Friday, January 10, 2025
Friday after Epiphany
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
In the world
Who indeed is the victor over the world?
Plough Magazine often shares writing from Eberhart Arnold, theologian and founder of the Bruderhof in Germany. Today’s Bruderhof publishes the magazine. Here is something Herr Arnold wrote:
As long as we want to deny that life is eternal, everything that belongs to life remains cloaked in tormenting riddles. Eternity remains the deepest longing of the human spirit. When we know that we are immortal beings, everything we experience is great and understandable; when we see ourselves as mortal, it all becomes dark and futile. If there is no other future and no other world (which is bound to be victorious because it is the better world), then the injustice that prevails makes nonsense of human existence by giving final victory to “the worst of all possible worlds.”
And a few days ago I read a post from Ron Rolheiser about what he called “The Gentle Powerless Power of God.”
If we accept human testimony, the testimony of God is surely greater.
Taken together we have two points of view – the human point and an idea of God’s point. God’s power isn’t what we call power. But it’s inexorable and full of love.
God’s power does not overpower with muscle, or attractiveness, or brilliance, or grace, as does the speed and muscle of an Olympic athlete, the physical beauty of a young film star, or the gifted speech or rhetoric of the brilliant orator or author.
What does God’s power look like? How does it feel to feel as God must often feel in this world?
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- If you have ever been sick and there was no doctor or medicine that could cure you, if you have ever felt the mortality of your own body and been hopeless at its weakness, then you have felt how God is in the world.
- If you have ever been shamed in your enthusiasm and not given a chance to explain yourself, if you have ever been cursed for your goodness by people who misunderstood you and were powerless to make them see things in your way, then you have felt how God is in this world.
- If you have ever felt yourself aging and losing both the health and tautness of a young body and the opportunities that come with that and been powerless to turn back the clock, if you have ever felt the world slipping away from you as you grow older and ever more marginalized, then you have felt how God is in this world.
- And if you have ever felt like a minority of one before the group hysteria of a crowd gone mad, if you have ever felt, first-hand, the sick evil of a gang rape, then you have felt how God is in this world . . . and how Jesus felt on Good Friday.
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God never overpowers. God’s power is never the power of a muscle, a speed, a physical attractiveness, a brilliance or a grace which (as the contemporary expression has it) blows you away and makes you say: “Yes, there is a God!” God’s power is more muted, more helpless, more shamed and more marginalized.
God’s power  lies at a deeper level, at the ultimate base of things, and will, in the end, gently have the final say.
Jesus did not overpower the leper in Luke’s story. And in every healing story I can remember, Jesus loved, Jesus healed, and Jesus never overpowered.
Jesus stretched out his hand, touched the leper and said, “Be made clean.” And the leprosy left him immediately.
 (1 John 4, Psalm 72, Luke 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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