Considering Power

I have just read Henri Nouwen’s little book The Path of Power which offers some timely and challenging reflections on how we use power, along the way suggesting that we might develop a theology of weakness. He comments, “I want to look with God's eyes at our experience of brokenness, limitedness, woundedness, and frailty in a way that Jesus taught us in the hope that such a vision will offer us a safe way to travel on earth.”

Nouwen also reminds us that any thought that Christian history has not misused power is mistaken. “The devastating influence of power in the hands of God's people becomes very clear when we think of the crusades, the pogroms, the policies of apartheid, and the long history of religious wars up to these very days, but it might be harder to realise that many contemporary religious movements create the fertile soil for these immense tragedies to happen again.”

Power is important and has its important place, but it is very easily abused. We cannot, and should not, ignore it, but we do need to channel it.

Nouwen reminds us that this is all best expressed in the nativity story and all that means in the profoundest sense. God relinquished power in order to come alongside us, and yet that was an incredibly powerful act. It gets us thinking as to what power really is and how it is properly used. As Nouwen asks, and comments: “How can you fear a baby you rock in your arms, how can you look up to a baby that is so little and fragile, how can you be envious of a baby who only smiles at you in response to your tenderness? That's the mystery of the incarnation.”

I was particularly struck by what he says about a theology of weakness. – “A theology of weakness challenges us to look at weakness not as a worldly weakness that allows us to be manipulated by the powerful in society and church, but as a total and unconditional dependence on God that opens us to be true channels of the divine power that heals the wounds of humanity and renews the face of the earth. The theology of weakness claims power, God's power, the all-transforming power of love.”

“A theology of weakness is a theology of divine empowering. It is not a theology for weaklings but a theology for men and women who claim for themselves the power of love that frees them from fear and enables them to put their light on the lampstands and do the work of the Kingdom.”

With God’s help may we use power in the right ways – and may our weakness indeed be recognised as the empowering, in the right way, that it is.