A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
3rd April 2022
John 19.1-16a
I don’t know if you noticed, but today’s reading is shot
through
with
language about power, and examples of
its use and misuse.
There are symbols of power:
a crown, a
purple robe, and a judgment seat;
and there are examples of structural power:
appeals to
the law, appeals to God, appeals to the emperor;
and at every turn, this language of power
is
subverted, questioned, and deconstructed.
So this morning, I want us to think about power,
it’s use
and misuse, it’s symbols and structures,
and its
relation to us as disciples of Jesus.
Many of us who have come from a Christian background
have a
perspective on power
that it is,
in some sense, inherently corrupt and corrupting.
We’ve come to believe that it’s the antithesis of ‘gentle
Jesus meek and mild’,
and we’ve
been told that we should forsake all the temptations of power
in our quest for a higher, more
spiritual way of being,
that following Jesus opens before
us.
Well, I want to question that orthodoxy this morning,
and I hope
to show that not only is power not
inherently immoral,
but that for us to be agents of God’s coming kingdom of
justice and peace,
we need to
have a far more open and honest conversation about power,
and how it
functions in the world and in our lives.
I want to suggest that, a bit like its close relative money,
power is
neither inherently good nor evil.
Rather, its morality is determined by how it is used.
So firstly, let’s bust a couple of myths about money and
power.
It is not true that ‘money is the root of all evil’,
and neither
is it true that ‘all power corrupts absolutely’.
Rather, starting with money,
in his
letter to the young Timothy, St Paul says the following:
“But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by
many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and
destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their
eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced
themselves with many pains.”
(1 Tim. 6:9-10).
And similarly with power, William Pitt the Elder, the then British
Prime Minister,
said in a
speech in the House of Lords in 1770, that:
“Unlimited
power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.”
something which Lord Acton coined into the more popular
incarnation of the phrase,
writing, in
a letter to Bishop Creighton in 1887, that:
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power
corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost
always bad men.”
Neither money, nor power, are in and of themselves evil or
corrupt,
but rather
they can both be misused in the service of corruption and evil;
and they need to be handled with care,
lest they
tempt us to acts of sinful avarice and domination.
So let’s think a bit more about power,
and what a
Christ-like approach to power might look like,
both in terms of our relationships with one another,
and the way
we seek to address the ‘powers that be’ in the world.
To help us in this, I’d like to introduce four kinds of
power,
and my
suspicion is that for most of us,
it’s
only the first one that we tend to engage with
when
we think of what makes something or someone powerful.
And this first, and pervasive, kind of power
I’m going
to call ‘power over’.
This is the kind of power that is implemented by the use of
force,
coercion,
domination, and control.
It is the kind of power that is reinforced by fear.
And the key thing about ‘power over’ is that it treats power
as if it
were a finite resource.
If I have more power, you have less;
or if you
have more, I must have less.
In mathematical terms, it treats power as a zero sum game,
where advantage
for one side involves an equivalent loss for the other side.
It’s a bit like cutting a cake,
where there
is only so much cake on the plate,
and if one
person has a larger slice there is less for everyone else.
‘Power over’ has winners and losers,
it’s like a
game of chess, or a race.
We’re programmed by society to think of power in this way:
My MP has
more power than I do.
Putin has
more power than Zelenskyy.
The
preacher has more power than the congregation.
The rich
have more power than the poor.
The
educated have more power than the uneducated.
White
people have more power than people of colour.
And we can see many examples of ‘power over’ in our reading
for this morning:
Pilate has
power over Jesus,
to
have him flogged, mocked, questioned, released, or executed.
The Emperor
has power over Pilate.
The Chief
Priests start off with less power than Pilate,
but
by appealing to the law and the emperor, they gain power over him,
and
he in turn becomes afraid of them.
You can see how the balance of power swings within the
narrative,
backwards
and forwards between the various characters,
with some gaining it, and others losing it,
as they vie
for power over each other.
And we can see this in our world, and in our lives:
this is how
the world works, or at least that’s what we’ve been told.
We can see this kind of power at work in church life too,
as people take
power over others.
My former colleague Roy Kearsley wrote an amazing book
on Church,
Commmunity, and Power,[1]
in which he reflects on ‘power over’ as a force in church
life.
