Will to Power

On a late afternoon, a melancholy rider followed the setting sun into a dusty town and when the dust finally settled one week later, the bad guys lost and a new era began. But since this isn’t a Zane Grey novel, the enigmatic newcomer wasn’t wearing a pair of .45’s or riding a big sweat-streaked Appaloosa. He was wearing a pair of sandals and riding a young donkey. Our hero took some hits that week. He saw his popularity evaporate, killed no one, and was tortured to death.

And yet, in the beginning, the crowds threw down their coats to create a makeshift red carpet and cheered. Something about this rider had them begging to be led into a battle they couldn’t win. A compelling authority that could not be countered drove the throngs to shout things that embarrassed the religious elites. He didn’t ask for it, but neither did he stop it. After all, it was true, he said.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. How odd.

What kind of fighter shuts down the bad guys with meekness? What kind of conqueror rides into town on a donkey, turns the crowd against himself, and dies? And who takes over the world with meekness?

He stood in front of Pilate, who had total power to execute him or to set him free, and ignored him. Yet there was something so powerful in that silence that Pilate tried his best to free him.

The will to power (der Wille zur Macht) is, according to the nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the fundamental driving force of life. It is not hard to see why Nietzsche came to the conclusion that he did. The will to power, to control, to bend my surroundings to my will, seems as deeply rooted an instinct as anything in the human experience. Indeed, it is our original sin. That we would be as God, [deciding for ourselves] good and evil…

The dream of despots and dictators is always more power, more land, more kingdom to rule. To finally control the entire world, though it be destroyed in the process, has always been the holy grail of villains. And no wonder, as the deepest desire of Satan has always been precisely that, and it is in his image that fallen man is formed, and it is in his image that our charge to protect, cultivate, and care for the world has turned tragically and malevolently possessive, domineering, and mean.

The meek shall inherit the earth, Jesus said. Impossible, human history replies. Jesus is mistaken; that is not who inherits the earth.

In our experience, it is the will to power that inherits the earth. It is the strong one, Nietzsche’s ubermensch, who shoulders his way to the top of the scrum, or the manipulative one who most artfully pulls the strings and sets the traps, who finally conquers, subdues, rules. Nice guys finish last. It is the strong who survive.

Or do they?

At thirty-two years old, Alexander the Great, arguably the greatest conqueror who ever lived in the style of Nietzsche’s ubermensch, unexpectedly sickened and died after a night of carousing and drinking “far into the night” according to witnesses. Alexander the Great was infamous for his wild drinking parties. In one famous brawl, a drunken Alexander killed his friend and general Cleitus with a javelin, the same Cleitus who once saved his life in battle by severing the uplifted arm of a Persian commander before it could bring its weapon down on Alexander’s great, conquering head. He once hosted a celebratory drinking competition in which, after a foot soldier named Promachus triumphed by consuming four gallons of unmixed Greek wine, all forty-two contestants died of alcohol poisoning. Whether Alexander himself really died of alcohol poisoning, as is popularly claimed, is questionable, but it was clearly his hard drinking and hard living habits that caught up with him. And why did Alexander drink and fight so much?

We humans will engage a thousand battles and a thousand enemies rather than face the one battle and the one enemy we dread. The enemy that only the strongest men and women are able to face—themselves and their past.

To rule one’s own self has always been the biggest battle. This enemy—the only one that mattered—Alexander fled rather than conquered. His past and his inner demon were enemies he fled by drinking and fighting and conquering. Stripped of the facade of Greatness, it likely wasn’t military ambition so much as a kind of desperate fleeing from himself that drove Alexander the Human through enemy lines with such force and ferocity and cunning all the way to India.

Ancient thinkers have long observed that to see oneself is one’s highest duty and most difficult task. The Chinese general, writer, and philosopher Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, dating to the fifth century BC in China, observed that if one knows himself and knows his enemy, he can fight 100 battles without fear. Alexander, tutored by Aristotle, should have been familiar with this kind of wisdom since the Greeks had a similar message, Know thyself, famously carved above the entrance to the temple of Apollo in Delphi around the same time period. Perhaps equally instructive for Alexander should have been the two Delphic maxims that followed the first; Nothing to excess and Surety brings ruin. Jesus himself, in Matthew 7:5, urges us to defeat the enemy within before we go forth to defeat the enemies without. Humanity has long understood that the greatest battle lies within.

The power that conquers there conquers all. This is meekness.

A few years ago, I was profoundly impressed with E. Stanley Jones’ comments in The Christ of The Mount, regarding what he calls “the most formidable being on earth, the Terrible Meek.” He goes on to say,

"They are terrible in that they want nothing, and hence cannot be tempted or bought, and in that they are willing to go any lengths for others because they feel so deeply. Christ standing before Pilate is a picture of the Terrible Meek. He could not be bought or bullied, for he wanted nothing—nothing except to give his life for the very men who were crucifying him. Here is the supreme strength—it possesses itself, hence possesses the earth."

The world will not be conquered by the strongman and the will to power, it will be healed by the meek man who says, “Not my will but thine, be done.” It is that terrible, relentless, patient power of the meek that heals the world, because it conquers self.

We must learn to look ourselves in the eye, individually and corporately, and tell the truth about what we see there. Once we see ourselves, we can at least hope to change ourselves, by the power of God. But so long as we persist in denial, nothing can change or heal. I’m not really a bitter old man/woman, I’ve just learned a few things in the school of hard knocks. I’m not really addicted to sexual vices; I just have some weaknesses. It’s a tradition; not an idol. It’s freedom in Christ, not carnality. I don’t actually love money; my gift is business. I’m not a rebel; I’m a concerned member. I’m not a petty potentate; I’m a strong leader, that’s all. And I’m not a glutton; I’m a foodie.

The earth will not be conquered in the style of Alexander the Great and the will to power, but healed, when the body of Christ learns to die; to ride donkeys instead of warhorses, to be lifted up on crosses instead of thrones, when it learns His prayer “Not my will but thine, be done.”

The enemy within can be conquered, not by bare ascetism or will power turned against itself, but by the taking on of a new master. Neither a vacuum nor self-loathing can replace self-will, but Christ can. In dying with him, we are also raised with him, and a new life of truth-telling and meekness will flow through us, like rivers of living water, not conquering the world or dominating it, but healing it, watering it, cultivating it, and loving it as our own inheritance.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.