Feb. 10, 2008

By Harry T. Cook

Matthew 4: 1-11

In the backwash of Super Tuesday – the big casino of several state presidential primaries – it is not at all inappropriate to ask what is driving anybody aspiring to the highest office of what is at least for now the most powerful nation in the world. So what makes people hungry enough to be President that they will endure the sometimes harsh and always exacting nature of a national campaign, expose themselves to the long knives of the press and hold themselves open to reputation-ruining savagery by their opponents?

The answer to that question comes in one word: POWER: Power in all its glory and privilege. One needs only view a few episodes of “The West Wing” to see the reach of such power. Who wouldn’t want it, were it not for the burden that comes with it? Ah, but the burden of it is fairly well known – not unlike what women have said of the rigors of childbirth: forgotten in near-ecstasy once the infant is held to the breast.

So those left standing after the first several primaries are still out there supplicating votes, their eyes on the prize of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as well as the power and the perks with which it is associated. Of course, some say they want to share their “experience” with their fellow Americans; others say they wish to initiate “change;” still others want to settle hash with those they believe have led the country to near-ruin.

Still the answer to “What do they want?” is P-O-W-E-R, which doesn’t make them bad people. You can’t do anything without power or strength. Not even lift a finger. Thus the question is “power to do what?” And for those who like to seek guidance from the Christian scriptures, there is to be found in today’s reading from Matthew a kind of answer – a puzzling answer, even a challenging one, but an answer nonetheless.

The reading is familiar enough. Here it is in a 21st Century paraphrase: This man named Jesus from the Galilee has the idea that he is a potential leader. According to Matthew’s narrative, he’s been vetted by followers of his contemporary, the better-known leader John the Baptist. Subsequently having gathered to himself the beginnings of a following, he comes to a kind of proverbial crossroads. Leadership among Palestinian Jews and Gentiles is up for grabs. The real player is the Roman provincial government and its war-based economy. If Jesus seeks from his own people the power to lead and it ends up being conferred upon him, what will he do with it? How will he handle it? To what end?

He does what an intelligent person would and should do. He sits down in solitude far away from what the 18th Century English poet Thomas Gray would later call the madding crowd’s ignoble strife to figure it out. Matthew has Jesus ponder the phenomenon of power: power for self-aggrandizement (turning stones into bread), power for its exploitative worth (throwing himself down from the temple’s pinnacle – a kind of Evel Kinevel stunt to prove whatever) and the narcissistic acquisition of power over people and their lives for the worship of that power itself.

Jesus rejected each concept, so Matthew says, and emerged from his solitude outwardly unchanged but inwardly determined to lead the hard way: by acting out his values on a retail basis, person by person, opportunity by opportunity, seeking nothing but the satisfaction of transmitting the power of love rather than indulging in the love of power.

No, we cannot expect that of a President. She or he must lead on a wholesale basis, must represent the United States among the nations of the world, must occasionally be tough and proprietary on our behalf. She or he needs as far as humanly possible to speak and act on behalf of all Americans, regardless of political persuasion, age, gender, race or religion. She or he must emerge as a respected, if not likeable, public figure to whom even political rivals will afford a measure of esteem.

If it was a struggle for Jesus – an itinerant street speaker from a no-account Galilean hamlet – to overcome the temptations of potential power, how much greater must be the temptations of her or him who has raised millions of dollars and great expectations to run for President of the United States?

It seems clear that by a very curious and circuitous route, including betrayal, arrest, trial and execution, an early generation of what we now call “Christians” did confer upon Jesus, or at least their image of him, the power of a leader. His image got overlaid with all kinds of messianic imagery, with such notables as St. Paul likening him to a dying and rising son of god and John, the author of the gospel that bears his name, promoting Jesus as the very creative force of the universe come in human form.

Withal, generations of Christians have had but one central symbol for all that imagery and of that personage to which has been imputed the very power of the divine. And that symbol is not a towering obelisk with inscriptions of victory here and victory there. It is not a great temple with soaring columns and broad lintels. It is neither the orb nor scepter of a monarch, nor yet a crown or diadem.

What is that symbol? It is the crucifix – the First Century Roman version of today’s electric chair, the gas chamber, the lethal injection, the firing squad, the hanging tree for lynching.

Pray tell how the crucifix is a sign of power? Is it not the sign of power’s absence? Or is it power absconditus – power hidden? The power of love rather than the love of power? Greater love hath no man than this than that he lay down his life for his friends.

Providence forbid that any President should be harmed, much less assassinated or die in the performance of her or his duty. Not the point. The point for her or him is to possess and to use power in ways that secure and maintain economic and social justice, that secure and maintain a peace, which is not only the absence of war but, wherever and however possible, its various causes.

Maybe it is too much to hope that those really serious about being elected President will find their own wilderness experience in which they may come to grips with the insidious temptations of power and be able to come out saying of them, Get thee hence, Satan. That would not be anything so ordinary as “experience” or “change.” It would be “conversion,” which, plainly speaking, is what we need right now.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.