This week I want to move beyond gender and their relation to power, and to the importance of recognizing our own privilege and power as followers of Jesus.
Why is this important? Isn't talk of privilege and power just another way of confusing liberal political values with the Gospel?
How Jesus deals with the powerful
Whenever we read the Gospels it is difficult to miss how he deals with certain people of power. We read about his encounters, debates and clashes with the Pharisees, and His rebuking of them.
We notice as well how he deals with the Roman authorities. In fact He doesn't really deals that often with them. He seems more occupied preaching the Kingdom of God to the poor and marginalized that He spends little time trying to convert the Romans.
In one famous encounter with the Rich Young Ruler, Jesus asks him to sell all he has, and give it to the poor. He is telling this to a man who has kept all the commandments! And yet Jesus tells him "one thing you lack". The one who had it all figured it out and had it all, so it seems, lacked one thing.
If we read carefully, we see that an undeniable pattern emerges in Jesus' encounters with people. With the rich and powerful He almost always deals in a negative way. With the poor and marginalized He almost always deals in a positive way.
Of course there are exceptions. But these exceptions do little to eradicate the undeniable pattern that emerges.
Why is it important, then, that we recognize our own privileges and powers?
It is important because if Jesus is the same today as He was yesterday, that means that His pattern of dealing with people of power, privilege and authority will most likely be the same now. This means that if Jesus is truly alive and risen, as Christians believe Him to be, His dealings with the rich and powerful NOW is most likely the same as it was THEN.
The Question really is, how do we want to be dealt with by Jesus?
If we miss to recognize our privilege and power, then we risk the danger of missing Jesus, or perhaps more accurately, Jesus missing us.
I believe this is not so much mixing liberal values with the Gospels, but this is most likely something that Liberals are correct about what the Gospels are telling us.
So how privileged are we really?
If you, dear reader, are living in the United States, or from another part of the "developed world", then you don't need me to tell you about our own privilege in terms with people of other poorer nations.
To deny our own privilege would be tantamount to being in a state of hopeless lunacy or unbelievable ignorance.
On a macro level, we are unbelievable privileged to live in a privileged and powerful nation.
On a micro level, we know that even in this powerful nation of ours, we still have people with less privilege and power. We will always have the poor among us.
We can recognize that minorities are statistically marginalized in this nation. People of color, undocumented immigrants, formerly incarcerated, all of these are populations who we can recognize as underprivileged.
To deny this is to turn a blind eye to the statistics.
On a more personal level, I can recognize my own privilege. First, I am male. As a man, according to statistics, I am more likely to earn more money than women.
Yes, I am Latino and immigrant, and this has put me in a position where I lack power and privileges. I can tell you thousands of stories of how this has played out for me, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
And yet, within my own Latino community, I am privileged. I am college educated and have a great paying job with benefits. To deny my own privilege would be the definition of denial.
The Call of the Gospel
After we have examined our own power and privilege, then the crucial question, as followers of Jesus, is to ask ourselves, what is the Gospel calling me to do?
I believe the Scriptures are clear on this: we are to give up our power for the empowerment of others.
Whether we earned (or feel we earned) this power and privilege is irrelevant. Jesus rarely asks the rich and powerful how they earned their positions. Failing to see this can moves us to meritocracy, where we see ourselves as deserving and the poor as undeserving.
In my experience of living in the United States, I have time and time again seen how privileged people see themselves as deserving of this privilege, because they worked hard or because their families worked hard to get where they are.
While this may be true, failing to recognize your privilege often leads to a self-righteous perspective on the poor as lazy, not driven enough, and therefore undeserving of our sympathy, or worse, our help.
If this is our attitude to the poor, how can we reconcile our attitudes with Jesus' attitudes and dealings with the poor?
If Jesus is our example, shouldn't we imitate this undeniable characteristic of His ministry?
The calling of the Gospel is simple and yet terrifying: give up your power and use it not for your own comfort, but in service of others. If you can't identify your own power and privilege, then you won't be able to empower others as effectively.
It is hard to give what we ignore we have.
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