can to make its outcome as benign as possible for everyone concerned.

The important point of this sermon occurs in the Pauline text, that the power of God works through the Cross of Christ. Two worlds collide at the Cross. In the book I mentioned two weeks ago (“I See Satan Fall”) Rene Girard says that the cross beams of the Cross signify the cross purposes of rival desires, the stage of scandal where converging desires cause us to checkmate each other in the struggle for power, and then cause us to take out the frustration of our power grab on the innocent scapegoat. Jesus hangs there as the scapegoat of the world, because he refused Satan’s offers of power to defend himself by controlling others, to aggrandize himself by humiliating others, to buy election with miraculous bread refused to enter the rivalry for power at all. Instead he withstood and absorbed into himself all the rage of the violent world against God and one another, all the screaming self-assertion, strident righteousness, and nauseating hypocrisy. He refused to fight according to the rules of this world,  instead he persevered according to the rules of the Kingdom of God.

Let me tell you again my story of Mr. Shange. He is a huge Zulu policeman who ten years ago took me to do some interviews in the Msinga district of Zululand in South Africa. Msinga was then the most violent spot in South Africa because of inter-clan feuding. I asked Mr. Shange why this goes on and he said, “The young men no longer obey the chiefs.” I then asked if he ever talks to these young men and if he does what does he say. He said he talked to them often, hiking up into the hills to find them and then, having found them telling them of the “two bloods.’ “The two bloods, Mr. Shange?” I asked.  “Which are they?” “The blood of Abel,” he replied, “which cries out from the earth for vengeance, and the blood of Christ, which whispers ‘Peace be unto you.’” I think Mr. Shange has the whole Christian faith in those two bloods. The power of the Cross is the power to absorb violence and bear it away because God does not seek revenge.

To say that the power of God comes through the Cross of Christ is clearly to endorse Christian pacifism, - better to die than to kill - but I cannot be a pacifist for the reasons that St Augustine could not be. I cannot stand by while my loved ones or my neighbors are assaulted and, having the means to help, not help. I have often said that this does not justify war but makes it tragically necessary, that war must always be classified as a failure of human community, a failure of politics, a failure of security, and an unavoidable part of the tragic dimension of human life. I might even take some comfort from today’s Gospel lesson which shows Jesus using violence to expel the traders from the temple, but that would be to over-interpret the text. In any case I cannot be a pacifist and so must support the success of our arms.

Let me end with our text from St Paul. The Apostle does not intend it to be a teaching about war and peace and statecraft, but rather a teaching about how the saving power of God comes into the world and into our lives. The power and wisdom of God comes into our lives by this very act of preaching that I am doing now. Believe what I say and you will receive divine power and wisdom. The lives of nations may continue at the level of the troglodytes, or a male fraternity house, but our personal lives, yours and mine, can be lived in the wisdom of God and the power of God if we believe that this apparently foolish preaching you are now hearing is not as foolish as it sounds, but bears the power of God to save you. If you do not find it a scandal and a stumbling block you will experience the real miracle of power, the foolishness of God that is wiser than men and the weakness of God that is stronger than men.

Amen.