King of Kings and Slave of Slaves

Evidence of a problem

 

Some religious groups are disquieting in their keenness for control over their members. And here’s one thing you might notice. Some of these groups like to make argumentative use of the word ‘almighty.’ The Jehovah’s Witnesses, well known for their vice-like grip on members, like to repeat that Jehovah is almighty and not Jesus Christ. This ‘not Jesus Christ’ mantra, that vice-like control, and this troubling emphasis on the word ‘almighty,’ actually seem to go together, making an untoward mixture. I find it concerning.

 

It is, in short, an organisation that not only claims to represent Jehovah, but also considers it within their mission to assert that Jesus is not as great as what's on their side of the equation. That is, they think Jesus is one side of the equation, and they are on the better side of the equation. 

They represent something greater than Jesus, they think. Putting themselves on the side of the equation "superior" to Jesus is what it's all about. 

 

This is why they are strangely comfortable describing Jesus as “inferior.” That’s part of their ethos. That, I’m sure, is why many Christians find listening to them disquieting. It's easier to understand this strange thing if you recall one thing: that they think that Jesus' underlying identity is really Michael the Archangel. So what they really think is that Michael is on one side of the equation, and they are on the better side of the equation, Jehovah's side of it. With Michael's name in view, it wouldn't seem so odd. It's the Jesus/Michael switch that exposes it for what is is. 

 

The Jehovah’s Witnesses could have opted to say that they represent Jesus, which would be nice. But they don’t. They think Jesus is Michael. So they literally use words such as “inferior” to describe Jesus. It is a blunt weapon, and a blatant powerplay by their organisation. Revelling in the word ‘almighty,’ they pitch themselves as the victors in a simplistic and sectarian battle of “kingdom” against “Christendom.” That’s how they cast their picture. Their argument is that they represent ultimate power (Jehovah) - whereas churches merely represent inferiority (Jesus). They cast themselves as Jehovah's witnesses and they regard that as superior over churches casting themselves as Jesus' witnesses. Churches proclaiming ourselves as Jesus' witnesses is part of our inferiority in the eyes of Jehovah's Witnesses. That’s not about love. It's about power.

 

Hence their using the word ‘almighty’ in an argumentative fashion. They do a lot of anti-church polemics because their ethos allows no other way than antagonism.

 

At the same time, this love of power contaminates their image of Jesus. Their weird magazine art paints Jesus at his second coming dramatically blowing up cities by throwing fireballs at people from the sky - this couldn’t be further from the biblical picture of the Lamb. Their emphatic stress on power is inherently intimidatory.  

 

So yes, there’s a problem here. And it needs considering biblically. If Jesus is the image of God – he says “anyone who has seen me sees the Father” – then we need to radically re-think where this emphasis on power and superiority is coming from.



Re-thinking a paradigm

 

You can see that this really matters, how we think about power. It’s going to be a healthy or unhealthy relationship with power. I’m not at all saying that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are unique in exhibiting this kind of behaviour, but they are a really good example of it. Hence my pointing it out. They’ll naturally feel nothing but antagonism towards me saying this. It’s hard for them to escape from their power ethos.

 

But there is a way of being Christian without modelling worship as about a great big pack of power.

 

And that got me to thinking about whether there is something altogether open to misuse about this word ‘almighty,’ something not quite right that I needed to put my finger on.

 

And what I find is this. Jesus repudiates religion that bases itself so heavily on the idea of “almighty”. I’ll come back to the word. You’ll better understand that there’s a problem with the word when you see what Jesus reveals.

John 13:12–17 has the ground-breaking story of Jesus at meal-time choosing to do a slave’s job, bending down to wash the disciples’ filthy feet wearing a towel. And then telling them that he was modelling the way they were to be to each other. If they were to do that kind of thing, they wouldn’t “need” slaves. It would be their own job from now on. Jesus said to the disciples that "you have no part with me" if you don't follow his lead in sharing this role.

What's more, Jesus indicates that none of them have shown themselves better than him at taking this lowly position, and to aspire to mastery is to aspire to take it. There is no room for mastery over other people here, only service to each other. To complete one's learning from this "master" is to complete the journey to total repudiation of mastery over others. This is like the final test of training before their "master," the initiation into his ways. No servant is equal to his master - in Jesus' training regime - until taking the position of the lowest slave like his master Jesus did. 

It's as if the sacred initiation ritual marking the formal completion of the correct training at the feet of the master is this holy practice to follow as a way of life: to imitate his act of being one who doesn't own slaves but who acts as lowly as one. Once they have grasped this, he sends them out as brothers of the same mind: they have mastered their own desire for power. They will never be greater than him. He is the King of Kings and Slave of Slaves. (If we ever resented the idea of our being "slaves of Christ," we have no idea how much more he is a slave to us. We might be called "slaves of Christ," but Christ isn't exercising mastery over other people.)

Washing feet is coded language by Jesus, here in John’s Gospel, as if it wasn’t safe to publish the message in an uncoded way. But it really suggests that Jesus was setting up for his followers to be a non-slavery community, like the Essenes (see below), and that John’s Gospel was originally received in the church in that spirit. 

This fits with Mark 10:44 which says that anyone who wants to be first among his disciples must be as a slave. This more or less forbids the disciples from being slave-masters; and suggests that slave-holders will be least in the Kingdom of God in Jesus' thinking.

It's not the way we might have thought of enslavement being abolished. It's not done by ridding of slaves. It's done by ridding the world of masters who would have control over their fellow human beings. That's how mastery over others is universally abolished in God's economy. 

