The lordship of Jesus Christ is not power for power’s sake. And when the Christian Church confesses that ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord’, then it is not thinking of a blind law standing threateningly over us, not of an historical power, not of a destiny or fate to which man is exposed defenceless, in face of which his final insight could only consist in acknowledging it as such; but it is thinking of the proper lordship of its Lord. [...] Where God is king, man can but fall down and adore. But adore in presence of the wisdom of God, of His righteousness and holiness, of the mystery of His mercy. That is Christian reverence before God and Christian praise of God, Christian service and obedience. 

(Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, p. 90)

The goodness of God is at stake here. God is love, either that, or God is not love but something else. I can’t and won’t provide any theodicy here – Job, much greater than I, was left speechless before God’s answer in power. Barth makes the powerful point that power for power’s sake is satanic. To use the language of someone like Stringfellow, power for power’s sake is demonic, demonic being that which promotes death, setting up principalities and institutions that lead to death. This nihilistic power is, unfortunately one I believe many people are fairly familiar with and understand God to embody.

God is seen as arbitrary by many, including me. What happens, what comes about, whoever wins the battle, whoever has the most money, whoever posts enough heads on stakes outside the camp, whoever lines the road with enough tortured victims on crosses, wins as an act of God’s supposedly good will. Job’s friends were not friends but accusers – each of them explaining that Job’s lot was his own fault, he should have known better and he had better just sit back and relax and enjoy the show until its finish because he bought the tickets and took the seat all on his own. And when some awful act of evil happens, whether a tsunami or a war, it seems to be a matter of time before someone blames God for it, either by cursing the people afflicted as anathema for their sin or by cursing God as an arbitrary torturer.

What I understand Barth to be explaining in the chapter I have excerpted, Our Lord, is that by looking into the face of Christ we see God fully and completely, and he was anything but arbitrary. Jesus accepting power for Power’s sake would negate Lent, the season of repentance symbolic of Christ’s wilderness fast and temptation of all things. Power for power’s sake would have been the Christ eating heartily of the bread he might have been able to make. He might have ridden in on a stallion with captured enemies trailing behind in a victorious march into Jerusalem. A Christ powerful for power’s sake would never have endured death and Hades for all. 

Yet Jesus Christ, the Lion of Judah, roared like a lamb. He conquered Jerusalem riding on a donkey as a peaceful king, taking no prisoners. He stood by the meek and downtrodden, the oppressed and forgotten, the leper and prostitute, and even his accusers, the Pharisees and Romans. He suffered and died and, to paraphrase Chesterton, took on the demeanor (or truly even, not just the demeanor) of atheism if for a moment – “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” God forsaken of God, Christ as God with us, truly with us in our doubt and disbelief (in the midst of joy and wonder). Christ as truly human, truly all of humanity, defining the limits of “being-human.”

Christ’s existence was not the arbitrary insertion of a man into the process of history, but the existence of a man in whom deity is seen, living always for-us, an existence with a purpose, who “not only exists for Himself but is this One for all” (90). This is why I love the Lutheran theology of God not just being, but being-for-us, which is a picture of power not for power’s sake, but reminding us that Christ’s power is based on God’s mercy, goodness, and love, inviting all to abandon their reservations.