If adherence to anything like the Christian faith is on the wane, there are good reasons for it. Not the least of which is how much you seem to have to give up to follow Jesus. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Jesus seems to call us to live our lives according to a different set of rules. But what I am talking about here is not conservative or liberal religious values. It has more to do, I think, with power. And the Gospel calls us to reject the kind of power that is easy to grab, and instead find power in places other than where we’re generally being told to look by the world around us.
If you expect to gain power with your money, Jesus will tell you to give it away. If you think it is your status that will get you power, Jesus will tell you to be humble and take a lower seat when you walk into a room. If you want to use brute power to accomplish your goals, Jesus will tell you to put your sword back into its sheath - even if it was him you were trying to protect! If you think that being the smartest person in the room will get you power, Jesus tells you to be more like a child: more like someone who doesn’t know much at all, and who has no power. Feeling meritorious? Did you think showing up early and working hard would get you power? Remember last week, when we learned that in the kingdom of God, the guy who shows up last gets the same pay as the ones who were there at the crack of dawn.
Indeed, the paradox that the first shall be last and the last shall be first is all over Jesus’ teaching and all over the Jesus story. And mostly we don’t know what to do with it. Because generally speaking this paradox only sounds like good news to people who already know that they are behind everyone else, beneath everyone else, and have nowhere to go but forward and up - that is to say, to people who have no power.
Reading the stories about Jesus, we are flummoxed (or at least I am) by the one instance in which we hear of Jesus asserting power with force - when he drives the money-changers out of the temple - because it is so uncharacteristic of him. But then, he is fully human.
St. Matthew provides us with two instances of this kind of teaching on power this morning. First, we hear Jesus engage with the chief priests and elders of the temple about where his “authority” comes from. “Authority” is a description of a certain aspect of power. Don’t be fooled here, the chief priests and elders are challenging Jesus’ power, because they sense clearly that everything about him challenges their power. They might as well be asking him, “Who do you think you are?!”
It’s telling that Jesus will not answer them. Not because he can’t; he simply won’t. He doesn’t see the need to assert his authority (his power) any more than he already has, since to do so would be to use a kind of power that he is not willing to wield.
Then he tells a parable about two sons. The one son says he is going to work in the vineyard, but doesn’t do it; the other says he won’t work, but does. Jesus doesn’t even have to provide an ending to the story; he lets the chief priests and the elders do it themselves, before they realize that the parable is about them! And the moral of the story that Jesus reveals is that the powerless penitent will sooner find entry into the kingdom of God than the righteously indignant. First will be last, and last will be first. This parable is not about knowing what to do, it’s all about knowing who you are. The chief priests and the elders think they know who they are because they are in power. But Jesus tells them that they are wrong, and that the powerless (the tax collectors and the prostitutes) are closer to the kingdom of God than they are.
Jesus seems to know that power is a problem, or at least that the way we humans tend to use it and abuse it, is a problem. This could be a difficult insight to learn from the Son of God, a God who, we are usually eager to point out, is omnipotent! How could the all-powerful Son of the all-powerful God teach us anything about power, except that the more of it you have, the better off you will be? What else can God know about power other than that power belongs to God, as the Psalmist puts it? This is an important question, that goes, I think to the heart of Jesus’ mission to humanity, the question of why God became human. And Jesus shows us time and time again that he is unwilling to use the power that we all assume was surely within his grasp, because, after all, he rose from the grave and conquered death!
But it is St. Paul, dear, troublesome St. Paul, who we often think of as one of the most powerful figures in history because of what he accomplished in spreading the Gospel and growing the church. It is St. Paul who shares with us insights about the nature of Jesus’ life and ministry, and indeed, about the nature of Jesus’s power that we need to hear. St. Paul engages with the paradox of the Cross: that what we can intend for evil, God can intend for good. Thereby the first end up last, and the last may enter in first.
Paul does not shy away from Jesus’s paradoxes, and especially not when it comes to the paradox of Jesus’ power: that the all-powerful Son of the all-powerful God doesn’t seem to be especially powerful, by any worldly standard.
And St. Paul sees the wisdom of God where others have a hard time seeing it. Here’s what God showed St. Paul about Jesus, that it was hard for others to see: “… that though he [Jesus] was in the form of God [which is to say that he shared everything with God], yet, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born human likeness.”
