Today’s Scripture Reading (November
6, 2012): Judges 9
The quest
for power leads us to do things that I am convinced we would never consider
outside of the quest. It is the reason why we believe that power corrupts. In
the core of who we are, we believe that there are certain things that we have
to do to obtain power. And that lesson we learned early on in life. It does not
seem to take long for us to figure out that who it is that we are will never be
worth anything. In fact, the lesson we learn is that who we are is only worthy
of ridicule. Therefore, a choice has to be made – a path that we have to choose
to follow.
I recently
had a conversation with a spiritual director. He raised a question that actually
has bothered me ever since our conversation. The question was this – how can
you change what it is that you do (your actions) without overhauling who you
are. The backdrop of the conversation was that Paul totally changed his
behavior because there was a massive overhaul of his identity on the Damascus
Road. And although I understand the question, I think that it is misdirected.
Paul had already overhauled his identity long before his Damascus Road experience.
It happened as he studied the Law of Moses under the supervision of the Jewish
rabbinical system. If Paul wanted to become one of the premier leaders of the
nation, there were certain things that would be expected of him. And the result
of all these expectations was that Paul found himself persecuting the Christian
Church. His identity had changed. What he really wanted was to please God, but
his experiences had brought him to a point where he was actually persecuting
that God. It was a place I do not think that Paul ever dreamed that he would
find himself in. What happened on the Damascus Road was not a massive overhaul
of Paul’s identity; it was the restoration of his identity back to its starting
point. And from that point he could be released to become everything that he
was ever intended to be.
The tragedy
of the story of Abimelech is that in his pursuit for power he had to adjust his
identity far from its starting point. Being brought up in the house of Gideon,
Abimelech would have heard all of the stories – he would have known of his
father’s reticence to enter the battle, of his absolute dependence on God in
his rise to power and of his refusal to claim the crown that Gideon felt
belonged to his God. None of what had happened was because of his own genius;
it was all because of God’s presence. But as Abimelech began to rise to power
all of what he had learned from his father had to be discarded. In order to
claim power, he had dishonor everything that his father stood for – claiming the
throne his father spurned and killing the sons his father loved.
Outside of
God, the path to power will always cost us something. And that cost is
something that we cannot afford not to count - because power corrupts by
reshaping our core identity, and God only seeks to restore it to where it was
always intended to be.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Judges
10
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