A couple of quotes for you:
Church as a living
community cannot afford to be casual or complacent
about something as formative for its
life together as power.
It must be alert to
power’s pervasive presence,
the elephant in the room that no-one
talks about.
And once awakened to
the fact that power relations and strategies are indeed dangerous,
it has to avoid falling back into any
form of denial
concerning the sociological reality
of power at work within its processes.
Especially, church
should take note of the hidden levers
that can in a crisis suddenly clunk
into action
or defiantly be shifted to a tactical
off-position.
He goes on:
The uncomfortable
truth is that power in churches
often serves as the real cause of
changes, whether positive or negative.
Even in our highly
democratized society,
power rather than policy often still
turns out to be
the single most decisive factor in
strategies developed by small groups.
It can arise as the
most immediate and pressing factor in every undertaking,
despite accompanying solemn
discussions
about theology, finance and
management.
Power, this slippery
element of human relations,
frequently manages to mutate or
reincarnate in some form…
Power is possibly the
element that is least understood, explored, or explained
in groups like churches, even though
it is pervasive.
Time and again it is
the determining issue
even around such core activities as
mission,
worship, pastoral care and
sacrament.
So, there we have it: ‘power over’ is, I think,
fundamentally problematic.
It is the
dominant conception of power in society and institutional life,
and its zero-sum game approach
inherently diminishes some
whilst
advantaging others.
But thankfully, ‘power over’ is not the only power-game in
town.
London Citizens, the community organising network that
Bloomsbury is a part of,
suggests
that the antidote to ‘power over’ is ‘power with’.
When someone is trying to dominate you, coerce you, or
control you,
you can
resist by building power in collaboration, through relationships.
‘Power with’ is power built on respect, mutual support,
solidarity, and influence.
It builds
bridges within groups, or across difference,
and it can
lead to collective action.
If, as Christians, we are to reject and resist ‘power over’,
we can,
surely, embrace the concept of ‘power with’.
This is, after all, the kind of power that Jesus built
throughout
his ministry.
At his temptation he resisted the offer of ‘power over’,
declining
to take political or religious or economic power for himself,
refusing to
build his kingdom through domination and fear.
Instead, he called disciples, he built a community,
he invested
in meaningful relationships,
he built
power with, not over.
In our passage for today, the disciples are notably absent,
they’ve
been silenced by fear, scattered by anxiety,
but they will re-emerge,
and the
community that began with Jesus and a few devoted disciples,
will grow to discover their strength together,
their power
to act collectively
to
challenge the monolithic institutions of powerful domination
It is no surprise that almost all of the great social
justice movements in human history
have their
origins in religious convictions,
because as people give their allegiance to one another,
working
together to subsume their individual will-to-power
in the
interest of the greater good,
so possibilities for a new and better future emerge,
as ‘power
over’ is undermined by the greater force of ‘power with’.
This is why I’m so passionate about our involvement in the
work of Citizens UK,
and why it
was so amazing
to be part
of the action this last week in Parliament Square,
as we brought the organised power of community
to bear on
the key instrument of power in our land,
to articulate a challenge for justice for those who are
living with in-work poverty,
as they
care for the sick and vulnerable in society.
Now - here we have to pause for a moment, and ask a
question:
did our
display of ‘power with’, our ‘power together’
succeed in
getting a real living wage for health and social care workers in the UK?
The answer, of course, is no - at least, ‘not yet’.
One of the sayings of Community Organising
is that you
get the justice that you have the power to demand.
And although we got attention, and we got some significant
commitments from politicians,
there is
more to be done before justice is achieved.
And although, like the disciples at the trial of Jesus,
we may have
scattered back to our communities for a while,
we will come together again, more powerfully in the future,
and the world as is will take a step closer
to
becoming the world as it should be.
Or, as Jesus might have put it, the kingdom of God will come, on earth, as it is in heaven,
and it will
do so as we keep the faith
and keep
building ‘power with’ others.
So, ‘power over’, and ‘power with’…
But there are two further aspects of power
I’d like to
draw out of our reading for this morning.
The third kind of power I’m going to call the ‘power to…’
This is the power to act, the power to make a difference,
the power
to create, the power to achieve.
This is the power that each of us deserves,
the power
to be, to exist, to love, to live in freedom.
And this is something that, if ‘power with’ is successful,
can belong
to each of us, whoever we are.
