Power, Privilege and the Coming Christ: A Hope in Darkness – Jon Phillips
As we approach the end of Advent and the beginning of the season of Christmas, we await with great anticipation the coming/returning of Christ. It is a time of darkness, hope, peace, joy, and love. Yet, foremost, it is a time of waiting. Waiting for God to come and overturn the powers and principalities that oppress and take life. Yet, we know from the stories of our faith that when God does indeed come, God comes in a manner entirely unexpected – as a newborn who comes into the world in an occupied land, born to an unwed mother in poverty. The power of the incarnate Christ comes into the world in the most expectation-overturning manner one could imagine. He who is entirely defenseless is God’s answer to the people’s cry for deliverance.
The story of this Jesus goes on from there, as we know.
Yet, throughout the life and ministry of Jesus, there remains this constant sense of hope for change – that Jesus would fulfill the expectations of messiah his followers and the surrounding culture held, and indeed, needed. Instead, eventually he was tortured and executed by empire; overturning not with expected militaristic power, but with love.
I suspect that those of us with the most privilege in North America (myself as a white, straight, educated, abled, cisgendered man very much included) also hold similar expectations and projections about the Christ. I suspect that we read ourselves into these stories as the expectant people, or even as the closest disciples. We hold onto our piety and our faiths in a world that is becoming less easy for us to understand and navigate in the midst of climate change and economic uncertainty, yet we conveniently forget and leave unexamined our own privileges and power – the ways in which we sin. We with these privileges have so individualized our faith journeys to the point that we have forgotten the ways in which North American society allows some of us to thrive at the expense of most others. We utterly neglect the poor, even at times in our charity. We pretend racism is a thing of the past. We have become blind to the ways in which we are upholding the powers and principalities Paul warns us about, at times even in the name of Jesus, instead of standing for justice in solidarity with our neighbors and with Christ against these powers.
We who are privileged have in many ways forgotten all about our neighbors.
Yet, in the midst of our society’s darkness, there is, of course, hope. Our God whose power seems to us to be utterly foolish can overturn even the structural evils of racism, sexism, classism, ageism, heterosexism, and environmental destruction (among so many others). In this season of expectant waiting, let us hold onto the eschatological hope that the God who acts in ways unknown to us will continue to do so until the entire universe is reconciled. And let us remember that we are called both to action and repentance. Our society was and is being structured by us – people – and thus, it can be modified and changed by us also. Let us be God’s hands and help to destabilize and deconstruct the harmful intersectional oppressions benefiting so few that so many around the world suffer from.
Jon Phillips is a candidate for ministry in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) from Spokane, Washington. He is currently a PhD student in the field of Theology, Ethics, and Human Sciences at Chicago Theological Seminary, serves on the leadership team for the Presbyterians Against Domestic Violence Network, and is a women’s flat track roller derby official. Jon worked as an architect in Spokane and served as a ruling elder prior to seminary. His academic interests include intersectional feminisms and Deleuzian assemblage.