"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Shelley's poem highlights the illusory nature of power. Illusory but at its greatest, power can be anything but illusory. It infiltrates all our lives to the extent that we believe this type of power is the only reality.
When we walk the streets of any city we rarely remember the power that keeps it going. By this I do not mean electricity, petroleum and gas. I mean the invisible nexus of power. The power of money to enable us to show our support for a range of goods and services. The political powers that ensure we obey the law. And most important our belief in the city itself, our inability to conceive of any alternative reality.
Paul and the people of his time described all this as 'powers and principalities'. It is a mistake to believe these are other terms for devils or angels; or indeed to assume they do not exist. They are real but intangible and unconsciously we are governed by them for most of what we do during our lives. The problem is they are not always of equal benefit to all people. For the poor and marginalised, these powers can be malign.
I mean the sort of sin that is not directly our responsibility. We are responsible for it in the sense it is a part of the web of our relationships. It is sin institutionalised. This is one reason why no-one can be free of sin. Whatever they do, they will always be a part of society.
The key to all of this is the power of money. Economic power is the means through which the poor remain poor and the marginalised are persecuted. Page after page of the Bible condemns this failure endemic to human societies to exclude those who are unable to participate fully. It is, as I will show in future posts, at the root of all sin. It is too easy to forget this and believe that sex in particular is at the root of sin.
In the Old Testament there is the idea of Jubilee. It is a form of social engineering whereby every 50th year is an opportunity for redistribution of resources. No-one knows whether Jubilee was ever enacted. Today we are left with the promise that the Kingdom of God is amongst us. At the core of God's rule is the idea of Jubilee.
Let us be clear before we go on to look at some particularly problematic ethical issues, that any morality that does not acknowledge the primacy of economic injustice does not know God.
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