The thing is, power, it turns out, is not actually a zero
sum game.
Empowering
the poor, the marginalised, and the disenfranchised,
is not
about taking power from some one else.
This really is a game where all can be winners.
It’s a bit like education, one of the most effective tools
for
building the ‘power to…’ in communities.
Educating more people does not mean un-educating others.
Despite the fears of lowest-common-denominatorism,
widening
access to education
has proved
to be one of the most enabling factors
in
giving individuals from across the social spectrum
the
power to be, the power to determine their own lives.
And here, I want us to consider for a moment
not the
characters in the story of Jesus’ trial,
nor even
those strategically absent from it,
but rather those for whom this story was written in the
first place,
the
community who first received John’s gospel.
This is a Christian community,
about fifty
or sixty years after the events of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.
They have separated from their parent religion of Judaism,
and are no
longer worshipping in the synagogues.
Their community is made up of a mixture of Jews and
Gentiles,
so it is
both culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse.
And as they separated from Judaism, they had lost the small legal
concessions
that the
empire had granted to the Jewish people
in terms of
freedom of religion.
In other words, these were a people
whose
‘power to be’ was now severely curtailed.
And in the gospel’s deconstruction of ‘power over’,
and it’s description
of a new community who shared ‘power with’,
we find the writer of the gospel encouraging his readers
that their route
to a recovery of ‘power to’ lies not with the will-to-power,
but through
a rediscovery of the collective power of community.
And the church today would do well to remember this:
it is not for
us to cry foul every time we perceive some slight against us.
Those kind of Christians who see every freedom for another
as a
diminishment of their own rights
are falling
into a fatal trap here.
It should never be for Christians to defend their own rights
by
diminishing the rights of others,
rather we should be at the forefront
of arguing
and taking action to establish the right
of all
people to have the ‘power to be’.
Christendom was a selling out of the vision of Jesus,
as his
followers sought political and established power over.
The true path to the ‘power to be’ is found not in power
over,
but in a
recovery of the power that is found in collective action,
as we stand
alongside others who are different to us,
fearlessly
taking our place in the world not to dominate, but to love.
Which brings me to the fourth and final aspect of power
that I’d
like to draw out from our reading this morning.
We’ve deconstructed ‘power over’,
we’ve seen
how the alternative is found in ‘power with’,
and we’ve seen how this can unlock the ‘power to’.
Well, finally, we come to ‘power within’,
this is the
sense of your own capacity, your own self-worth.
In our passage, this is exemplified by the actions of Jesus.
It seems
that everyone has power over him,
from
the chief priests, to Pilate, to the empire or Rome.
And yet… Jesus, for all his powerlessness, is the one person
in this story
whose power
cannot be threatened.
Because his power comes from within, not without.
Edwin Friedman, the Jewish Rabbi and specialist in Family
Systems Therapy,
calls this
the ‘differentiation of self’,
and it describes the capacity of a person
to be so grounded in their own sense of who
they are,
that they
are not threatened by forces beyond themselves.
You can see this in the way Jesus responds to Pilate,
firstly
refusing to answer him, just sitting there quietly,
and then
when he does speak, critiquing Pilate’s very basis of power.
This, if I’m honest, is the power that I aspire to:
the power
to be most fully myself, within myself,
not
answerable to the power of others, whatever it may be,
because I
know before God who I have been created to be.
Graham Stuart says that
‘Power within’ involves people
having a sense of their own capacity and self-worth.
and it allows people to recognise
their “power to” and “power with”,
and believe they can make a
difference.[2]
So in our church community, I suggest that
we want to
nurture ‘power with’, ‘power to’, and ‘power within’,
whilst
resisting the temptation to operate from a position of ‘power-over’.
And in our engagement with the world,
our aim
should not be to maximise our power over other people,
but rather to create the conditions whereby power [itself]
can be shared.
To conclude, as Severyn
Bruyn and Paula Rayman put it,
in their book, ‘Nonviolent action
and social change’:
The purpose is to create the conditions
in which
each individual’s opportunity to exercise power is maximized
in the
context of the larger community.[3]
Or, as Jesus put it,
‘You would
have no power… unless it had been given you from above’.
[3]
Bruyn, S., & Rayman, P. (Eds.). (1979). Nonviolent action and social
change. New York: Irvington Publishers. p.21.
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