Power and authority
This week I’ve been wrestling with the nature of power and authority.
It began with one of the truth nuggets from Marnie’s sermon last week. She said,“Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not.” It’s not the first time I’ve heard that statement, but it was a timely reminder of the radical implications of our claim of the Lordship of Christ.
I further reflected on the nature of power when we celebrated St Margaret on Wednesday. In her early life she sought exile in various places as others sought to neutralise the threat she posed to their desire for power. When life became more stable, Queen Margaret used her position of power for the building up of others.
She was famous for her care of orphans and people in poverty or sickness, often visiting people in their homes and nursing them herself. Beyond that she founded schools, hospitals, monasteries, and orphanages to ensure care was available at a larger scale.
This wrestling with power continued on Wednesday as I watched Donald Trump announce another bid to win the White House. It was a sickening display of self-aggrandising and deceit. It was a mixture of trying to tear down the achievements of anyone else, whilst painting himself as an economic and cultural saviour. His desire for power is purely self-serving, and his method of gaining it is through a mixture of entitlement, lies, and the manipulation of others.
And so we come to Christ the King Sunday. Here we proclaim Jesus as the ultimate authority, and the only one worthy of our worship. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords. But that theme doesn’t end at the dismissal of today’s service.
Instead we spend Advent, Epiphany, Lent and Easter hearing of how Jesus chooses to gain and use the power that is his. The one we crown with many crowns arrives in a feeding trough, in a stable, in a small occupied town, to unwed and unimportant parents, with Herod breathing threats and simple shepherds his first visitors. He'll live simply, finally arriving to a King’s entrance at the backdoor of the city on a donkey with a red-carpet made only from the branches ripped off nearby trees. His throne is the cross, with the title of King above written as insult.
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