Listen up world, you’ve been carrying a wrong idea of what power is for too long.
Your main idea of power involves being the top dog. And for that you need the capacity to subjugate, dominate, control and exploit other people or nations. To make them servants for your own gratification, or economic slaves for your material goods. You think the successful person has it all, has people to do it for them, luxuriates while others toil. That’s top down power – and you can’t imagine any other.
That idea of power is carried on the wings of violence. You think that the powerful have the military or the industrial capacity to dominate. Either with soldiers, or with dollars. They rule.
It was ever the same. Who shall be Lord? Will it be Caesar, Hitler, Lenin, Trump? Who shall bring all the others into order under the power that they weild?
Listen up world, this is the big revelation… When God visited us in the flesh this most absurd outcome followed. It was a claim that this minor figure, this poor and powerless human being who was nailed to the cross as an act of public humiliation, is now “Lord“.
So let’s get this straight – To say that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is not to say that Jesus now has the same kind of power as all these other earthly Lords. It is to say that you have misunderstood power. What needed to change through God’s interruption of the world was your very idea of what it is to be powerful.
Yes I know that in the Hebrew Bible the Gods fought it out. Elijah‘s God fought off the Gods of Baal. It was a battle to who could be most impressive. Or the Hebrews themselves went into battles to fight for their God. They copied the other nations around them, believing your Gods proved their worth by giving you victory… because that’s what Gods do… they ‘rule’.
But listen world – that myth has been toppled.
The only way God could get through to us on that one is to turn it completely upside down.
I know it’s far fetched but it had to be done. To come and prove what God’s power is about. It’s about horizontal power not top down.
God embodied that power in one person. And that person’s power was the power to heal, the power to raise the spirits of the overlooked and proclaim them the true heirs of God‘s promise. The meek inheriting the Earth, the peacemakers not the warmongers.
To say that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and all other powers must answer to Jesus is not to say that Jesus is top dog… number 1 in the hierarchy. No, it is to say that our common view of power is a tragic mistake. The very idea that God wants to dominate in the way that the rulers will dominate is wrong. This is not the power of true humanity made in the image of true God.
The power that originated the cosmos, that brought beings into life, that sustains them through the lights of 1,000 billion stars, this power is a creator, a merciful and gracious power. It seeks to destroy no one, to dominate nobody, to enslave nobody. It seeks not our submission but our union. It is Love.
If that day comes when we all stand in front of God’s throne and sing ‘Jesus is Lord’, we will know what we are talking about. We are talking about a whole other kind of power that everyone must answer to. The one who made us for each other and ‘Him’.
The ‘judgement of God’ comes on our misuse of power. That judgement did not destroy us and its final announcement. It will indeed refine us just by knowing how wrong we have been to think the power is the will to dominate.
Power as shown in the death and resurrection of Jesus is the power to integrate all things because through God all things were made, and in God all things belong. In that integration the mighty are dragged down from their seats and the poor are lifted up. He fills the hungry with good things, but the rich he sends away with empty hands.
Integration and reconciliation are the same thing. We are reconciled to God in that we come to know the power, the intent, and the endless beauty that God has created, and will not destroy.
