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Power Corrupts or it Doesn't:
Change the Paradigm II
First Sunday in Lent
Deut. 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13
Let’s dispense with orthodoxy immediately: Lent is not about repenting for sins, whether great or small. Giving up chocolate or movies or being nice to your mother-in-law won’t cut it. It is not about replicating the story of the people of Israel wandering in the desert for 40 years because they had forgotten who brought them out of bondage; nor is Lent about replicating the experience of Jesus’ possible sojourn among the Essenes in the wilderness IF that experience is interpreted to be reconciling himself to the fate God had already established for him.
In Luke’s story, Jesus tells the devil not to put the Lord your God to the test, and then the text says that “when the devil had finished every test he departed from him until an opportune time.” The master story-teller is foreshadowing the hero’s final battle to the death when the devil (the evil spirit?) goes after Judas (22:3-6), and causes massive betrayal and abandonment by Jesus’ disciples. Significantly, for orthodoxy, Jesus points away from himself in this initial skirmish, and neither the devil nor Luke apparently thinks that Jesus is God.
If John Crossan is onto something with his interpretation of Paul’s mission to the Pagan/Gentile worlds outside Jerusalem, it is only fair to start the reading from Romans 10 a little sooner than the cobblers who decided to start half-way through verse 8: “(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim).” The rest of the paragraph has been read to reinforce the dogma that if you believe that Jesus died for your sins, you will be saved (from hell and damnation). And it doesn’t matter who you are, IF you believe that, you will be saved. But what is Paul’s purpose? He is arguing that “Christ is the end of the law . . .” The law has no power over the Christ. The law is meaningless. Whose law? The law of Empire. The law of Cesar. Because justice-compassion (righteousness) trumps the law of Empire by restoring God’s covenant of distributive, non-violent, justice-compassion. Whoever calls on this Lord – no distinction between Jew and Greek – anyone who claims God’s non-violent covenant of justice-compassion – is part of the great general raising into God’s Kingdom. Whoever calls on this Lord is already transformed into the spiritual body of Christ, and does not need to fear the death that comes from selling out to the Empire. Whoever calls on this Lord is saved to integrity.
Well, I’m not selling out to the Empire, right? I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. I buy organic. I don’t use credit cards. The chocolate is “fair trade” chocolate. I didn’t vote for George III, and I tell everyone the best way to “support the troops” is to bring them home ASAP.
Again, the meaning is far deeper than that.
Dr. Arthur Dewey, Professor of New Testament at Xavier University, and a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, suggests the story in Luke is an illustration of power: “ . . . [T]his is a contest to decide which power is to rule the world. Is it to be the power that comes from magic? from manipulating things and people? from the desire to see oneself as great and in control? Or is it to be a power that refuses to display itself at the price of its own integrity?” Arthur J. Dewey, Th.D., The Word in Time, Liturgical Publications, Inc., 1990, Revised Edition, p. 156.
One of the lies told by Empire is the definition of Power as political, economic, social, and military/legal power-over the universe the Empire controls. Everyone who agrees with this definition is trapped in the systems that perpetuate poverty, war, and oppression because even in a democratic society, people will vote against their own welfare. (See the 2006 election results in the State of Alabama, where right-wing “Christian” churches turned out the poor in droves to vote against raising taxes on the rich and eliminating or lowering taxes on themselves.) But in Luke’s story, Jesus illustrates that to reject that kind of power (power-over) means to actualize his own. Jesus’ power is power-with the justice-compassion of the Kingdom of God. To the extent that our own personal power is that kind of power, we effectively counter the seemingly inevitable progress of the normalcy of civilization into the strength of sin in the law of Empire.
We are taught to reject personal power because we can’t believe we can safely avoid the temptations the devil offers: manipulating things and people, and seeing ourselves as greater than others and most important of all, in control. Jesus refused to play those games because he realized that to play them meant losing himself: losing his integrity, losing his freedom to be himself. That is the great contradiction in the story of Jesus’ death. It was not a hero’s death. It was meant to be humiliating, reducing him and his power to nothing. There are some who would say that it did. If Jesus had allowed his personal power to be corrupted, they would be right.
One of the major ways we buy into the Empire’s paradigm is to agree to ever-more-invasive incursions into our personal lives, from airport security searches to red-light cameras to drug-free employment and school activities policies that require everyone to submit to screenings whether there is probable cause or not. The mantra in this post-September 11 society is, “I’ve got nothing to hide.” The second verse of the mantra is “It doesn’t affect me.” Injustice affects everyone, because the assumption is that everyone is guilty. As Paul writes in 1st Corinthians 15:56, the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” The way to defeat that power is to believe in and act from our own integrity.