The Power of Power

Luke 6:17-26

“The whole crowd wanted to touch him, because power was going out from him and he was healing everyone.” This verse caught my attention, drew me in with the magnetism of curiosity. We’ve all heard the beatitudes before, whether from Luke’s rendition of Jesus’ sermon on the plain, or Matthew’s sermon on the mount. We’re familiar with Jesus’ famous opening lines about the ones who are happy and the ones who are troubled. That’s what I was focused on as I read my way through this week’s selection from Luke, too focused on where I was heading to pay attention to where I was. My mind was already mulling over the beatitudes, thinking about all the different directions I could take my sermon. I was so focused on verse 20, the verse where Jesus raises his eyes to the crowd and proclaims, “Happy are you who are poor…”, that I tripped over verse 19.

“What are you doing there?” I exclaimed.

Verse 19 responded: “The whole crowd wanted to touch him, because power was going out from him and he was healing everyone.”

I like to refer to verses like this as “Scriptural tripwires”, these are often verses that hang around the more popular texts and often get overlooked. Sometimes even scripture we think we’re familiar with can trip us up when we walk through it from a different direction or look at it from an unexpected angle. Just an aside, I’d like to take this opportunity to celebrate that the word of God has the ability to startle us like this. I know that no one has gone into my Bible and added, or deleted, or shifted the words around since the last time I read it, so what does it mean when these same familiar words surprise and inspire me anew? I must be growing, changing, learning...perhaps new wisdom or new perspective is at work within me.

I mentioned last week about how I try not to back down when invited into a wrestling match with Scripture. Here is another instance where I pay special attention: when the word of God trips me up outta nowhere. As I mentioned earlier, such occasions rouse my curiosity. “How have I overlooked these words?” I guess I’m giving you philosophy of preaching and teaching the word right now, to preach from the place in the text where curiosity causes me to sink in the deepest.

Perhaps my tweed jacket with elbow patches gives this away, but my theology has always been largely informed by academic pursuits...and even then, limited to “Western wisdom.” But lately, I’ve found myself drawn out of that comfort zone to investigate health, and healing, and wholeness, and strength, and wisdom from new perspectives.

Speaking of new perspective, here I am, fallen to the ground after stumbling over verse 19, looking back up at the healing power of Jesus. This is a power and a healing that flies in the face of Western medicine: the healing power of touch. “The whole crowd wanted to touch him.” And even beyond that touch, simply the healing power of presence. “Power was going out from” Jesus, the text reads, “and he was healing everyone.”

“They came to him,” verse 18 reads, “to hear him and to be healed of their disease, and those bothered by unclean spirits were healed.” First off, “they came to him,” these broken, struggling, suffering people were drawn to this energy. Somehow this power of God resonates with us and draws us in. But this power also “goes out from” Jesus. After letting these two verses tumble around in my mind I’ve updated my working definition of the power of God: an energy that resonates with us and entices us to approach in full vulnerability, but also a radiant energy that approaches us and seeks us out for the purpose of healing, restoration, and peace.

There are powers whose intentions for our vulnerabilities are more manipulative. They can be equally enticing because they offer the promise of protecting our vulnerability, but such protection often comes at the expense of a diminished relationship with ourselves. Psychologist Carl Jung suggests that we tend to shape our identities around ideal characteristics. I suppose you could say that we each have our own inner mantra of beatitudes: “Happy am I when I am ______, but woe to me if I am _______.” These beatitudes, our inner sense of right and wrong, are are shaped and reinforced by our environment, our culture, our faith. They also determine our self-image and influence the qualities we seek to express and those we seek to avoid or repress. [1]

Often times, the qualities we repress are the source of powers which subconsciously manipulate us and impact our self-image, sense of worth, and sense of health and wholeness. This is one of the reasons why we fear the dark. I began to touch on this last week, but the dark is reminder of the unseen, the subconscious, and the unsettling powers of doubt, and fear, and depression. Negative emotions are often the result of these darker powers resisting the healing energy that seeks out our broken places. “We have been duped into equating ‘negative’ with ‘undesirable’,” writes Ken Wilber, and so our tendency is to “alienate and project” our negative traits, “seeing them in everybody else but ourselves.” [2]

Now I’d like to turn and look at the first few lines of the beatitudes spoken by Jesus. How do these stack up against your own sense of what is good? “Happy are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are hated, rejected, and insulted.” Do you celebrate or repress poverty, hunger, sadness, and public scorn? After verse 19, which helps us understand the power of God that emanates from the very presence of Jesus to seek out and heal our brokenness, can we see that same power at work in the words Jesus speaks in verses 20, 21, and 22? After spending time with verse 19, verse 22 is the next one that trips me up: “Happy are you when people hate you, reject you, insult you, and condemn your name as evil because of the Human One.” This sounds exactly like the way I was describing the power of repression in our subconscious, to cause us to shame and reject ourselves. “All of us have blind spots,” says Wilber, “tendencies and traits that we simply refuse to admit are ours, that we refuse to accept and therefore fling into the environment where we muster all of our righteous fury and indignation to do battle with them.” [3] These are the traits we project onto others, finding it easier to criticize them externally than confess them to ourselves. Confession does not create the healing energy of God, but it does expose us to it. And when we deal with our own insecurities and receive forgiveness, we are then transformed to be more compassionate towards others. Exposure to the healing power of God’s love empowers us to fulfill the command which Jesus poses to us immediately following the beatitudes: “I say to you who are willing to hear: Love your enemies.” We cannot keep this commandment without God’s power, God’s forgiveness and learning to love ourselves. Jung puts it beautifully in his work Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ--all of these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, the very enemy himself--that these are within me, and that I myself stand in the need of the alms of my own kindness--that I myself am the enemy who must be loved--what then?” [4]

“What then?”, indeed. To be aware of our negative traits and tendencies is very different from acting on them, Wilber points out, and even goes so far as to say that we are more likely to act on these tendencies when we remain blind to them and let them remain unexamined in our subconscious.[5] Is there a power in this universe capable of opening the eyes of the blind? Is there a power in this universe that would allow me to confess my brokenness and sin without being overwhelmed by it? Is there a power in this universe that would allow me to confront my own sin without projecting it and condemning it at the expense of someone else? Is there a power in this universe capable of healing my hurt and shame and silencing the storms that rage inside? Is there a power in this universe that resonates with my deep need for healing and wholeness and seeks me out in such a way as to stretch a tripwire out in front of my fear of appearing unsteady, uncertain--my fear of falling? Sin isn’t the only thing that can trip us up. Sometimes, when we are seeking healing, wholeness, power, and strength in all the wrong places, climbing higher and higher, up and away...the love of God will send us tumbling down, down, down. The love of God often disorients us in order to reorient us with true healing, wholeness, power, and strength. Thanks be to God.

[1] Zweig, Connie and Jeremiah Abrams. Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature.

[2] Wilber, Ken. “Taking Responsibility for Your Shadow” from Meeting the Shadow. 273.

[3] Ibid. 274

[4] Jung, C.G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul quoted in “Taking Responsibility for Your Shadow” from Meeting the Shadow.

[5] Wilber. 276.