State Violence and the People's Power
Reflections on the Lectionary for April 27th
What is power?
It’s a more complicated question than it might first appear. There’s a school of thought that says that power isn’t anything at all; rather than asking what power is, we ought to ask what power does. Power is a practice, in this way of thinking; power is a set of actions, and it doesn’t exist if it’s not in motion. Power can’t rest, it can only move. Power isn’t anything we can point to, except when we point to where and how power is being used.
Look, for example, at the Acts passage from this week’s lectionary. The text of Acts understands intuitively that power shows up in relationships and in the exercise (or not) of control. Rather than spending a lot of time describing who the powerholders and powerbrokers were in first-century Jerusalem, the text instead names the parties (the Sadducees, the high priest, the council of elders, the temple police, the police captain, the apostles, and a crowd) and then demonstrates the power relations between them. Acts does this by showing who has power over whom, and who is afraid of whom. (We have to back up a few verses to the run-up to this story, starting in about 5:12, to find all of this). The Sadducees were jealous of the apostles, which is a way of saying that they feared the apostles’ power. The high priest and the council had the power to command the police and the police captain, but it turned out that the prison and its guards didn’t have the power to contain the apostles. The police and the police captain had a lot of power in theory, but it turned out that their power was limited, because the police were afraid of the crowd. Finally, where the lectionary passage picks up, we see that the council had the power to compel people to stand before them, and the high priest had the power to question people. But this power proved flimsy; the apostles were there in the first place because the council’s theoretical power wasn’t actually real enough to keep the apostles in prison, and the apostles made it clear (in verse 29) that they were answerable only to God.
The result is that this passage from Acts is full of bravado and bluff, but it’s not actually full of many exercises of power. The author of Acts is skewering the council and the high priest and the police, showing the powerful folks to be far less intimidating than they would like everyone to think. There’s a lot of posturing but not much use of power. The story is defused, after the lectionary passage leaves off, by the wisdom of a person named Gamaliel, who advises the council to hold back in the exercise of their power—effectively, to cede a bit of their power in the hopes of preserving the rest of it. The council wanted to kill the apostles, but Gamaliel gave them some examples from the recent past of how things often end up worse for the purveyors of violence, and how the ones against whom violence is used—putatively the weak—always end up on top.
We’re all living through a case study in the uses and misuses of power. And we are living through a grand negotiation about how power works. Whether you agree with Donald Trump’s actions or not, there doesn’t seem to be much disagreement that he is reveling in the opportunity to wield power once more. Everyone can see that that Trump enjoys having the trappings of power; we simply disagree over whether that’s a good thing or not. Trump’s government is predicated on a sweeping view of power: the power to decide and act capriciously, the power to disregard competing or inconvenient opinions, the power to abrogate long-established rights and privileges, the power to sell human beings into captivity. In a system designed to spread power around so that no one person holds too much of it, Trump hoards power jealously and takes every opportunity to grab it, even from his allies. Again, we might disagree about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but the pattern seems clear enough. Trump understands intuitively that power isn’t something that is, it’s something someone does. He cares little about what the rules are, and he cares a lot about what he can get away with.
The lectionary texts this week seem to hold the same intuitive understanding. The passages from Acts, Revelation, and the Gospel of John all whistle different versions of the same tune; they all show the distance between what power is on paper and how power works in the real world. This is because all of these texts (and indeed all of the texts in the whole New Testament, and many of the ones in the Hebrew Bible too) were written in the shadow of power. These texts were written from the underside of empire and the wrong side of violence. These texts were all written by people who were intimately familiar with the workings of power, a familiarity that many people in the United States in the 2020s are just beginning to learn. (More on this below).
Since about the middle of the first Trump administration—for reasons—I have become very interested and invested in theories of power and sovereignty. Sovereignty, many theorists note, is nothing but the state’s monopoly on violence. States (everyone from your local town’s police department to the United Nations and everything in between) try to control and harness violence, and they try to make it a tool that only sovereigns (governments, police forces, militaries, militias) can use. This is often but not always a good thing, if you ask me. Although anarchists make many compelling points in their critiques of governments and sovereignty, I wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone had equal recourse to violent means all the time. But I also don’t want to live in a world where only one person or one military or police force has recourse to violence, either. And I certainly don’t want to live in a world where one government, led by one party beholden to one man, wields all the power over life and death.
There’s good news in the lectionary this week, if you think that unchecked power is a bad thing. We’ve already looked at Acts, and the way 5:27-32 paints a complicated picture of power. In that story, the ones who thought they hold power were not as powerful as they thought, and the ones who seemed to be on the underside of power were actually holding most of the cards. The council and the high priest and the police thought they had a monopoly on violence, but in the end they were all afraid of the same thing: the people. The police (in the section before this one) were afraid of the people’s violence and Gamaliel (in the next section after this one) was warning everyone about the power of the people’s allegiance. The people didn’t actually have to be violent to influence the actions and thoughts of the people in power; the people just had to exist as people who might begin to exercise power, and that was enough to give the powerful folks second thoughts.
