I Want You to Be by Tomáš Halík

Author:Tomáš Halík [Halík, Tomáš]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

However, Jesus’s Easter supper is also a source of inspiration for a political understanding of love. Jesus’s appeal for humble mutual service that accompanies the description of feet washing in John’s Gospel, is described in greater detail in Luke’s account of the Last Supper: “A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. But he said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.’”20

The community of Jesus’s disciples is to be a corrective contrast to the world of power forever. Let it not be thus among you! Never let power and the desire for power and leading positions destroy the spirit of fraternal equality and solidarity!

Power and authority are natural components of every society, along with property; but power and wealth also represent a risk for those who are endowed with them. Power and wealth can fill those people with pride and render them oblivious to poverty and to the needs of the poor and powerless; they can corrupt their hearts. One must be constantly on guard and train oneself in the struggle with these temptations in order to preserve one’s inner freedom with regard to power and money. Those who are entrusted with power, authority, and leading positions must accept that task and fulfill it as a service—a service of love. Jesus did not kneel at the feet of the apostles in the upper room in order to abase himself, but “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”21

Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world, as we read in the scene of the trial before Pilate in John’s Gospel,22 but that is precisely why he holds up a relentless mirror to the powers of this world. The reference to the reign of God denies the worldly powers absolute control of the human conscience: God must be obeyed rather than any human authority!23 Likewise Jesus’s answer to the question about whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the occupying power was not—as it is so often interpreted—advice to compromise between the realm of politics and the kingdom of God.24 Jesus does not forbid them to pay taxes but demands something else: Don’t give the emperor what belongs to God! The most important thing in our lives is not what we owe the emperor but that for which we have to thank God and why we are committed to him. No authority, not even the highest authority in the land, has any right to that.

Jesus’s attitude to state power stems from the tradition of the prophets,

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