Jesus, though he was God, emptied himself of his godly power, to share the life of the powerless, and to do his divine work powerlessly. Why do this? Because the wisdom of God knows the cynicism of power that’s exercised with strength - what we often hear referred to as “hard power” these days.
Try to find someplace these days where the exercise of worldly power does not carry a whiff of the cynical. In Washington? At the United Nations? On the Moon? Even there, on the Moon, power is cynically deployed and exploited. Lord Acton was right: power corrupts.
Knowing how cynical power can be does not prevent most of us from wanting it, especially since we know most of us can’t have it. And we are conditioned to strive for the things that will bring us worldly power: money, status, and force.
Power corrupts religion, too. You don’t need me to provide you with the details to prove it. The decline of religion in our time is at least in part a result of how much bad religion has been foisted on people over the centuries.
Don’t you think that Jesus knew that power corrupts? How could he establish God’s kingdom of peace and love by exercising power in the ways of this world? If war can even break out in heaven amongst the angels of God, what can God do to curb the abuse of power as he establishes his kingdom? Isn’t a kingdom just a social construct of power?
Listen to St. Paul again: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Who does St. Paul think he is, the Speaker of the House, calling for us to put principle over party? On what basis can he make this argument? He goes on: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.”
Though he was God, he emptied himself of his godliness, emptied himself of his power and became powerless except to serve. St. Paul is able to teach this way because of what Jesus taught him when he looked to Jesus for power. The details of Paul’s inner struggle are murky, but the insight from Jesus was absolutely clear. Paul prayed to God for relief from whatever it was that tormented him. He says he prayed three times, which is to say, I think, that he had prayed all he could, and his prayers had run dry. And Paul reports that Jesus said to him in his torment, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness. Who could say such a thing and be believed, if he had not died on a cross?
The Cross is the place where the awesome power of God meets suffering, injustice, and death with all the weakness of humanity. And the way this happens is that the all-powerful Son of of the all-powerful God empties himself of his godly power to become just as weak as you and me. For, it is when Jesus has emptied himself of his power that we can believe that he has become un-corruptible. And only when he is powerless can he share his grace with the rest of those who have no power and who know that there is nothing else for them to rely on - nothing else for us to rely on - other than the sufficiency of Christ’s grace.
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. And I suppose that that is because foxholes are obvious locations of powerlessness. We had thought that foxholes were a thing of the past, but we know better now, don’t we? But still, we avoid them if we possibly can.
Do you remember that famous line from the film, “The Usual Suspects:” “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”? Well, maybe the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that we wouldn’t find ourselves in foxholes anymore. Which is to say, that, without foxholes of the real or spiritual kind, it is easy for us to think that we can rely on whatever power we can amass, and that life might be all about gathering power, one way or another.
And maybe that’s why God became human: because of how misguided this basic human endeavor would become; because of how destructive the relentless pursuit of power would become; because of the damage such profound cynicism can to to a nation, a people, a faith, a religion, when all that matters is where the power lies.
Jesus is to be found where the power doesn’t lie, because Jesus gave up his power when he came to live with us, to be one of us, and to save us. I think this may be why the church came to venerate her martyrs so highly. Because those who had given up their lives for their faith, embraced the powerlessness of Christ, relying solely on his grace at the cost of everything.
Most of us are not called on to give up quite so much. But whether it’s money, status, or force, or some other nuanced category that doesn’t fit neatly into this scheme, most of us have been working to gain enough power to at least maintain control of the conditions around us, and preferably a bit more than that.
But there is no amount of power that will ever make us safe, that will ever protect us from everything, that will ever give us everything we want. There is only grace. And Christ’s grace is sufficient for us. And his power is made perfect in weakness.
Eventually we all find ourselves in a foxhole with no way to defend ourselves. And the reason Christ emptied himself of his power, is because he knew that this would be the case, and he knows that it’s at these times when we need him most. 333“My grace is sufficient for you,” he tells us, “for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
“What good does that do us, now?!” we are tempted to shout back at him!
And Jesus reminds us that it was when he was at his weakest moments that he embarked on his most important ministry, that it was from the Cross that the awesome power of God met suffering, injustice, and death with all the weakness of humanity and triumphed over death; that it was from the grave which had swallowed him up in death that he rose to bring resurrection life to all who would accept his grace.
So, “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.
“Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
1 October 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