Revelation is a book steeped in power relations. The whole thing (spoiler alert) tells the story of cosmic struggle and clashing sovereignty. Violence soaks Revelation start to finish. The passage in the lectionary this week is from the beginning, before most of that violence has been unleashed, but already blood hovers over the text like a mist. Jesus is “the faithful witness” in verse 5, and the word in Greek there is martus. The word martus has three main meanings: a person who testifies in court as a witness, a person who offers a testimony to some truth, and a person whose witness to the truth costs them their life. The NRSV is translating martus here as “witness,” that second definition, which is entirely defensible. But I think that the third definition is in play as well; Jesus is a person whose testimony came at the expense of his life. This is in fact where we get our word for doing that, in English. Martus shows up in English as the word martyr—one who witnesses at the cost of their life. This is how Revelation begins, with a reminder of Jesus’ martyrdom at the hands of an empire, who the text now claims is “the ruler of the kings of the earth,” who “made us to be a kingdom.” Revelation is not messing around; it wants its readers to know, up front, that life and death are on the line.
John 20:19-31 is a tricky text. I was tempted, this week, to devote my whole Substack to the ways Christians have read this passage and undertaken violence against Jews (because of the “for fear of the Jews” line in 20:19). And I do think that if you preach on this text and don’t debunk that part of it, you’re committing theological malpractice; Christians must be in the business of actively resisting the ways our own sacred texts have led to the spilling of blood. But I want to focus my attention on another part of that equation: the way this story of Jesus’ miraculous appearance and “doubting” Thomas arrives in the aftermath of violence and the exercise of power.
Pay attention to Jesus’ body in this passage. Jesus certainly wants you to—he twice makes a point of showing the wounds in his hands and his side. In 20:20 and 20:27, Jesus points out the bloody places where his body bore the violence of empire—the remnants of power. This story plays out as a drama about doubt and belief, about evidence and faith, and about presence and absence. Thomas is the story’s foil, standing in for the reader who might need some more convincing; Thomas refuses to believe unbelievable things without evidence. Jesus is more than willing to provide such evidence to Thomas, and by proxy, to the reader. Jesus is more than willing to share his wounds as evidence, to show his pierced body to anyone who wants to look, as evidence entered into the record.
But what is Jesus’ wounded body evidence of? Of what is Jesus’ wounded body supposed to convince Thomas, and the reader? In the story from John, the answer has something to do with life and death and violence. Jesus’ wounds are evidence of imperial power—they are evidence of the exercise of state violence, remainders of sovereignty. And—this is the key part—Jesus’ wounds are the evidence of the falseness of state power, the futility of state violence, and the hollowness of state sovereignty. If sovereignty has to do with the ways states monopolize violence and with holding the power over life and death, then Jesus’ wounds are a claim that the power doesn’t lie where everyone thought it did. If power only exists where it is being exercised, and Jesus’ wounds show up on a somehow-still-living body, then the empire didn’t have power after all. Like the story from Acts, the power has somehow been relocated away from the state (the empire) and all its functionaries, and power has landed in the hands—literally—of the people.
Jesus would probably want me to pause just now and remember that even though the power ended up in his hands by the end of the story, he still had to pass through a great deal of suffering and death. You don’t get to a story about showing off your wounds without undergoing a lot of wounding. That’s where we are in the story right now, in the United States. We are in the part of the story that’s about suffering and death, and the breathtaking capricious cruelty of people who think they will never have to answer to anyone. We are living through the part of the story with a lot of wounding. We might be in this part of the story for quite some time. For some of us, this is a very old story; many Americans have been living through wounding and death for hundreds and hundreds of years. But for others of us, we are having our first real experience with what it’s like to live in fear of unaccountable violence and control; some of us are finding out for the first time what it’s like to see state violence from the sharp end of the sword.
The hope in our story—and the hope that shows between the lines of this week’s passages from Acts, Revelation, and the Gospel of John—is that the ones who gleefully dole out cruelty and violence are rarely the ones who end up with the power in the end. Violence is a false god and sovereignty is a hollow idol. Cruelty might look like power for a while, and viciousness can certainly create a lot of suffering and pain. But it does not produce power—not power in any durable sense. In the stories from the lectionary this week, for all the attempts to claim and wield power by governors and kings and councils, for all the grasping at power, sovereignty always somehow ends up back in the hands of the crowd, back in the hands of the people, back in the hands of someone like Jesus. Strength always ends up looking less like a sword and more like a wound. Power, in the end, cannot belong to the ones who want to hoard it. Power belongs to the ones who survive, the ones who feel the threats of harm and death and live anyway. Even if it takes a while, power always belongs ultimately to the powerless, resting in the wounded hands of the ones the sovereigns tried to kill. In the days ahead, that may be a lesson worth remembering.