Header photo by ProChurch Media
A man walks in to the room where power sits on earth and accosts the members of its assembly with an aggrieved eye before beginning to speak:
“It is the responsibility of those who have been given power on this earth, to care for the disadvantaged and marginalized. See and hear the widow and the orphan, the dis-owned and the foster child. Attend to their unique grief. See the immigrant and refugee and hold them as long as it is theirs to fight PTSD. Respect the indigenous whom you made refugees on their own land. Repent, and step down from your arrogance, and your quasi-progress, back to the office of service and attend to de-humanized lives. This is governance as it should be.”
With both hands he points at the assembly. He wears simple garments. His hands are worn – perhaps from his carrying the wounded, his healing, and his washing of others’ feet. He accosts the assembly with authority unexpected from someone so otherwise unimposing:
“You white washed tombs! You divvy out legislation from your places of privilege and grin into the camera. The frame captures you, the signed paper your hold up, and your strong men behind you. You lay thick the story of your greatness while you lift not a finger to assist those in your charge who need assistance. Instead of helping them up you make them your strawmen and your scapegoats. You pin empire-sized grievances on those who cannot advocate for themselves because they are not listened to. Even as you persecute and malign, it seems you can do no wrong because you have made yourself judge, god, and meaning-maker to many who are blind enough to put their faith in you – you who yourself are also desperately blind.”
“You do not see that God has always sided with the slaves. You are Pharaoh and Caesar and Emperor, and by your self-elevation you have pitted yourself against God because you have sided against the slave, refugee, and disenfranchised. You fight their defender by placing yourself over them. God stands with the destitute and mourning and the oppressed while he stands against the proud, giving the arrogant to their folly.
“All the great men you have seen fall? You will join them soon should you not turn and remember those who are helpless.”
“But alas! On this earth it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for the elite to embody the values of God and to live righteously. Indeed, in this generation, the rich are proud and the proud are cruel – even while they present themselves and altruists and messiahs.”
The man turns then to the assembly’s most esteemed chairman, piercing his imperial façade with undeceived perception:
“You, sir. You will only be as great as you think you are when you are willing to sell all that you have, give the proceeds to the poor and then walk humbly, with your God. You will find life only when you lose everything you’ve seized so fiercely. You will starve your soul still if you do not let go. Oh, Strong Man, you have built a castle of cards on sand. You have erected your shrine, so tall now that the altitude asphyxiates you. So inaccessible, you have condemned yourself to isolation even whilst eliciting an empire’s worship. Such a lonely god you are.”
“You have weaponized law and hidden truth. Law should have been held for the defense of the powerless. It was a holy shield. But you twist it, using it to protect your privilege and hold those you despise down. By your misuse of law, you legalize your prejudice and incarcerate the down-trodden.”
“Even more, you have weaponized religion and the language of faith. The rhythms and language of faith were also made for the redemption and protection of human life. But even this – which God gave for your wholeness – you have instead corrupted and added to your wickedness and added to your propaganda arsenal. You are the hired-hand, the poor steward, which kills and steals and destroys – destroys even those you were charged to protect.
God the Good Father, the keeper of all justice, He sides with these whom you have afforded no compassionate thought. You were charged to protect them, you were commissioned to love them, but instead you treated them like your enemy. God sides with those you afflict, oh Strong Man.”
The assembly writhes under the indictments. The Strong Man stands and yells, “Who the hell are you?”
“I am he whom you crucify with the afflicted. I am he who suffers with the broken-hearted and consoles the wounded – he who carries the wounds and disease of the world – he who fortifies the spirit of the persecuted – he that cuts down the haughty and wields all of heaven against the self-aggrandized persecutor.
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, I assure you this.
“I was hungry, and you did not feed me. Naked and you did not clothe me. Incarcerated and you did not visit me. Villainized and you did not defend me.
“Woe to you and your false empire. You could have invited people to follow you into the kingdom but instead built a labor camp at the gate with plastic imitations of what you see inside. You did not enter yourself and tempted pilgrims away from its promise and into your illusion. You and your converts are slaves of your deception. Your proselytes are twice the sons of decay as you have become – so zealous with the anxious defensiveness that comes with defending a lie.
“Woe you and your false justice. You obsess over a small matter, and call yourself righteous, while you neglect mercy and justice. You’re treating acne while dying of cancer. You focus everything on a sunburn while you demonize the oncologists who are begging you to see the metastasizing tumors.
“Yours is a dead morality, exceptionally clean by the rules you have selected but horrifically diseased by reference to the law of love and truth. You care more about looking just than being just and by this have deceived many. You look the part but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness, contradiction and vice.
“Woe to you who disguise injustice as freedom and shut to door against real justice. Woe to you and your prophets of false gospel and quasi-kingdom – those who say “Peace, peace,” when you there is no peace. You have resigned yourselves and your people to live in a ruin even while the Kingdom has been held open to you. You may have entered had only you repented, crucified your ego, and served.
“The distribution of power and resources in your empire warps around the black hole that is your ego. Such grief it is that one man’s pride can waste a nation’s plenty. Oh Strong Man, you are like death: hungry, senseless, and violent.
“You have propped up death and called it life. Turn, Oh Strong Man, before your ‘life’ kills you and your people.”
At these words, the assembly can stand the man no more. As a mob, they malign the man as an anti-social radical, condemn his character, insult his intelligence, and cast him out. The man picks himself off the earth, however, and gets back to his work of consoling the broken-hearted and instructing the faithful. He builds an alternative kingdom with living stones. These are those who confess their error, crucify their egos, and rise to a new system of worth and to new power to love. Now, they may go un-thanked and un-praised while still understanding themselves to be instruments of restorative light. This kingdom is yeast in the dough, a clandestine insurgency of compassion and forgiveness, that operates within, but will outlast, the kingdoms that implode by force of their corruption. The crucified man’s kingdom is not of this world’s hierarchy schemes and scarcity dynamics. It transcends and will outlast. The self-giver will prove to have overcome after all the self-aggrandized have ruined themselves.
The Strong Man who sits in power will kneel one day in deference to the man he crucifies.