The weakness of power (Luke 4.1-13)
The Weakness of Power (Luke 4.1-13)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Lent 1C, Kirkin’ the Tartans (March 10, 2019)
Tom James
Back in the 1980s, there was an anti-drug campaign that used the line, “Just say no.” Some of you may remember the ads. For people in my generation who were deluged with this message, it was probably not very effective, and it also became something of a joke. We would use the line to talk about trivial things: “Just say no” to leg warmers, or high-waters, or big hair. “Just say no” to stupid songs or goofy ads. But of course, the “just say no” campaign was about something much more serious: “just say no” to drugs, and to peers who try and push them on you. Just say no to chemicals that can take over your life, that can diminish your abilities, that can make you susceptible to life-threatening accidents or injuries or overdoses. “Just say no” was about resisting things that could damage or destroy or enslave.
There’s actually something very important about this simple act, even if it seemed silly to me and my peers at the time. It isn’t just about saying “no” to things the government doesn’t approve, but, much more deeply, of learning to say “no” to things that harm us. Sometimes, in fact, it means saying “no” and standing firm in our “no,” against any and all social pressure that would demand that we conform and submit. “Just say no” can be a way of refusing the demand that we stay quiet about the truth about ourselves our about the world as we see it. “Just say no” was what Martin Luther was doing when he refused to bow to the pressure of bishops to recant his truth, what Rosa Parks was doing when she refused to sit at the back of the bus, what independently-minded Scots have done for centuries in the face of English dominance, what teachers are doing now when they are told they have to accept terrible working conditions and inadequate resources. We discover over and over again what power there is in saying “no.”
In Luke, Jesus begins his ministry with three opportunities to “just say no.” We call these “the temptation story.” In the first “temptation,” Jesus resists the urging to turn stones into bread. Now, we know from the rest of the gospel story that Jesus has the power to do it, and that he doesn’t mind doing it when the need is great. Remember the feeding of the five thousand? But here it is a matter of whether his hunger will have power over him, whether he will succumb to the urging to use his gifts to satisfy his own private need. And he says, “no.”
In the third temptation, Jesus resists the suggestion of trying to coerce divine intervention to protect him from his own reckless actions. Later in this same chapter, we find him actually doing something like that when he denounces leaders in his own hometown, leading them to try to throw him off a cliff. But, here, it is a matter of whether he will make his own rescue an end in itself—whether he will seek to show that he is invulnerable to physical injury and death. It is a question of whether he will be bound by his need for safety and security. And Jesus says, “no.”
But it is the middle temptation, I think, that cuts to the heart of the matter. In his second temptation, Jesus is shown all the kingdoms of the world and asked if he would rule them. This one is key to the story of Jesus, because Jesus in the gospels is announced as the “Christ,” the anointed one, and the “anointed” one is what you would call someone who has the authority to reign. As the “anointed one,” Jesus is supposed to be the one who will finally bring all the nations into the commonwealth of God. It would seem here that the tempter is offering him precisely what his goal is, or should be.
But Jesus knows that it isn’t that simple. He knows that the way he will reign is not by means of the same kind of coercive power by which states and governments keep their people in order. Make no mistake, Jesus embraces the role of “Messiah,” and to be a messiah is to be a political force that will challenge the authority of the empire, but the force of Jesus does not take the form of the strong force of armies, or of coalitions or parties that seek to gain control of legislatures and parliaments. This strong force, this force of militarism and statecraft, the force that we often think is the most powerful thing in the world, is precisely the force that is offered to Jesus by the tempter. It is the force that seems inevitable. It is the force that seems to be required to get anything done, even something good, or great.
But this kind of power is also the force that the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth said is “evil,” because it is not subordinated or put to work in the service of love. Force without love is the force of the Roman empire, which achieves a lot by expanding its territory by constantly waging warfare and by gobbling up resources and people. And it is just this kind of force that Jesus refuses to acknowledge as ultimate.
Let’s be clear, though: by not worshipping the tempter, by not bowing the knee to the lie that says imperial power is the only real power there is, by resisting and refusing the ideology of the ruling powers, Jesus is already fated to be crushed by those ruling powers. Saying “no” here in the wilderness already sets him on a path that leads to the cross. But here is the thing: Jesus knows that this is his path. Jesus begins his ministry with these temptations, he begins his own Lenten journey, as it were, already headed toward Jerusalem, not to reign in the strong power of Caesar, but to make manifest a different kind of power altogether. It is what philosopher John Caputo calls “weak power,” what Paul in 1 Corinthians calls “the power made perfect in weakness.” It is the power of insistent love.
What is this, if not the gospel in a nutshell? Our own anxieties to control our lives, anxieties that so often tempt us to try and control others, that get amplified in our collective lives together and lead to wars, and oppression, to misunderstandings and to brutalities, to massive inequities and to concentrations of resources in the hands of the few, to apathy toward others as we seal ourselves off in our secure neighborhoods and enclaves, all of these anxieties fail to have ultimate power over us. Jesus freed himself from them in those forty days in the wilderness, and as we are joined with him, we are freed from them, too.
We often think of Lent as a time for curbing our appetites, of reigning in our desires, maybe even giving up something that we enjoy or value. These things are part of what Lent has meant to Christians over the centuries, to be sure, but there is something deeper, a more joyful possibility that is made real during these forty days. The good news is that Jesus unites us to himself, and that means that he unites us in his own resistance to the inevitability of those forces that crush love and justice. Lent is time for us to practice the joyful “no”-saying that union with Christ makes possible for us.
But it’s important to understand that “just saying no” in Lent isn’t just negative. It also means saying “yes” to God. Saying “no” to the strong forces of power is also saying “yes” to the weak force of love. And we can do that in very practical ways. We can add practices to our lives during these weeks. We can learn more about prayer, and we can try on new habits of prayer. Prayer, by the way, is weak because, by its nature, it does not try to control and manage—rather, it teaches us to give our lives, with their burdens and cares, into the hands of God we are learning how to trust. We can practice contemplative reading. We can mediate. We can engage in various kinds of service. All of these are types of activity that are unproductive. They are all ways to resist the temptation to cram our lives with accomplishment and useable value. They are also ways to say, “Yes, God, these sacred symbols and stories, these promises of Scripture, these calls to love our neighbor as ourselves, are valuable to me, even if they do not produce tangible results.” They are ways of interrupting our ordinary routines and obligations and general busy-ness with moments of recognition that we are not in control, that we are embarked on a joyful adventure of faith.
A few days ago on Ash Wednesday, I repeated a call that is printed in our Presbyterian Book of Common Worship, a call to a “holy Lent.” There is much about the season that is a “downer.” We repent. We acknowledge our mortality. We stop saying “Alleluia” (oops). The culmination of these forty days is a holy week in which we reflect on the Last Supper before Jesus’ trial and execution. But, at the end of the day, to observe a “holy Lent” means to practice our union with Christ. It means to learn how to live a life which is victorious and filled with joy. It means to embark on a journey of forgiveness in which we learn how to be free from guilt and recrimination, in which we can learn how to be a peace with ourselves and each other. It is to practice the weak force of God, the weak force of an insistent love. And when we do that we are learning how to be God’s companions, in suffering and hope. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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