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Rhidian Brook |
Good Morning,
The scandal enveloping Newscorp is playing like a drama that’s hard to categorise. It’s blockbuster, soap opera, morality play, family saga, political theatre, police story all rolled into one. It’s gripping for all kinds of reasons and not all of them noble – it’s shocking, brazen, unsubtle and spiced with hubris, schadenfreude, revenge and justice - and it seems all the more dramatic because no-one saw it coming – even though some of the writing had been on the wall for months, even years.
If it’s about one thing it’s about power: Who has it? How much should they have? And what are they doing with it? The apostle John suggested that the three basic areas of temptation are sex, money and power – and whilst much of human existence involves a struggle with one or all three of these things, power is by far the most dangerous, mainly because it’s so hard to measure: we know when we’re having sex and we can count our money, but no one can say for sure how much power they have – a few believe they have enough.
In some way most of us want the world to bend to our will. And I imagine that, most days, a media mogul asks the same question you or I might ask: ‘do I have the power I need to achieve my aims?’ Its temptations operate at every scale of life – in the home, at work, in schools – luring us into that subtlest of traps where we set ourselves us up over someone else to get what we want. It’s why we must handle whatever power we’ve been given with the greatest care and respect.
Indeed, if we see power as a gift, rather than something we earn, we might well be protecting ourselves from its most corrosive qualities. Power- political, cultural, domestic -can and should be creative, shared and given away. If it isn’t we end up chasing it for its own sake; we start believing our own hype and become a law unto ourselves. Like the people of Babel who said: ‘let us build a city, a tower; and then let us make a name for ourselves’ - in trying to secure power we end up forgetting where true power comes from in the first place.
Which brings us to a key question: where does true power come from and what does it look like? Is it something we create - or is it a gift from a power greater than ourselves? In a seemingly un-sensational moment in the gospels Jesus reminded his disciples that, through relationship with him, they had access to the ultimate power in the universe. But before they could get carried away with thoughts of conquering and dominating the World, He told them what to do with it. Give it away, he said. Share it. Not because it’s too dangerous to handle but because that’s the way true power works.
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