Holy Week is about power

I spoke with 25 teenagers yesterday at a local high school's Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting. They listened well and engaged in conversation with me--pretty impressive for 7:30 in the morning on a Tuesday.

I talked to them about Holy Week and what to make of it. It's hard to get the full picture of Holy Week, even IF you attend all 3 (or 4 or 5) services at your church. You really need to read the whole gospel to grasp it. Each of the gospels has a different way of slowly building the tension between Jesus and the established powers. Unless you read the whole thing, and feel that building tension and then experience the explosion of conflict in Holy Week, you may not notice what is so clear when I read the entire story: the good news of Jesus is not about salvation--it's about power. It's an answer to the question, "what is true power?"

Power is the ability to get something done. In physics, it's creating change. In our social life, it's the ability to compel someone to do what you want them to do.

The Christian gospels make the case that true power is not compulsion--not "power over," but power for and with. It's the power of love, of goodness. The ability of the state and religious authorities and economic norms to compel our behavior may appear to be the site of authority. But Jesus presents a different vision. His Palm Sunday parade is a parody of a Roman military procession. He upturns the tables of the grifters in the Temple to assert that some things in our world must be kept sacred and not desecrated by profit-taking. Jesus challenges the idea that emperor has any power at all by declaring that all things belong to God. He submits to the crude violence of the state to its tyranny, all the while remaining steadfast in the practice of nonviolent resistance. Jesus' resurrection is the power of God over all of the powers that tried to impose themselves on Jesus' Kingdom of love.

I feel like I am just now coming to an awareness of how deeply the story of Holy Week subverts and rejects our norms of power. I'm eagerly holding the question of what faithfulness to Jesus' power should look like in my life.