Musings on Power

Food for thought from Culture Making:

In the paradox of Jesus Christ--Yeshua from Nazareth, anointed One of history--the paradox of God's cultural agenda is summed up most perfectly and completely. God is for the poor--the oppressed, the widow and the orphan--and he is for humanity in our collective poverty, our ultimate powerlessness in the face of sin and death. But he makes known his redemptive purposes for us through both the powerless and the powerful, using both to accomplish his purposes. When God acts in culture, he uses both the powerful and the powerless alongside one another rather than using one against the other. To mobilize the powerless against the powerful would be revolution; to mobilize the powerful against the powerless would simply confirm "the way of the world." But to bring them into partnership is the true sign of God's paradoxical and graceful intervention into the human story.

I believe this pattern--God working with the poor and the rich, the powerless and the powerful--serves as a kind of template for seeking out what God might be doing in our human cultures. When elites use their privilege to create cultural goods that primarily serve other elites, that is nothing but the way of hte world, the standard operating procedure of culture. Furthermore, even when the culturally powerful deign to share their blessings with the powerless, but in ways that leave the powerless dependent and needy, this too is simply another marginally kinder version of the way of the world. Likewise, when the powerless cultivate and create culture that simply reinforces their oppression without bringing any real change in the horizons of possibility and impossibility, or when those is desperate circumstances rise up against the powerful, simply creating new structures of power in their place, we rightly recognize what is happening as business as usual. (pg. 209)

I first came to recognize many of these truths while reading Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (1990). Steele argues that much of the problem in race relations centers around the idea of power.

Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power (in relation to each other). To be innocent someone must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other's backs. The inferiority of the black always makes the white man superior; the evil might of whites makes blacks good. This pattern means that both races have a hidden investment in racisim and racial disharmony despite their good intentions to the contrary. Power defines their relations, and power requires innocence, which, in turn, requires racism and racial division. (pg. 6)

To follow Jesus faithfully, powerful and powerless, black and white, innocent and guilty all must converge as they do on the cross. We are guilty, He is innocent. We are God's "innocent" children, beguiled by sin and Satan. Jesus is powerful, we are powerless. During the passion, it appeared that the people were powerful and Jesus powerless. But as the Messianic kingdom call goes: the lion will lay down with the lamb, children will play over an asp's habitat.

After reading Sam Wells' Power and Passion, it is clear that the cross and resurrection were all about power. If this is so, why aren't we spending more time identifying our roles of power?