Power and Its Fruits

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After three years of living with Jesus, and after forty days of seeing him alive after his death, his disciples still couldn’t shake the human longing for power. “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”^⁠¹ they asked him. They clearly were tired of their nation being subject to Rome. They wanted God’s rule to be restored, for their country to return to its founding principals.

It’s a common desire.

As many American Christians have idealized the experiment in theocratic rule begun in Puritan New England, those disciples on the Mount of Olives longed to resume the theocratic rule exemplified by David and brought to glorious expression by his son Solomon.

Solomon’s kingdom was in many ways a captivating image. Even in its own time, its reputation for splendor and efficiency had spread widely. The queen of Sheba came to admire it, and it’s reasonable to assume that she was not the only surrounding monarch on whom Solomon’s success had made an impression. He had territory, he had gold, he had horses, he had chariots, he had wives and concubines, and he had buildings: a house for himself, a house for his #1 Egyptian wife (and no doubt one for the other 799), a house for his horses and chariots, and a house for God. That he was not to marry foreign wives and that he was not to amass horses and chariots are realities conveniently overlooked by the Chronicler and other admirers.

And yet the Chronicler’s admiration is nuanced in a different way. He notes that Solomon’s splendor was amassed on the backs of slaves.

Now Solomon purposed to build a temple for the name of the LORD, and a royal palace for himself. And Solomon assigned 70,000 men to bear burdens and 80,000 to quarry in the hill country, and 3,600 to oversee them.^⁠²

Solomon exercised violent coercive power over 153,600 men. These men weren’t hired to do the job. They were conscripted. And these were not Israelites.

All the people who were left of the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were not of Israel, from their descendants who were left after them in the land, whom the people of Israel had not destroyed—these Solomon drafted as forced labor, and so they are to this day.^⁠³

These were the minorities, men of a different ethnic background and therefore, to Solomon, and to many with power, exploitable. And at some point, Solomon’s heavy hand began to press down upon Israelites who were not of his own particular tribe. When the northern tribes appealed to Solomon’s son Rehoboam for mercy after Solomon’s death, his response was

“My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to it. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.”^⁠⁴

Power once possessed, you see, can possess us^⁠,⁵ and any man or woman, any pastor or elder, any husband or parent, who overlooks this is not being wise, thoughtful, or scriptural. We all in some way possess power, and possess therefore the opportunity to use it wrongly, violently, or exploitively. Solomon’s story is a cautionary tale about the corrosive and deadening fruit of power.

Robert Caro in his eye-opening book about power, The Power Broker, tells the story of Robert Moses, one of the most powerful men many of us have never heard of.⁶ Moses, in the middle of the twentieth century dominated the politics of New York City, though he never held an elected office. He used that power to force his will on the city and, yes, he got things done. He was responsible for building the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the United Nations Building, Shea Stadium, and many lesser known but equally impactful projects. But in getting these things done, in using this power, he callously displaced the poor and ruthlessly destroyed those who dared to question him. Robert Moses, like Solomon and many others, got things done with no qualms of conscience for the way in which that power was used against others. Power wrongly directed and unchecked, whether it is in the hands of kings, builders, pastors, politicians, husbands, or big brothers, dulls the conscience.

And so Jesus redirects the desires of those who stood around him wanting to put one of their own into a position of political influence. The power to dominate is not the kind of power worthy of our energy. Rather, Jesus said,

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses . . . (Acts 1:8)

The power Jesus wants us to have is the power to witness to his resurrection. It is the power to live a life that says to others that Jesus is alive and living in us. This is the power to take up one’s cross and not one’s scepter. And if Jesus’ life is an example, it is the power to serve others, not lord it over them. It is the power to wash the feet of others. It is not the power to enslave, but the power to set the captive free.

This is power Jesus gives, and it is a power worth coveting.

1. Acts 1:6

2. 2 Chronicles 2:1

3. 2 Chronicles 2:7, 8

4. 2 Chronicles 10:11

5. James Davison Hunter touches upon all of these points in his insightful book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, (United States: Oxford University Press, 2010), see p. 176ff.

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6. Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, (United States: Vintage, 1975).