I think the gospel writers would be aghast at the thought that people in the future would read such things and yet think owning slaves instead was what they were being cued up to do. 




And Paul agrees with Jesus

 

Paul writes, “do not use your freedom for self-indulgence… through love become slaves to one another… love your neighbour as yourself” (Gal 5:13-14). Here, Paul interprets “loving your neighbour as yourself” as all being one another’s “slaves” in mutual kindness. So, in describing his ideal picture of a Christian community, Paul eliminates "masters" from the vocabulary of how to relate to each other. Being a master over other human beings fails to have validity as a way of "loving your neighbour." This is quite a slap in the face to slave-masters. Only by taking the role of fellow slaves, without being slave-owners, do they have a part in this. 

o This is really significant. It means that the way Paul looked at the world, he knew there was a moral problem with the institution of slavery itself. It’s “masters” that Paul removes from the spiritual equation, meaning that the fundamental moral problem with the institution is people being “masters” over other people. And with that insight, he seeks to work out how to apply it. 

o Thus, if you are loving your neighbour how you love yourself, then you can't be your neighbour’s slave-master, because you wouldn't like it the other way round. Being the master is disqualified as a form of loving your neighbour in Paul's argument. 

o This is resistance to the institution of slavery and its fundamental imbalance. Not in the sense of being a tract against the Roman Empire. Rather in Paul's vision for the church, the idea of people being slave-masters over other people just doesn't make sense. The institution of slavery is radically out of kilter with it. 

o It also upsets people’s ideas of what their freedom is for. (Remember Jesus teaching his disciples about washing each other’s feet as if to make a society without slave-masters. Otherwise, Jesus says, they have no part in him.) 

o This simple instruction erases the worldly distinctions of slave and master in the Christian community; the slaves and the free must act as “slaves” to one another, because this is Paul's interpretation of what it means to love your neighbour as yourself. He wants his community to live like an owner-master-free zone.

What God the Father is like

I am coming to the point about the 'almighty.' Christianity contradicts other religions' ideas of a God who throws his weight around.

When Jesus said “to see me is to see the Father” and makes it an occasion for him to wash people’s grubby feet, he wasn’t joking. He was revealing something important about God the Father. This might make us feel uncomfortable. Perhaps. But we need to go where Jesus leads. Jesus says he is doing only what he sees his Father doing, If the Son is acting as a servant, then the Father is acting as a servant. It seems to me entirely in vain to resist this conclusion.

People think he was talking about how to be a good Christian. But he was also talking about the nature of God’s goodness. 

When Jesus takes the form of a human servant in Philippians 2, he’s not showing how to be different from God. He is showing what God is like. To those biblical or political figures who would aspire to be God’s equal, Jesus’ answer is that equality with God is not a snatching attitude, it’s a servant attitude.

Ultimately, the purification of the world won’t be a show of muscle, it will be the final redemptive cleansing of the Lamb.

Truths like this are hidden by mistranslating a New Testament word as ‘almighty’. I'll come back to that.

God’s creation of a beautiful universe was an act of service to those who would enjoy inhabiting its gardens. Our honouring of God in worship is an act of thanks for God’s generous service to us. 

God, without pay and often without thanks, sends the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. Life-giving sun and rain brought to us by God, whose very image is the Slave of Slaves as well as King of Kings.

This image, this Jesus, is sometimes called The Servant King and rightly so. We are simply taking this to its fuller conclusion. 

What's in a word?

There really is a Greek word for ‘almighty.’ But... it’s not in the New Testament. Anywhere. It’s παντοδύναμος. What does it mean? It means “almighty.” But it’s entirely missing.

 

If the New Testament wanted this to be absolutely the defining thing about God, then it’s strange that it doesn’t appear even once. (And this word manages to make just one solitary appearance in the LXX, in its apocrypha actually, in Wisdom 7.23.) It’s not that God isn’t παντοδύναμος. It's just that the New Testament’s pious authors were clearly completely disinterested in the word. 

That's not to say that the New Testament authors lacked any interest in the subject. Jesus has unlimited power, having "the Spirit without limit" according to John's Gospel. Jesus is also called the Power of God. There is nothing lacking that qualifies as powerful. The Holy Spirit is God's unlimited power and is also called the Power of God. So really, looking to demote or denigrate Jesus' power is a fool's errand.

I will expand further on the subject of translation, looking closely at why the word 'almighty' appears in our English Bibles, in due course.

Ethics

It ought to be noted that in the picture of Jesus playing the slaves' part, these were all men. Men were to follow this example. My one slight nervousness in writing this post is how the concept of slavehood has been used to manipulate women and at times enslave women as subject to a male 'head of the household.' That is, the woman serves him, and the man doesn't serve her. He says, "I'm not going to be a servant." This is deeply problematic. It's not virtue either to uncritically allow your spouse to be your enslaver. And Jesus said to the disciples that "you have no part with me" if you don't follow his lead in sharing the slave's role.

Women in such situations have been manipulated to keep this arrangement that is indulgently self-serving for men who are unwilling to be "slave of all" as Christ is "slave of all," as the image of our God who must be "slave of all." This arrangement does not fulfil the wishes of Christ who expected us to be slaves of one another. Such men can call themselves the 'head' as much as they are like, but they are not a head as Christ is a head, nor a head as God is a head. What kind of 'head' wants abusive power and terrifying control over a human being? Satan perhaps. If that's not putting it too strongly. 

Satan probably would have liked to be called 'almighty.'