Power and Position
Reflections on the Lectionary for October 20th
It’s the heart of election season in the United States, which means that we are all neck-deep in conversations about leadership. Who do we want to lead us? What does a good leader do, ideally? What qualities make for a good leader? What qualities might disqualify someone from leadership? And in most elections I can remember, and in this one especially, we also have the inverse conversation. What are the perils posed by leadership? What dangers accompany different leadership styles or personalities? What happens when someone we think ought to have been disqualified from leadership becomes the leader?
These are very urgent questions for us today, in the few weeks of election season that are left, but they are also very old questions. We are not the first people to ask them. The biblical tradition is full of meditations on leadership, focusing on everyone from kings to prophets to judges to messiahs to ordinary people. Often the biblical tradition (especially the Hebrew Bible) seems to be making the case that the people in positions of leadership are actually the ones least suited to it, and the everyday folks who aren’t identified as leaders can actually be more influential. (Think of the role of Rahab, for example, or the way the prophetic tradition argues against kingship as a model of leadership. Or think about the arguments in Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels, fueled by prophetic citations, about the promise of a child, of all people, in a leadership position).
But often the biblical tradition is especially interested in one particular aspect of leadership: the question of power. Biblical texts like to interrogate power and undermine it, even as they sometimes lionize powerful people or powerful forces. Power and leadership are not the same thing, but usually when the biblical tradition is criticizing leaders, they are criticizing the misuse of power. And in many places in biblical texts, including the prophets, the gospels, and the historical books, power becomes the site of a really fierce debate. Does power reside in strength—in armies and kings and gods and obvious physical capability—or can power reside in weakness, generosity, self-giving, or smallness? It’s a debate that plays out again and again in the Bible, and often the meaning of a biblical text depends on inversions of power between strength and weakness.
The lectionary for October 20th is full of texts that ask questions about power. They don’t all ask the same questions, and they don’t all come to the same conclusions, but they are all interested, in one way or another, in the way power shows up in the world. And while they don’t all think about leadership in obvious ways, they are all pointing to the ways power can be leveraged (or subverted) in the living of life, including the forms of communal life where leadership can be valuable.
The first of these texts is Job 38:1-7 and (optionally) 34-41. This is one of my favorite sections of the book of Job, a climactic moment in the long tale of Job’s suffering and existential questioning. This is the scene where God—long absent in the book as Job suffers—finally responds to the beleaguered Job. The response from God is not especially pastoral, as we might have expected, and it’s not very comforting. Instead God pulls rank. Who are you, God seems to be asking, to question me? God’s expressions of power here take the form of observations about the natural world and the ways God is responsible for it. This passage is sometimes called a third creation story because of the way God claims dominion over the natural world and exercises care for it. God implies, in these words, that Job’s troubles are minor compared to the upkeep that the world requires, and that Job’s sufferings are just one small part of a world teeming with divine responsibility. God, here, seems to be claiming both that God is infinitely responsible and that God is too busy to dwell for long on any one creature. If I were Job, I don’t know that I would find God’s response very satisfying.
The selections from Psalm 104 do something similar—they assign God responsibility for the natural world in a way that resembles Job’s latter chapters. This is a comforting view of divine power as generative and benign; here, God is the one who creates and sustains. And in Psalm 91, we are presented with a God who looks after God’s people and God’s world, guarding against trouble and peril. In contrast to the experience of Job, Psalm 91 imagines a God who is attentive and ever-present during times of suffering—a constant presence and a power ready to intervene on behalf of the ones God loves.
The selection from Isaiah 53, then, is where I think things get really interesting. This is one of the more famous passages from the prophetic books, at least among Christians, because it is one of the so-called “Suffering Servant Songs” that gets cited by gospel writers and later Christian authors to describe Jesus. The Suffering Servant Songs are in all likelihood meant to describe Israel as a people—as longsuffering and persecuted people set in the midst of a chaotic and cruel world. In its earliest meanings, this passage from Isaiah was likely meant to describe God’s care for God’s people who endured much pain. If you read through this passage substituting “Israel” for “he,” you can get a sense of the argument: Israel, as a people, has borne infirmities, has carried diseases, has been wounded and crushed, etc. It makes sense, as a prophetic utterance to and from a people who had endured much at the hands of external imperial powers.
But Christians don’t usually read this passage that way, substituting “Israel” for “he.” Instead, they tend to read it by substituting “Jesus” for “he.” That way of reading isn’t very historical; it ignores the context in which this passage was composed (centuries before anyone had ever heard of Jesus). But this Christian way of reading Isaiah 53, as ahistorical as it may be, does do some fascinating work with regard to power. By reading Isaiah 53 as being about Jesus, who Christians believed was the messiah and the son of God, Christians recast power (and to some degree leadership) not as a matter of strength, but as a matter of weakness. Isaiah 53 imagines someone who is beset by the world and its cruelties, under the heel of violent power, and wounded and stricken by injuries. Isaiah 53, when read by Christians as a description of Jesus, becomes one of those places where the Bible argues that real power can be found in weakness, and that what seems like strength is actually not where real power lies.
