Use a Different Type of Power
First Sunday of Christmas
Hebrews 2.10-18; Matthew 2.13-23
For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. Hebrews 2.11
Our eldest daughter is not one for early rising. That’s no criticism, as I suspect she is typical of her age group. Indeed typical of the age group even when I was included amongst it - too many years ago now to be thought of often! The small hours of the night was the time to be doing things, morning was for sleeping it off!
I only mention this so that you will appreciate how difficult it was for my daughter, then working as a shop assistant, to get to work the first trading day after Christmas Day. Zoe was required to be there at 5.45am, for the shop doors to open at 6.00. We all thought it crazy as elaborate family plans were arranged to makesure she actually left the house at 5.30. What a ridiculous time to open a shop.
The judgement was confirmed as she left home in the dark. All was still, nothing and no one stirred in the cathedral precincts. What a shock then to find in Eastgate (the main shopping street) a huge queue of people waiting for those shop doors to open! The early birds had already been waiting more than two hours.
Such is the power of consumerism. The power of a chain store to attract such a determined customer base. Yes, but not just that, the power also of those customers to prompt that early morning trading at a holiday time, at prices they were content to pay.
The Church is often terribly po-faced about consumerism. We give the impression of being aloof from the mucky business of shopping, as if like some stuck-up character from a Jane Austen novel it is to be condemned as “only money from trade, Sir.” Criticism of the evils of consumerism comes all too glibly. We miss the point that for most of us, consumerism comes as a great liberation.
Money to spend, choice, commodities, and options about how to manage the things of living, and the leisure to make such decisions, are all ways of exerting our personal power that our forebears could have hardly have imagined. It’s not surprising then that shopping is reported as our society’s number one leisure pastime. We find ourselves able to exert a
remarkable and really rather new kind of power, and in our heart of hearts most of us must admit that we are in love with that power.
So when you hear Matthew’s horrifying story about Herod’s evil abuse of his power, don’t shudder at its’ vileness, and then put it from your mind as only about tyrants and their cruelty. It is about those things, but it is not only about those things. Yes, it tells the terribly story of all human history, how tyrants will not yield and how the innocent become their
victims, but that is not all it tells.
Matthew wants to say something about such things, but this story of the horrible extreme also points to more mundane, ordinary, workaday things. Could it be that like his sayings about tearing out a sinful eye, or a log in the hypocrite’s
eye, or cutting down every fruitless tree, the extreme picture is used to shake us into alertness about our everyday experience? This sorry story of power’s abuse speaks to shopping, and home, and work, and leisure. Asks us to look again at how we – each of us, uses our power.
Matthew wants to bring home to us that the issue of power isn’t solely about rulers, and wealth, and the great forces of history that seem beyond us. To bring home to us that this baby, - threatened, poor, homeless, friendless, - absolutely
dependent on parents’ whose possibilities are hemmed-in – this apparent epitome of powerlessness– will bring a liberty beyond imagining to us all. That in the daily tests of living, as well as the daunting terrors of life, God offers us another take on power that changes things. All of us are going to have our understanding of life shifted. The things of power that we have taken as read will be overturned.
Matthew makes the point that the clues to this change are repeated again and again, but we fail to notice. In days long ago Egypt was a refuge for Jacob and his sons when famine ravished Canaan, but it became a hell as their descendents were enslaved. At that time God freed his people from their misery: Out of Egypt I have called my Son. Matthew’s account matches the cry for freedom that Moses spoke to the tyrant Pharaoh. Moses, too was a baby who escaped death. He too was a deliverer of his people who led them through the wilderness to the promise land. This baby who flees Herod’s rage is a second Moses, says Matthew.
Baby Jesus goes into Egypt as the people of Israel once went. And he will be called out as they were, straight through the wilderness. Later he will be tempted for forty days, as Israel once was for forty years. And, like Moses, on a mountain top he will hand on to his people words which he himself received from God: signposts to a promised land
– Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, those who thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, …
Signposts to a promised land, but hardly categories the powerful have any time for. From the first Matthew tells a gospel that is about power, power so incredible, so disarming, so different, we can hardly believe it.
Blinded by worldly power, we cannot see what the baby with us, God with us, represents. Are not his making hands always upon us, said Austin Farrer, do we draw a single breath but by his mercy, has he not given us one another and
the world to delight us, and kindled our eyes with a divine intelligence? Yet all his dear and infinite kindness
is lost behind the mask of power. Overwhelmed by omnipotence we miss the heart of love.
The godly love of this new Moses must touch ever part of the power we enjoy, for each of us is contributing to our own or someone else’s power. Even when we are passive we are colluding with someone else’s power. Every parent, every colleague, every clerk, every shop assistant, every nurse, the strongest boy in the playground, the cutest girl in the class, has an element of power. Every committee, every work group, every household unit, is asserting or dealing with power. Every one of us brings some degree of power to bear on others. And power, unless there is an antidote, corrupts. Bishop John V. Taylor put it like this:
[Power] … corrupts by distorting people’s perception, especially one’s perception of oneself, by confusing people’s
motives, by creating irresistible pressures and paralysing fears of loss of power. The exercise of power, on whatever scale, by anyone who has become corrupted, confused and distorted by it, adds one more stone to the structure of alienation, unreality and violence that despoils God’s world.
Here in this reading, this overture to Matthew’s story of Jesus – power’s corruption and Jesus’ way out of it are already foreshadowed. Amongst those who follow Jesus as Saviour power must be different. Here begins the gospel of him who
came not to be served but to serve, and give his life a ransom for many.
