The last two weeks we have been examining true isness power within the ecology of consent saying that power comes from our isness and that true isness power can only be practiced within the participatory ecology of consent to isness. We also learned that the economy of the ecology of consent is honour, respect and submission. For a full review you can read The Isness of Power and Consent. Today we will examine Jesus as our prime example of what it means to wield1 isness power in contrast to the world’s ideas of greatness.
Power in Practice
Looking to Jesus the Wisdom & Power of God
Power is a dirty word. It elicits scenes of horrific abuse of the primary interface. Deforestation, pollution, border walls, seas black with oil, hundreds of thousands of Gazans lying dead in the streets whose blood cries out to God—when will you avenge us? Closer to home we see politicians wielding their respective rumours of power to cut each other down and sow fear into the hearts of those who have consented to their reigns of terror in the name of safety, legitimacy and provision.
Sadly when we look at the people of God what we see is mere benevolence within the same systems used to abuse those considered weak within it. Over time that benevolence gives way to inevitable malevolent leaders. It can be difficult to wash the bloodstain off of a word like power when we have only ever seen it used to drain the life out of those who are rumoured to wield it and those who follow in their footsteps. However, the Bible gives us another vision of power in the person of Jesus—and not really another but a true vision of isness power; a power still covered in blood but whose blood it’s covered in makes all the difference. True isness power is not benevolence; power rebranded as service, or the word Christian tacked on to the front of it with no meaningful difference. True isness power flows from a Biblical definition of greatness.
Jesus Our Example
As those coming from an Evangelical background we often over spiritualise the life of Jesus as unattainable. His miracles are reduced to their ultimate purpose of declaring His divinity or else showing His character. What we rarely consider is what Jesus is doing via His miracles. In Broken we examined the miracles of the unintentional healing of the woman with the bleeding disorder and and the intentional raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead. We said that Jesus wasn’t fixing them so much as restoring them to full integrated wholeness of body, soul and spirit.
I mentioned this thought again a month later:
“We saw, when Christ was with us, that everything He came into contact with was righted as if it were a slouching soldier sucking in their gut upon inspection. We also saw that everything which did not right itself was cast out from Him. Demons. Fig Trees. Judas…What are the failings of the flesh but identities that refuse fealty to God and so are falling away?” —Suck in Your Gut
And so here we are again, looking at Jesus as our primary example and this time we are looking at Jesus’ example of true isness power; His righting influence both miraculously and in His teaching. We have seen Him restore soul and health to a body, and remove evil spirits from a body again and again in the scriptures as a form of reintegration of a person’s Anthrohead by Divine command. Interestingly we understand Jesus’ righting influence in the miraculous fairly well but tend to miss it in His teachings.
Jesus’ reintegration of the Anthrohead is both miraculous and conceptual by nature. Think of it like hardware and software. Jesus corrected the hardware issues miraculously but the software issues He took precious time to rewrite and enter into the system. Think of His Sermon on the Mount; the “you have heard it said” statements, the beatitudes, the parables. These difficult to understand teachings are meant to make us question everything the world teaches us about power and greatness. To reduce them into a single sentence in the style of the beatitudes we might say, “blessed are the nobodies for they are the only somebodies”. This is a difficult teaching indeed. Whatever the metric, whatever the cultural value, whatever the educational degree—if it creates a permission structure to not love God and/or one another2, blessed are those who not that.
The Pharisee and the Tax Collector
In the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector3 Jesus pits the highest of society against the lowest—the very highly educated and culturally with it Pharisee praises God for the good fortune of his life having never fallen into major sin nor ever betraying his country to extort taxes from his fellow Jews. By contrast the Tax Collector merely cries out to God, beating his chest, “have mercy on me a sinner,” and Jesus says that only one man left that day justified, for whoever relies on the world’s metrics to claim exaltation will be humbled, but whoever humbles themselves will be truly exalted. As a religious leader I have tended to read this passage to mean, “whoever humbles themselves will receive worldly exaltation” honorary doctorates, positions, book deals, glory, safety, legitimacy, and provision. This is not what Jesus means. Rather, Jesus is resetting the bar for greatness to its factory settings at Creation.
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…
In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth and called them beautiful and great. Adam and Eve our Earthly Father and Mother were the greatest humans to ever exist. They walked naked in the garden with God without secondary interface, without knowledge, without status, without culture, without difference, and without hierarchy—they were truly great in being and in practice because God called them great. Every person who has come after who has experienced true greatness in form and function must then point to our Grandparents as having been the greatest until Christ with a few mentionable people in-between. In Christ the reset button of greatness reminds us of our lineage that we are not moving on to hitherto-unknown heights of greatness of the worldly kind but a greatness so powerful that it strips away everything apart from the primary interface. The animal skins fall away, the fig leaves burn to a crisp, what we believe to be our shame will be exposed—but in the light of God’s glory we are reintegrated body, soul and spirit. It is our various stages of reintegration that give us such a wide spectrum of isness influence and power.
It occurs to me that in Eternity we will be as great and powerful as Adam and Eve. But it is important to understand the world’s greatness by contrast which is to have achieved every mimetic desire of this age and to become desirable oneself. By contrast Adam and Eve are great because they are without any other desire than to love and be loved. I think we understand this to a certain degree because those who practice the greatness of the world seem to live incredibly simple, Gene Roddenberry inspired lives of rest and creativity on the back of technological and social innovation. This is, as we well know, a façade regularly uncovered by gossip magazines that do us the service of removing the stone that reveals the colony underneath.4 Afterall, there is a difference between satisfaction and contentment.
