Notes from NT Wright and Michael Bird’s, Jesus and the Powers.

The problem of political power is rooted in the beginning. In creation. God set humanity in place to bring order. The problem is humanity keeps getting in their own way. The history of the Old Testament leaves us in a quandary:

To put it negatively: anarchy is hopeless, because the bullies will always prey on the weak (so God therefore intends his world to be governed by humans). But authority is problematic, because the vocation to rule constitutes a temptation to abuse power (so God will hold authorities to account). (p. 48)

The longing for God to make things right (especially after we screw it up ourselves) is a constant longing in Jewish Scriptures. When we get to Daniel, and it is being widely read in the time of Jesus, it is easy to see most people are interpreting all this as a leader who will come in physical strength and kick physical Rome out of the land and return the land to peace and worship.

Yet, there is another biblical strand to be followed. This can be traced through Isaiah. It is the idea of the “suffering Servant.” Looking back, the early Christian leaders could see Christ in his surrender being the point of what Isaiah was talking about.

The servant was to embody both the vocation of Israel and the vocation — so to say — of Israel’s God, and thereby take upon himself the weight of exile, shame and death, in order to renew the covenant with Israel and thereby renew creation itself. (p. 50)

The problem of political power is that, without the vision of vocation in the Kingdom of God, we’re always going to mess this up! The redeeming value of that is God will hold all powers to account. We are imperfect in our vocation because we allow our own drive to take over. We like the power, the influence, the ability to manipulate. We don’t bring it under the control of Christ and the vocation to which we are called… and it will fail.

Yet, we are called to bring restoration to a broken creation! This is the struggle in which we find ourselves on a continuing basis!

Part One of this series on the book

Part Two of this series