Our eldest daughter is not one for early rising. That’s no criticism, as I suspect she is typical of her age group. Indeed typical of the age group even when I was included amongst it - too many years ago now to be thought of often! The small hours of the night was the time to be doing things, morning was for sleeping it off!
I only mention this so that you will appreciate how difficult it was for my daughter, then working as a shop assistant, to get to work the first trading day after Christmas Day. Zoe was required to be there at 5.45am, for the shop doors to open at 6.00. We all thought it crazy as elaborate family plans were arranged to makesure she actually left the house at 5.30. What a ridiculous time to open a shop.
The judgement was confirmed as she left home in the dark. All was still, nothing and no one stirred in the cathedral precincts. What a shock then to find in Eastgate (the main shopping street) a huge queue of people waiting for those shop doors to open! The early birds had already been waiting more than two hours.
Such is the power of consumerism. The power of a chain store to attract such a determined customer base. Yes, but not just that, the power also of those customers to prompt that early morning trading at a holiday time, at prices they were content to pay.
The Church is often terribly po-faced about consumerism. We give the impression of being aloof from the mucky business of shopping, as if like some stuck-up character from a Jane Austen novel it is to be condemned as “only money from trade, Sir.” Criticism of the evils of consumerism comes all too glibly. We miss the point that for most of us, consumerism comes as a great liberation.
Money to spend, choice, commodities, and options about how to manage the things of living, and the leisure to make such decisions, are all ways of exerting our personal power that our forebears could have hardly have imagined. It’s not surprising then that shopping is reported as our society’s number one leisure pastime. We find ourselves able to exert a
remarkable and really rather new kind of power, and in our heart of hearts most of us must admit that we are in love with that power.
So when you hear Matthew’s horrifying story about Herod’s evil abuse of his power, don’t shudder at its’ vileness, and then put it from your mind as only about tyrants and their cruelty. It is about those things, but it is not only about those things. Yes, it tells the terribly story of all human history, how tyrants will not yield and how the innocent become their
victims, but that is not all it tells.
Matthew wants to say something about such things, but this story of the horrible extreme also points to more mundane, ordinary, workaday things. Could it be that like his sayings about tearing out a sinful eye, or a log in the hypocrite’s
eye, or cutting down every fruitless tree, the extreme picture is used to shake us into alertness about our everyday experience? This sorry story of power’s abuse speaks to shopping, and home, and work, and leisure. Asks us to look again at how we – each of us, uses our power.
Matthew wants to bring home to us that the issue of power isn’t solely about rulers, and wealth, and the great forces of history that seem beyond us. To bring home to us that this baby, - threatened, poor, homeless, friendless, - absolutely
dependent on parents’ whose possibilities are hemmed-in – this apparent epitome of powerlessness– will bring a liberty beyond imagining to us all. That in the daily tests of living, as well as the daunting terrors of life, God offers us another take on power that changes things. All of us are going to have our understanding of life shifted. The things of power that we have taken as read will be overturned.
Matthew makes the point that the clues to this change are repeated again and again, but we fail to notice. In days long ago Egypt was a refuge for Jacob and his sons when famine ravished Canaan, but it became a hell as their descendents were enslaved. At that time God freed his people from their misery: Out of Egypt I have called my Son. Matthew’s account matches the cry for freedom that Moses spoke to the tyrant Pharaoh. Moses, too was a baby who escaped death. He too was a deliverer of his people who led them through the wilderness to the promise land. This baby who flees Herod’s rage is a second Moses, says Matthew.
Baby Jesus goes into Egypt as the people of Israel once went. And he will be called out as they were, straight through the wilderness. Later he will be tempted for forty days, as Israel once was for forty years. And, like Moses, on a mountain top he will hand on to his people words which he himself received from God: signposts to a promised land
– Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, those who thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, …
Signposts to a promised land, but hardly categories the powerful have any time for. From the first Matthew tells a gospel that is about power, power so incredible, so disarming, so different, we can hardly believe it.
Blinded by worldly power, we cannot see what the baby with us, God with us, represents. Are not his making hands always upon us, said Austin Farrer, do we draw a single breath but by his mercy, has he not given us one another and
the world to delight us, and kindled our eyes with a divine intelligence? Yet all his dear and infinite kindness
is lost behind the mask of power. Overwhelmed by omnipotence we miss the heart of love.
The godly love of this new Moses must touch ever part of the power we enjoy, for each of us is contributing to our own or someone else’s power. Even when we are passive we are colluding with someone else’s power. Every parent, every colleague, every clerk, every shop assistant, every nurse, the strongest boy in the playground, the cutest girl in the class, has an element of power. Every committee, every work group, every household unit, is asserting or dealing with power. Every one of us brings some degree of power to bear on others. And power, unless there is an antidote, corrupts. Bishop John V. Taylor put it like this:
[Power] … corrupts by distorting people’s perception, especially one’s perception of oneself, by confusing people’s
motives, by creating irresistible pressures and paralysing fears of loss of power. The exercise of power, on whatever scale, by anyone who has become corrupted, confused and distorted by it, adds one more stone to the structure of alienation, unreality and violence that despoils God’s world.
Here in this reading, this overture to Matthew’s story of Jesus – power’s corruption and Jesus’ way out of it are already foreshadowed. Amongst those who follow Jesus as Saviour power must be different. Here begins the gospel of him who
came not to be served but to serve, and give his life a ransom for many.