This tension between strength and weakness finds a strange and powerful expression in Hebrews 5:1-10, which is the “epistle” reading for this week (even though scholars are close to unanimous that Hebrews is not an epistle). This part of Hebrews represents an early and fraught attempt to think through one of the central questions of the early Christian community: how, and why, is Jesus important? Today, after twenty centuries, many Christians have ready answers to that question. “He died for our sins,” many say, or “he reconciles us to God.” But in the late first century and early second century when Christianity was coalescing out of small communities of Jesus-followers across the Mediterranean basin, they didn’t yet have quick or easy answers to the question of how and why Jesus was important. Instead, the New Testament is full of early attempts to make sense of Jesus. “Jesus is Lord,” it says in some places, or it claims that Jesus is the Logos. Some Christians saw Jesus as a good example (Luke’s gospel seems to take this approach), and Paul seems to have thought that the very fact of Jesus’ resurrection had changed something profound about the structure of the world and God’s relationship to it. But Hebrews, for my money, is where the wildest experimentation can be found, with results the farthest distance away from where Christianity eventually ended up. In this passage, the author is proposing that Jesus is important because he occupies a special dual place in God’s system of salvation, which for Hebrews is modeled after the Jerusalem temple. Jesus, in this way of thinking, is both the sacrifice and the priest who offers it. And Jesus is not just any sacrifice and he is not just any priest; he is the perfect sacrifice and he is a special kind of priest. Jesus, here, is a priest in the order of Melchizedek. What does that mean? It’s not 100% clear, but it’s likely that the author of Hebrews thought that Jesus was a universal kind of priest, connected not to Aaron (who was an Israelite) but to Melichizedek (who was a priest in the area that became Jerusalem before Abraham arrived).
The upshot of this theological imagination is that the author of Hebrews thought of Jesus as powerful independently of the Jerusalem priesthood—as specially positioned to mediate between humans and God in a universal kind of way. (Scholars frequently note how the book of Hebrews is founded on anti-Jewish tropes and offers itself to anti-Semitic interpretations, and this passage is certainly one of those). If the question is God’s relationship to human beings and the way God does or does not care for human beings, then Hebrews’ answer is that Jesus fills a kind of gap—that Jesus is a kind of clutch or contact zone between God and human beings. Jesus, like the priests in the Jerusalem temple, can mediate God to humans. But unlike the Jerusalem priests—in the logic of Hebrews—Jesus can do that for everyone, not simply for Israel. (I think we can make claims about Jesus and his importance without denigrating Judaism, but that doesn’t seem to have been front of mind for whoever wrote Hebrews).
That brings us to the gospel text for the week, Mark 10:35-45. This is a famous passage featuring two of his disciples, a pair of brothers, James and John. The brothers have a request of Jesus: “Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in glory.” This is often interpreted as a power grab, as a way for the two brothers to try to claim authority in the future. (Although “in your glory” is often interpreted to mean “when Jesus is reigning in heaven,” given Jesus’ eschatological messianic edge in Mark and his insistence on the immanence of the Kingdom of God, I am not so sure that this is meant to refer to the distant future. I think they are imagining Jesus on a restored throne of David, in their near future). There are certainly aspirations to authority embedded in the brothers’ request, but I think we can also read it as a simple request to help—to be instrumental in whatever “glory” Jesus is bound for. While it’s common to read this as a power grab, I think it’s also easy to read it as devotion and loyalty.
Whatever it is, Jesus isn’t having it. He tells them that they don’t know what they’re asking (which might, again, point to the brothers imagining an earthly reign while Jesus is imagining a future of persecution and death). But then Jesus turns to the very questions of leadership, power, weakness, and strength that the other texts in this week’s lectionary have been considering. “You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” This is a stark statement, seemingly designed to dash any hopes of earthly glory, and a critique of the way power usually works. And it’s an outright criticism of the view of power as strength, and it’s a return to that deep biblical pattern of seeing power in weakness.
I’ve written before about the dynamics of power embedded in Christian theological language—what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls kyriarchy. Kyriarchy points to the way power—and the use and abuse of power—is foundational to the world of early Christianity. The word “Lord” that we use to refer to Jesus is the same Greek word as the “master” of a slave, for example, and when Paul calls himself a “servant” he is actually calling himself a “slave” in Greek. Ideas like messiah, good news, Prince of Peace, Lord of Lords, son of God, peace, and kingdom are all deeply implicated in systems of power in the Roman Empire of the first century. Although we might not always be able to see them, first-century configurations of power are right underneath the surface. We should never forget that power imbalances—what we would even call abusive or exploitative systems—are ever-present in the New Testament. Gender, class, caste, status, sexuality, and identity, among other things, course through the text.
You can really see this in action in 10:42-45 (which I quoted two paragraphs above). There, the discourse of power is front and center, and Jesus (and the Gospel of Mark) is using slavery and servitude as a metaphor. In the first mention of servitude, in 10:43, the word Mark uses is diakonos, which is more of a role than a status. (Remember that Jesus spoke Aramaic, so the word choice in Mark’s gospel in Greek belongs to Mark’s author and not to Jesus). A diakonos—where we get our modern word “deacon”—was someone who did something on behalf of another person. This could be working as a middleman in a transaction, serving diners at a meal, or assisting with a task. The word that Jesus (and Mark) used in the second clause, however, was doulos—a slave. If being a diakonos is a role, then being a doulos is a condition or a status; it is something like a caste designation. When Jesus tells the disciples that “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant (diakonos), and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave (doulos) of all,” he’s talking about roles—being in service to other people—but he’s also talking about a shift in status and an assumption of an absolutely abject and powerless posture. He seems to be letting the disciples know what they had signed up for.
Election season isn’t a perfect analogy to what’s going on in the Bible with regard to power and leadership, and it might not even be a decent analogy. But I do think it helps us think about what we want out of power and what kind of power we want out of our leaders. Biblical texts are forever warning against the dangers of human ambition and the endless appetites of people who hold power. The Bible’s refrain, in a surprisingly consistent way, is that we would do better to look for power in small things and leadership from seemingly unimportant people. How we translate that to the world we live in today is an interesting question.
Just now reading this a week after the election. It provides me some comfort as we contemplate how civil power will be used in the months and years to come.