I Can’t Get No-ho Sa-tis-faction
In Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, Self Actualisation is the tip of the pyramid of having made it. To Maslow we are ever moving closer to actualisation having a “becoming” satisfaction model of desire, populated by “I’ll be satisfied if/when,” statements. In Christ, we have a “being” contentment model of desire populated by “I am content even if/when” statements. James tells us that the nature of desire is that it brings forth death5—desire is in our bones, in our blood, in our being—it is as close to a biological understanding of the doctrine of sin that we will ever encounter. Our bodies believe that they must have something to sustain them and so we whither away. This is perhaps the truth that Jesus points us to when He says to the Devil, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”.6
Perhaps the greatest illustration of the nature of the world’s power comes from the book of James where the author tells us that desires give birth to death7. Wow—what was supposed to happen? Well, it was supposed to reproduce after its own kind right? That’s what every part of the primary interface does—it reproduces itself perfectly. Not so with desires. Desires are a disease that spread from person to person causing the individual to spend their whole lives chasing them but never receive the fruit of their labour because as soon as it comes to fruition it dies. Not a good death either, like a seed in the ground that must die in order to be resurrected, but a death of finality that did not reproduce—the end of its kind. Every other interface requires an exhausting amount of energy in upkeep. In my house they’re called “the chores that never end”8 Dishes, beds, floors, laundry, you name it—if it’s job is to make us comfortable while we go about the stuff of life then we are never done doing it until it becomes the stuff of life. Before we know it, we have either devoted our lives to fulfilling our desire for comfort or we have engineered a society where we outsource the upkeep of comfort to a lower class of people. Enter conversations about vocation.
I am not a fan of vocational thought—in my mind it exists as a sorry excuse and brainwash program for enslaving certain people to make us comfortable while we fulfil our so-called higher calling. If I have a calling then it follows that someone else’s calling is to make me comfortable while I get on with it. I don’t think I have to tell you that this thinking stinks of chattel slavery and misogyny. While many Christians support the idea of vocation as a type of washing one another’s feet, I find very little of it to be redeemable. Vocation in my mind is responsible for the survival of many secondary interfaces that would have died out long ago had they not enslaved certain members to do the dirty work of devoting their lives to death—what René Girard would call The Scape Goats.
An Example Must Be Made
René Girard formulated the theory of The Scapegoat which is that, “internal mediation and metaphysical desire eventually lead to rivalry and violence”. The scapegoat is the one found guilty by a group of people upon whom they caste all of the perceived social ills and commit communal murder to satiate their moral and political conscience. Think of Nathanial Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948) and Joanne Harris’ Chocolat (1999). Our desires are metaphysical lies that poison us into poisoning others. They convince us that we shouldn’t have to do without and indeed cannot do without the secondary interfaces that make us comfortable while we get about the business of our pursuing our vocation—anyone who threatens that comfort and therefore our vocation from God has to go. The language we use is an example must be made for the good of the many.
The Good of the Many
It is characteristic of vocational thought to pretend that the upkeep of the secondary interface is in the best interest of the primary interface; real, flesh and blood people—but secondary interfaces never sacrifice their own—it is always the outcast or stranger or lower class citizen who upsets the peace that becomes the sacrificial goat upon the alter of the heathen gods of safety, legitimacy and provision. My meaning in showing this to you is to illustrate that the world’s forms of greatness and power are detestable and evil—the people of God ought to have nothing to do with these deeds of darkness that produce only death. Paul says in Romans 8
“20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Creation is subjected to futility; fruitlessness; death and groans under the weight of carrying each child to term and giving birth to death again and again—longing for her children.
3 Suggested Applications
Godliness with Contentment is Great Gain
“6 But godliness with contentment is great gain. 7 For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.” 1 Timothy 6:6-7 NIV
Paul, advising his young disciple Timothy, narrows in on the simplicity of perspective in the Christian life—not that it requires austerity all of the time, but that to desire after greatness in the world’s eyes is not the same as desiring greatness in God’s eyes. Paul hints at the mindset of the truly great which is that when we entered the world we entered in exactly the same way that Jesus entered and will go in exactly the same way—naked, having brought nothing and taking nothing. If this is the case then we can be content! We recognise that the greatness of a person is depleted by the secondary interface and the more one sheds that interface the more they revitalise their created greatness.Strip the Secondary Interface
I don’t always suggest spiritual practices but in this case, a lot of our identities are tied up in what we believe God wants us to do or be—our vocation. As mentioned above our vocation might actually be a stumbling block for those we love in our lives. Examine your life in regard to the work left behind you that others deal with to make you comfortable in the world. Are there any interfaces that can be completely stripped away?Spend Time in Your Own Skin
This one is not going to be comfortable. Go buy a floor length mirror and every day when you dress give over that item of clothing to God until you stand in the mirror as only yourself and nothing more. Spend a moment thanking God for how you came into the world and how you will leave it. Take as long as you can, and do it until any sense of shame or personal disgust evaporates. In these moments you experience the greatness that comes from acknowledging your isness. The world wants you to think that your body is vocationally for someone else; either now or in the future—this is a lie. You are great and powerful just as our ancestors were great and powerful having walked naked with God in the garden. Pray today that God will unveil your eyes to the greatness of being God’s created image bearer and finally open your eyes—look into your eyes and say: I love you, I see you, I know you.
for lack of a better term
Read: see one another and God for who we truly are,
See Luke 18:9-14
An altogether unfair analogy as the insects below are more alive and a part of the primary interface than the rumour of simplicity being projected.
James 1
Matthew 4:4 KJV
James 1:15
To be sung to the tune of “the song that never ends” from Lambchops
Very thought provoking! I appreciate this share. Thank you!