Power and Control
Austin gets grumpy during the semi-annual Sunday school lessons about the difference between joy and happiness, the ones in which we’re instructed to seek after “joy” (which is true and long-lasting) rather than “happiness” (which is fleeting and worldly). I think what actually bothers him is the repetition paired with the expectation that we pretend that this discussion is new to us, but what he usually says is, “They just made that up! I could have said happiness is lasting and joy is fleeting! That difference is pretend!”
This is obviously true—as we’ve discussed before, all words are made up distinctions, and they get especially slippery around any God talk. But here I am. About to do this same thing.
Power isn’t control. Power is actually control’s opposite. And I know these words are slippery and the distinctions are a line in the sand but, as we’ve discussed before, sometimes a line in the sand is all I’ve got. So let me draw the line a little deeper and offer the definition of control I’m working on: I mean absolute control. I mean control like the ability to make something happen, to determine the outcome. Control is a zero sum game—the more that one person has, the less that another has.
I’ve been thinking about control a lot because of the feeling that has haunted me this last year: that I don’t have any. Not over the political atmosphere, not over other people, not even over my own body. This last one has been a steadily disturbing revelation as I’ve been overtaken with depression and found that, as much as I would like to power my way through and just be OK, I don’t have control over the chemicals that swirl around my brain anymore than I have control over the decisions my friends make. In both cases I have influence—I can coax drops of serotonin into my brain through exercise or persuade and reason my way through a conversation with a friend—but ultimately, I don’t have control. I can’t make things behave the way I want them to. Not my synapses, not other people, not political structures, not the men and women charging the seat of our democracy or the virus killing millions across the world, not the prejudices that destroy people and families. Control is an illusion that we all occasionally suffer from, but not a reality any of us live.
When I say that none of us live this reality, I mean God too. I’ve heard that God is in control and, at least if they mean what I mean by control, I don’t think it’s true. I’m disagreeing with St. Augustine here, who preached that “God’s agency is all-determining in both universal history and individual salvation” (Givens The Christ Who Heals 23). I’m disagreeing with Martin Luther too, and Calvin, both of whom taught that God determined all things.
This isn’t the God I believe in. The God I believe in is bound by laws that dictates the results. Like us, He lives with the agency of others and its effects. I don’t know whether He can control things and chooses not to or whether, even for Him, control is outside the reaches of reality, but what I do believe is that if He exercised control, He would no longer be God. I think that having control is antithetical to what it means to be God at all.
Chorra Church, Icon of the Christ healing the woman with the issue of Blood, Mosaic
I think this for lots of reasons, and one of them is Mark. In Mark, a woman who has been ill for many years reaches out and touches Jesus’s clothes, sure that if she does, she will be healed. We usually say that Jesus healed the woman, but that’s not what Jesus said. He said, “thy faith hath made thee whole” (KJV Mark 5:34). Jesus identifies himself as the source and conduit of the power that healed the woman, but not the healing itself. In fact, after he feels the power leave him, he turns and says, “Who touched me?”, indicating that he did not will the healing, did not decide to heal her at all. Instead, the power flowed out of him automatically, as a response to her faith. Just as Jesus was surprised at the power of the belief that allowed the Brother of Jared to see his Lord’s fingers reach out to touch the stones, so was Jesus surprised at the way reality bent to the strength of the woman’s faith.
This isn’t the only time that Jesus seems surprised and not quite in control of healing. In the chapter following the hemorrhaging woman, Jesus travels to his hometown and “could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith” (NIV Mark 6:5-6). In the original text, as far back as our translations take us, the word for “could” has connotations of “‘being able; of ‘capacity’ in virtue of ability” (Kittel 284). So when the text says that Jesus “could not do any miracles” it indicates he literally did not have the capacity or ability to perform them at that time. He wanted to do more than he did, he just couldn’t.
Hundreds of years of theologians have tried to write their way around this idea, I think because the idea that Jesus wasn’t in control, that being God doesn’t mean being in control, is scary. They want God, the maker of the universe, to be able to do whatever He wants in it. A God who has constrictions on His power makes us feel that we are on a train with no driver. If God isn’t in control, then how do we know that things will be OK?
The answer is partly, of course, that they may not be. People throughout history have been very not OK, and it was never because they were less important than us. Often it wasn’t even that they had less faith than us.
The other, more important part of the answer is the Atonement—interestingly another moment in which Jesus did not exercise control. He was torn from the people who he was closest to, to be humiliated and tortured in front of them. He did not exert control over this situation—and we know because what he wanted was not what he got. He plead with his father for another way forward, and he did not get it. He was not in control. And this is where we see control divide from the power, because in not exercising control over his situation or the people who wished to destroy him, Jesus exhibited the ultimate power: the ability to save us from ourselves. Not power that would ultimately be control—Jesus does not force us to repent and be OK. But because he did not exercise control, he has the power to empower us.
Scholar Dorothy A. Lee Pollard says that this ability to not control but rather to empower others is the essence of God’s power: “God’s power is the power to renounce power” (“Powerlessness as Power: A Key Emphasis in the Gospel of Mark” 174), the culmination of which is the Atonement. It is the least human, most God-like thing possible. In LDS Christianity, we refer to God’s renouncing of power as the gift of agency, an element of God’s plan so important that it was over this that the war in heaven raged. Iranaeus, an early theologian, wrote: “Because of his kindness he bestowed his gift upon us, and made men free, as he is free” (Fiona and Terryl Givens, The Christ Who Heals, 38). In my theology, it is not just kindness, but Godliness. God is God partially because He does not dominate. He does not control, but instead gives away His almighty power to us, to allow us to choose Him and choose to be like Him. He insists that we all get to make choices and that the consequences of our choices—whether they be reaching out to touch Jesus or lifting him up on a cross—really do have effects. He grants us power, for good and evil.
Christ Healing a bleeding woman, as depicted in the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter.
Crucially, this means power is not control. In the story with the woman with the issue of blood both the woman and Jesus had power, but neither of them had control. Control, as I noted before, is a zero sum game. God’s power is not this way. It’s less like control and more like love. If Jesus has more power, the hemorrhaging woman does not have less, and if she has more he does not have less. Instead, their power feeds into and magnifies each other. As the subject of the hemorrhaging woman’s belief and a source of healing, Jesus is powerful and his power is used to empower her. At the same time, the healing is a result of the woman’s agency, so she is is likewise powerful and empowering. If Jesus receives his ability to exercise power from the belief of others, then anything that helps others to believe in him empowers him. As the woman comes forward and testifies of him (Mark 5:33), she encourages those around them to believe, strengthening Jesus’s ability to perform future miracles.
Attempts at control would have shut down this flow of power, denied the agency of the other. It would have cut off the exchange necessary for the miracle. Power is the opposite of control.
This is what I’m trying so hard to remember as I scramble my way back to mental health and as I watch the news. It’s also what I’m trying to remember in my relationships, where my desire for control has often hurt the people that I love the most. I’m trying, trying, trying to remember: our desire for control is human, but our capacity to let it go in favor of agency and power—that is Godly.