The Power of God in Our Hands

“Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”(John 20:17)

… Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:21-23).

Just how completely do we share the life of God?

In this passage, Jesus makes several earth-shaking claims about our relationship with the Divine. He calls his disciples by a new name: not servants, not even friends, but brothers. The God he has always called “my Father” is now “my Father and your Father.” He gives us power to forgive sins—a privilege traditionally reserved for God alone.

These aren’t the only sacred texts that present this kind of view. The psalmist says of human beings, “You have made them a little lower than God….You have given them dominion over the works of your hands” (Psalm 8:5). St. Paul says in his simile for the church, “For just as the body is one and has many members…so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12)—when you’d expect him to say so it is with the church.*

Does this make anyone else a tad nervous?

Through millennia of training, many people of faith have adopted a much lower view of humanity. We think of God as Sovereign, as Judge. We adopt a “humility” that is more like self-deprecation. We emphasize scriptural passages that tell us (rightly, as it turns out) that without God, we can do nothing.

So what if God has shared with us, not just boundless love, grace, and guidance, but also power? What if we’re called to, in the words of my old therapist Harold Bussell, “trust God’s decision to trust us”?

Here’s what scares me: As humans, we don’t do power well. Either we forget the Source of that power and grow dangerously arrogant—five minutes with the nightly news provides all the evidence you need—or we shrink from it and become ineffective. Shrinking from power, ironically, creates a vacuum for the arrogant to step right in.

Maybe the key is in the relationship. If God is now our God too, if we have received a closer-than-breath connection with the Holy Spirit—and we live in that connection—the Presence stands as a bulwark against the fearsome pitfalls that power brings. It enables us to hold power lightly, remain constantly mindful of its Source, and wield it for good.

And wield it we must. The world desperately needs someone to effect change: to heal the starving, bind up the brokenhearted, toil for justice. In a word, God invites us to join him in co-creating a better world, bringing it closer to the vision of God’s reign.

As we do, let us look at this “power sharing” and see in it the utter extravagance of the Divine love. God has shared with us his work and his power to do it. Only deities that truly love can trust their creatures so completely.

*Thanks to Hal Miller, theologian extraordinaire, for this eye-opening insight into 1 Corinthians.