Power
John 19:1-16a
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In a news story this week it was reported that 11% of the residents in Puerto Rico, roughly 150,000 homes and businesses, are still without power, six months after that island nation suffered a direct hit from hurricane Maria. When I heard that I didn’t think about the political history of that island and everything that might be contributing to our fellow citizens being left to languish so long in such a terrible state. No, what I thought was how easily we interchange the words ‘electricity’ and ‘power’. Tell someone you are without power and my guess is that their first thought will be that you do not have access to electricity in your home, that the lights don’t come on when you flip the switch on the wall, that the digital display on your stove or coffee maker or microwave over is blank. That- gasp- you cannot access the internet. Now I certainly don’t mean to minimize the situation in Puerto Rico. The failure to adequately help its residents is truly a disgrace. Losing power means more than simply losing electricity, since electricity has become such a necessity to the things that we do daily. It keeps our food from spoiling by powering our refrigerators. It helps us to cook our food by powering microwaves, cooktops, and ovens. It makes our homes more comfortable by powering thermostats that control when the heat comes on in the winter, and running the swamp cooler or air conditioning unit during the heat of summer. So perhaps the reason why the two words are so interchangeable is because access to electricity indeed gives us the power to do so much. And really, that is what power is about. It is about agency. It is about self-direction. It is about having the ability to make certain things happen, and the ability to keep other things from happening.
Then I came across another news story this week about the National Day of Unplugging. The title itself points to the way our relationship with the power of electricity has been inverted. It used to be that if you wanted electricity, you had to plug something in to make it work. We were tethered by the electric cord. Now we can charge up all kinds of devices and carry the power around with us wherever we decide we want to go. So that it isn’t the lamp, or the appliance, or the TV that’s plugged in anymore, it’s us. We are plugged into these things that hold their power for as long as the battery lasts. The people behind the National Day of Unplugging suggested something along the lines of a traditional Jewish sabbath. From sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday, people were encouraged to unplug from their digital devices in order to re-connect with themselves, their loved ones, and their community in real time and space. I might add to that a connection with an entirely different alternative power source, God.
Power can be a tricky thing, though. Just when you think you’re the one that has it, it turns out that it has you instead. Look no further than Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect or governor of Judea. He has power. In fact, he says as much to Jesus. “Don’t you know that I have the power to release you, and power to crucify you?” But is that really true? Certainly, as the Empire’s man in charge, his was supposed to be the ultimate authority for law and order in Jerusalem that day. But as the history of that city has demonstrated over the past two thousand years, questions of order and authority aren’t quite as cut and dry there as we would like to imagine. The place is a powder keg of competing groups and agendas. The Pharisees are critical of the Herodians. The Zealots are distrustful of the Sadducees. The Samaritans are considered a disgrace by the Jews, and neither one likes the occupying Roman forces except the tax collectors who are on the take. Add to that mix a religious festival celebrating the people’s liberation from slavery to an oppressive regime, and you’ve got all the makings of a potentially bloody rebellion. Jerusalem was not Pilate’s home. He much preferred the Mediterranean breezes of his headquarters on the coast. No, he was in Jerusalem to keep the peace, the Pax Romana. He was there to remind the people just who was in charge, to demonstrate, if need be, the full power of Rome.
There’s a scene in the Steven Speilberg film Schindler’s List in which the title character is talking with Amon Goeth, German commander of the camp that holds Schindler’s Jewish workers. It’s late at night following a party at the commander’s house. Goeth is drunk and he observes that Schindler is not, “that’s real control,” he observes. “Control is power.” “Is that why they fear us,” Schindler asks. “The power to kill is why they fear us,” Goeth replies. “The power to kill arbitrarily is why they fear us,” corrects Schindler. “A man commits a crime and we kill him, he should know better...That’s not power, though, that’s justice. That’s different than power. Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.” “And that’s power,” asks Goeth. “That’s what the emperor said,” explains Schindler. “A man stole something. He is brought in before the emperor. He throws himself down on the ground. He begs for mercy. He knows he’s going to die. And the emperor pardons him. This worthless man, he lets him go… That’s power, Amon.” he tells the commander, “that is power.”
Pilate knows that there is no case against Jesus, that he shouldn’t die. He says that he has the power to release him, but the currents of the city, the incitement of the crowd had its own power that day. Pilate commands the Roman forces in the region, the mightiest army belonging to the greatest imperial superpower of its time. There is no real justification for killing this itinerant religious leader. He hasn’t incited an armed uprising. He hasn’t, as far as Pilate knows, been criticizing the emperor. In fact, the whole thing sounds like a religious dispute that’s being politicized. He gives them a way out, a way to prevent sending this man to his violent death, and offers to release him instead. They push his buttons, “if you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor’s. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor,” they remind him. As if he needed reminding. He wouldn’t even have been there if it weren’t for the emperor. Wouldn’t have his position, wouldn’t have his power.
That’s the problem with that kind of power. Just when you think you have it, turns out that it has you. And once we are committed to it, once we make the bargain to give away what amounts to our souls in service to the powers that be, the power of the moment, the power that brags and bullies and belittles- we find that in our effort to feel more powerful ourselves, we have ultimately made ourselves power-less. We are instead held captive by the will of the mob that screams its slogans, and are ourselves condemned by the lesser alliances that we make.
That is how power tends to work in this world of our making, because it is about what we can make, what we can do, what we can build. The old mythic story of Babel is about this very thing. It isn’t about a single language, it is about God’s response to a humanity that has lost its connection to the very source of its own being in the belief that they have the power to do just about anything. We even have a word to describe
this, we feel empowered. The importance of that word shouldn’t be minimized for people who have been made powerless. But you see that’s just it. That is what we do. The assumption that Pilate and the crowd are operating on is that power is a zero sum game. That in order of one person to have it, another person must be without. It is always power over. And it is what is killing us, what condemns us. It is why so many have misunderstood the original mandate of God to humanity with regard to our planet. We think that being in charge means getting to do whatever we want, having power over the earth, instead of recognizing that in this view the earth has remarkable power over us, and may no longer be able to sustain us at the rate we’re going. It is what divides us into factions that each want Amon Goeth’s control over what other people do.
But just last night I finished reading Madeleine L’Engle’s remarkable, ground-breaking book A Wrinkle in Time. The climax of the book comes when the book’s protagonist Meg Murray receives the wisdom of 1 Corinthians from one of her guardian angels, Mrs. Who. It is the wisdom that Jesus embodies that day before Pilate, a wisdom that we heard just last week in our first reading, “the message of the cross,” Paul writes, “is foolishness to those who are perishing. But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God… For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength,”
The power of God is not power over this world of God’s making. That is what so many people find so disappointing. Something happens that they don’t like and they want to know why God didn’t do something about it, why God didn’t exercise some kind of power over the situation to change the outcome. That is how we think power should work. It’s the supposition behind the juvenile question about God creating a rock that God can’t lift. We suppose that what makes God all powerful must be the ability to do anything. But In a twist of irony that should not be lost on any of us. Jesus stands, bloodied by the scourge of barbed Roman whips, robed in royal purple and crowned with thorns as a mockery of human power and authority. The true power of God, the power that is foolishness to a self-condemned world that is killing itself, is the power with and for. The power to pardon instead of punishing, the power of restoration instead of retribution. It is nothing less than the power of love, to not only withstand our worst but to free us from it as well, by coming alongside us and never abandoning us to our own devices. It a divine foolishness that puts all other wisdom to shame, the divine strength that reveals all of our shows of strength for the sham that they are. In this powerful love, so seemingly weak and despised, all other power is reduced to nothing for the sake of so much more.