When Power Fails
The humble journey of Holy Week | Palm Sunday, Year C
A couple of quick updates before we get to the main contents of this post. First, for those who are paying subscribers to The Way We Practice, I’ve added a voice over with a few extra comments at the end of this post. I hope to offer other “value-added” content along the way to say thank you for your financial support. It really helps. For those who aren’t paying subscribers, you can get access to this content along with the full archives for $5 a month.
Second, as I move into a new season after Holy Week, I’m wanting to record more audio. I love listening to Q&A podcasts and I thought I’d try out my own version. To get started, I need questions. What questions keep you up at night? Where are you trying to find insight into the spiritual life? Are you in need of book recommendations, or particularly practices to help with a spiritual challenge? Is there some question you have about theology, the Bible, prayer, or living the Christian way? I can't promise to be able to answer those questions, but I want to offer what I can through this medium. I may even invite some friends to help me along the way. To submit your question use this form or post it in the comments. Now, for the real essay.
Last week we all felt the threat, thunderstorms every day, my daughters’s activities cancelled and cancelled again for fear of what would come. It was rain, and rain, and rain, but the tornado watches never turned to warnings. Then on Saturday, when I was leaving my neighborhood, the nearby interstate was closed. A lake had formed beneath the bridge and cars were gathered, wrecked by the retaining walls. I followed the detour and continued on my way.
I was going to a workshop with the theologian Willie James Jennings, a chance to be with a small group of pastors to join in conversation with Jennings about his work on the theology of city planning. He was a lovely man, and a brilliant teacher, but midway through the conversation the lights went out as rain slapped against the window panes and phones buzzed in unison on the table. We were in the midst of a severe thunderstorm—lighting, wind, and more rain. The pastors in the room didn’t want to stop, and Dr. Jennings was kind enough to continue. We went on by the gray light of the stormy day, a phone propped on a coffee cup giving us enough illumination to read our notes.
When I emerged, hours later, I found a tree across the road a few feet from where I’d parked my car. There was the strong smell of natural gas in the air and fire trucks were standing by as neighbors rushed from their houses. I drove away, finding my path blocked at several turns, finally arriving home to my house. It was unscathed but the power out, and it stayed out for four days, as tens of thousands in my city were also left without electricity. Winds as fast as an E1 tornado had rushed through a large swath of the city, and combined with the saturated ground, trees had fallen everywhere. The damage ranged from the mundane to the spectacular. The news carried images of a car bursting into flame after a power-line fell on it. A friend taking her children to a birthday party emerged to find an oak on her minivan.
After the storm, and in the days leading up to it, there was a sense of dread in the air. Our city had experienced a devastating tornado just two years ago, and everyone echoed, in chatter in coffee shop lines, around the edge of children’s softball games, a nervous acknowledgement that storms are not what they once were. They menace with a new chaos and strength; our past experience of weather is not guide for what comes now. And all of this came at the same moment that the economic markets, graphed like the heartbeat of the Industrial economy, began to plummet, and the powers of government seemed as chaotic and unprecendented as the storms. We felt like we were coming to the end of something.
Somewhere to the West, the echos of their armor could be heard like the beat of a drum, a cloud of dust rising from the road. The swords they carried were real, sharp and double edged, but the whole spectacle of their arrival was meant to keep their use to a minimum. This was Rome, whose peace had come to the whole region of the Mediterranean through shear might and power. Any insurrection, any questioning of its right to order the world, would be put down. The worst, revolutionaries and dissident slaves, would be nailed to crosses and left to suffocate in a exhibition of public humiliation.
At the pinnacle of this parade was the governor, Pilate riding a war horse. He was coming as a reminder to all who might question it, that Rome was in charge. The most successful Empire of the ages, Rome knew when its power might be challenged. The Passover, a revolutionary feast in which a conquered people remembered their liberation, was a prime time for an uprising. Extra troops had been called in, spectacles of violence prepared. These people would know who was in charge and what would happen to those who challenged them.
From the East, a parade of peasants and ex-prostitutes, fishermen and former collaborators, a whole march of the marginalized people at the edge of the Empire, came carousing toward Jerusalem. There was no clanging of armor, only the soft patter of bare feet. But the closed lips of the lockstep army was replaced with the open song of a joyful people, singing the Psalms of old, echoing the joyful calls of hosanna!
At the pinnacle of this parade was a peasant man, his clothes patched as much as any other. He’d grown up in the trades, and beyond a loose lineage that linked him to the shepherd king of Israel, he was not of any noble birth. He rode in on the everyday stock animal of a farmer—a donkey who most other days would have been carrying baskets of produce to market. A tractor, not a tank, as Kent McDougal put it.
For all the plain, everydayness of this man, there was a quiet power in his presence. He taught with authority and cast demons from the possessed. There were rumours he’d calmed the wild sea, and even raised the dead. His coming, everyone felt, marked an arrival of something new. The Temple leaders feared it as Rome kept careful watch. But the people, ready to not only hear stories of liberation, but to live them, were hopeful that this man on a donkey would bring an end and a beginning.
He would. The fact that we are here, more than two millennia later, still talking about what happened, is the result of the change to the world that Jesus brought. But it wasn’t a change at the heights, a remaking of the world by a coup the Powers, a taking over of their palaces and positions. The world shifted, down to its core, because Jesus descended to the lowest place, like the water and soil of a valley, where the trees grow tallest and the roots go deepest.
Paul, the apostle who would come to follow him, named this path a humbling. Not the kind that comes from disaster, a failure that corrects pride, but a deliberate descent: “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death.” The story Paul offers in the scripture we will read this Sunday is known as the Kenosis Hymn. We could call it, in a less academic key, the Song of Self-emptying. It contains in its poetic outline the story of Holy Week. It’s music is the grounded going down to the place where life is renewed, a humble human turning toward the humus.
On Maundy Thursday we will find the great teacher bent over a bowl of water, doing the work of a slave. On Good Friday, the humility of the Incarnation will find its completion on the cross—the flesh of God bruised and torn—the body reduced to mangled meat. But then, the “name that is above every name” will be brought to radiant life—Jesus will be resurrected as God’s breath moves through the soil and soul that makes a human being.
As we follow along with this journey, watching this humble king in the stark contrast he posses to all the pretend powers of the world, we should take note of his steps and follow them. As storms stand as signs of the systems of earths life thrown out of balance by greed, and our politics echo the idolatry of money and pride, we should recognize that we are moving toward the time that
has called the “Great Humbling.” The best place to be whenever such a humbling arrives is close to the soil, for just as Jesus taught, it is from the lowest places that we will be lifted up while those who sought the heights will be brought low.This means that we should not worry about the rattle of armor, the spectacles of might, and arrogant charades of power. Instead, we are invited to join the parade celebrating the man on the donkey, the humble Human One greeted with hosannas and palms. Those leaves, they make good compost.