God's left handed power

Isaiah 42:1-9

            Here, according to Isaiah, is what it means to be the chosen servant of God: He is one who will bring forth justice to the nations, not by crying out or lifting up his voice, not by force or beating down the opposition. Instead, this servant is coming with a different kind of power—the power that Robert Farrar Capon calls “left handed power.” In the Bible, there is much said about the strength of the right hand. It is the right hand that defeats nations. When you sit at the right hand you are in a place of power and prestige. In this metaphor for strength, the right hand is the good one, the strong one—sorry, left-handed folks. The right hand is the power of force.

If you Google this, you will find no less than 58 examples of God’s right hand at work in the Bible. Some say things like “Save with your right hand and answer us!” (Psalm 60:5), or “Your right hand, O Lord, is majestic in power, Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy” (Exodus 15:6), or “He has bent His bow like an enemy; He has set His right hand like an adversary and slain all that were pleasant to the eye; In the tent of the daughter of Zion He has poured out His wrath like fire” (Lamentations 2:4). Lest you think this is only Old Testament, Psalm 110:1 is quoted no less than three times in the New Testament, saying, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Matthew 22:44, Mark 12:36, Hebrews 1:13).

Human beings have a great attachment to right handed power. Strength. Conviction. Decisiveness. All of these are traits of right handed power. We so badly want God to round up all the baddies and beat them up for us, teach them a lesson, and put them in their place. So much theology around heaven and hell in the church, if we’re being honest, is about other people getting what is due them. We love the right hand of God, because it means destruction for our enemies—something the Psalmist asks for again and again. In the pre-Christmas world, the power of force and coercion is the power that speaks loudest.

By contrast, scripture barely mentions the left hand of God. The only use of left hand in the entire New Testament is Jesus saying, “But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). There is nothing about left handed power, and I want to suggest this is very much by intention. You don’t need scripture to tell you about left handed power, because Jesus shows us by example exactly what it is. Our expectations were that Jesus would come wielding God’s right handed strength. He was supposed to be the Messiah who brought the chosen people back into the Holy Land. He was supposed to get back at those who had wronged his people. He was supposed to bring vengeance for all those killed—the powerless, the woman and children, and the warriors who gave their lives fighting for the faith. He was supposed to be the fulfillment of all the waiting for the people to get what they were due. He was supposed to be all these things, but instead he came wielding God’s left handed power, which is self-sacrifice. Left handed power is the least sexy power you can imagine. It is somebody slapping you on one cheek and turning the other and saying, “You forgot this one.” To the world, it looks like giving up. It is powerlessness and weakness and meekness and all those things that don’t look like power.

Simply, this is the power of Jesus Christ.

If you don’t like it, join the millennia of Christians who have tried to claim that Jesus was really about right handed power. The fact that Jesus saved by his left handed power of self-sacrifice, so that we might know grace, has never stopped Christians from wielding the right handed power of force in response—always justifying our actions by some greater good.

Nevertheless, when Isaiah is lifting up the characteristics of this servant, he is giving us the road map to Jesus. He is telling us about a king who serves—the God who comes to us in Jesus and washes our feet (and not the other way around); the God who defeats all the worst of our enemies not by rounding up the bad-guys and taking them out through force but who destroys hate through love. In the end, the left hand, which is so maligned by the powers-that-be, is the ONLY thing that will save us. The irony is that we spend our lives mocking and ridiculing the one and only thing that will ever save us from eternal death. This, too, is Advent.

The self-sacrificial power of Jesus begins small, as these things do, with a baby in a manger. In the Gospel of Matthew, a king is so afraid of that baby that he goes out and kills all the children in the land. That’s always the endgame for right handed power. It might start with the law, but it will progress to killing soon enough. That baby in the manger is everything Herod is not. He’s not going to defeat him the way Herod fears. In fact, he’s not going to defeat him at all. The very same right handed power that Herod uses will undo him. It’s what brings down every tyrant; it’s exactly the thing Mary sings about in the Magnificat.

Because of Herod’s actions, Jesus and his family become refugees in Egypt—a reminder that the left handed power of God always emerges from the margins. One of the big things you probably learned in high school science class was about Newton’s third law of motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus comes out of a world of Herods, so desperate to keep power that they kill children. Every show of force in this world has an equal and opposite need for a left handed reaction, which is self-sacrifice, powerlessness, meekness, and, ultimately, grace. The reason we needed Jesus is because this world is so terribly bereft of left handed power on the whole. We so desperately need grace, because we are so terribly attached to the power of force.

The power of the servant—Jesus’ power—doesn’t punch you in the face, or threaten you, or restrain you. In fact, it frees you. And that’s the most powerful thing of all. It’s the thing we need. Grace—a reaction to the right handed power of this world. God’s left handed, saving power for the sake of a world bent on wielding the power of the sword. This, too, is Advent.