Less Obvious Power

In gen­eral, peo­ple expend their great­est ener­gies to acquire the weak­est forms of power. Lying is weak. Manip­u­la­tion is short-lived. Brute force is tem­po­rary. In the end, spir­i­tu­al­ity over­comes all of them. For those of us watch­ing the world from the side­lines, it is some­where between sad and pathetic to see so much human energy wasted on the end­less cycles of social and polit­i­cal con­flict. Yesterday’s win­ners are today’s losers and the reverse will be true sooner or later. Illu­sions are pow­er­ful. Temp­ta­tions are con­stant. The game is the same. The pat­tern is a circle.

Wis­dom works every time, but it is slower than imme­di­ate force. Given time, it watches all neg­a­tiv­ity crum­ble and all cyn­i­cism land on the trash heap. Scan­dals are quickly yesterday’s news. Noth­ing is dis­cov­ered in them but human ten­den­cies toward fail­ure and car­nal weak­nesses. There is noth­ing new about that and there never will be. The grave ends all power strug­gles that have to do with this world. Ulti­mately, worldly power is very short-sighted.

The Bible is a power book, but it is writ­ten in sur­pris­ing con­trasts. Israel is saved by mirac­u­lous inter­ven­tions and not by its size or abil­i­ties. Jesus turned the power approaches of his world upside down, by show­ing that all of the mil­i­tary and polit­i­cal forces mus­tered against him could not erase his life or end his influ­ence. He did not fight back. He did some­thing more pow­er­ful: he tran­scended it all. That is the power of spirit over mat­ter. It is not whether one wins or loses in the imme­di­ate but what approach is taken for the long run. Trust in God, the ulti­mate good, over all forms of tem­po­rary evil, is the less obvi­ous power in the uni­verse but the final vic­tory over all struggles.

Jesus said that the road to life is “nar­row” in that it is hard to sense and rel­a­tively few find it. The rest sim­ply repeat the power strug­gles that began with Cain. Win­ning is tran­scend­ing. It is step­ping aside from the march of the herd. To win is to see it from God’s point of view — that to reign is to serve. Bet­ter a poor car­pen­ter on track with the ulti­mate than a king lost in a world of tem­po­rary power and pseudo-control. The win­ners of the game are the ones not play­ing it.