“And the devil said to
him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been
given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be
yours. St. Luke 4:6-7
“If anything unites America in this fractious
moment,” says the New York Times’ David Brooks in a recent column, it is a widespread
sentiment that power is somewhere other than where you are.”[1] “The Republican establishment thinks the
grass roots have the power,” he continues, “but the grass roots think the
reverse. The unions think the corporations have the power but the corporations
think the start-ups do. Regulators think Wall Street has the power but Wall
Street thinks the regulators do.” He
goes on to cite a recent Pew study which asked Americans, “Would you say your
side has been winning or losing more?” Sixty-four percent of us, majorities of
both parties, believe our side has been losing more.
People
respond to this feeling of powerlessness, Brooks says, with “pointless acts of
self-destruction.” When we believe we
have no power, compromise is suspicious.
If we believe we have no power, utopian dreams seem the only possible
escape. If we have no power, we must get
behind the one who promises to “start winning again,” no matter what real
abilities he might have to keep his promise.
This sense of powerlessness,
Brooks says, is very dangerous in a political system like ours, which attempts
to draw together a deeply diverse society through common citizenship and shared
institutions.
And as in
many past elections, there’s plenty of religiosity in the hysterical rhetoric
we’re hearing. Candidates are appealing
to the fact that so many of our fellow Christians feel particularly
powerless. They can see that church
attendance is declining, that religious voices are taken less seriously in the
places where real decisions are made.
Episcopalian
blogger Rachel Held Evans wondered in a recent post[2]
why polls show that the embarrassingly secular Donald Trump is the favored
candidate of America’s evangelicals. She
found a pretty shameful reason in one of his recent speeches. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Trump told a crowd
in Sioux Center, Iowa, “I get elected president, we’re going to be saying
‘merry Christmas’ again…And by the way, Christianity will have power…because if
I’m there, you’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.”
“This is the
gospel of Donald Trump,” Held Evans continued, “his ‘good news’ to Christian
voters: Stick with me and you’ll be a
winner. Stick with me and I’ll give you power, protection, prestige.” She notes, “It’s also the very thing Satan
promised Jesus when he tempted him in the desert.”
Now hear me
on this. I don’t think there are little
red horns somewhere in the Donald’s big hair.
But I do think Held Evans is on to something in holding up this moment
in our society against the choice offered by Satan to Jesus, standing on that
high peak with all the kingdoms of the world spread before Him.
Commentators
often rank this as the most serious of Jesus’ three temptations, the defining
choice that points most directly to heart of His life and work. The stakes are the highest. The choice is also phrased most directly.
Will Jesus bow down to God or Satan? For
whose ends will He devote His talents?
Saint
Ambrose, who wrote one of the early church’s greatest commentaries on this
passage call this temptation ambition,
the willingness to sacrifice moral principle in pursuit of a larger aim. Saint Ambrose knew something about
ambition. Before his ordination he had
been a Roman consular prefect, a man of great wealth and influence. He turned his back on a world dominated by
ambition to serve Christ in the church. And
he says that ambition is driven by a fear of powerlessness, and it reveals the
weakness of the one who chooses it. “That
ambition might govern, he says, it makes itself slave to another. It wants to be exalted, but it is made to
stoop.”[3]
Satan was
inviting Jesus to stoop, to become his slave, to turn away from the Holy Spirit
poured out on Him in Baptism. Satan was
urging Him to forsake His beloved Father, to abandon His moral integrity, to
reject the purpose for which He had been sent into the world. And because it was Jesus, it sounds at first
to us like an impossible choice. Yet the
Scriptures tell us that He was tempted in every way as we are, tempted even to
ambition, tempted to betray all He was, all He was meant to do.
Because this
trade, loyalty for power, stooping so as to be exalted, how often we make it. The temptation to ambition is a constant
feature, not just in the world of election cycles, but in the long and tragic
history of the Church. Again and again,
we have felt powerless, and our leaders have made deals for the sake of a
little more influence, a little more money.
And sometimes we’ve managed to get ahead, but not without spending a
great deal of our moral capital. Exalted
in the eyes of world, but feeble and shameful in the eyes of the One whose
judgement really matters.
It’s a
choice that is before us in this election season, and there’s more than one
candidate eager to cut us a deal. But how
often this choice also lurks in different ways in all the smaller political
arenas of life: the office, the club, the community organization, the
family. We hear that ancient voice,
don’t we? “Pushing back’s the only way
to get a little respect around here.” “She’s
spent all her second chances.” “Cut him down to size and they’ll start taking
you seriously.” “ Just look the other way and we’ll take care of you next time.”
The true
power, that which always endures and conquers, is God’s gift. It can’t be won in an election, bartered
across a breakroom table, or bought for millions of dollars. It has nothing to do with fame or flashy
talent. The Spirit poured out on Jesus
in Baptism rests also on us. By Christ’s
grace, the Lenten preface proclaims, “we are able to triumph over every evil,
and to live no longer for ourselves alone, but for him who died for us and rose
again.” Saint Paul assures us that
temptations will come, “but he will provide a way out so that you can endure
it.”[4][5]
I think
David Brooks is right. People respond to
the feeling of powerlessness with pointless acts of self-destruction. And I
expect that in some part of our life, right now, we each feel powerless. And the tempter is there, stroking our ambition,
offering some plan that promises to put us back on top of the world again. That temptation looks like conquest, but
it’s actually self-destruction.
The truly
powerful act, the one enabled by God’s grace is to stand fast, to hold fast to
your integrity, to remain true to the One who has created and will judge all
things. Jesus was promised all the
kingdoms of this world, and left the desert still a poor man, with no
followers, lacking even a place to lay His head. But Jesus held that head high, because in the
test of ambition, He had preserved all that was most precious in the life God
had set before Him. He’s beside you today,
as you face the test of ambition. Will
you call on Him for help? Will you let
Him make you strong?
[1] Brooks, David. “The Anxieties of Impotence.” The New York Times. 22 Jan. 2016, A25. Brooks is quoting the International New York
Times’ Anand Giriharadas here.
[2] “Donald Trump and A Tale of Two Gospels.” http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/donald-trump-gospel-liberty 26 Jan. 2016.
[5] I Cor. 10:13.
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