President Biden: Laying down power

With the backdrop of President Biden’s announcement this week, director of communications Jo Frost asks, “Why is it so hard to lay down power?”

This week Biden has refused the nomination of the democratic party to be their presidential candidate in November’s election in the USA, and Vice President Kamala Harris has become the presumptive nominee.
It took 24 days for President Biden to withdraw his candidacy after his disastrous live debate with republican nominee former President Trump. By the end, as an outsider, it was getting painful to watch. As each interview was scrutinised and every fumble was analysed, all public confidence eroded until we were each left saying, ​“Surely – he can’t carry on?!”

But for 24 days – carry on he did. In a sit down with ABC News, he said only the Lord Almighty could convince him to quit. ​“If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ​‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” he said. ​“The Lord Almighty’s not coming down”.

He refused to listen to council, arguing jet lag, a bad cold and over prepping for interviews as the causes of some of the concerning behaviours.

But from a distance it looked more and more like an old man’s reluctance to relinquish the power he had taken a lifetime to acquire.

We may never know the conversations or the challenges surrounding President Biden’s decision to stand down. We can’t speculate on what motivated him to stay in the race for so long or what finally persuaded him to step aside. But whatever may have been happening ​‘in the room’, the drama surrounding the decision caused me to consider my own relationship to power and what it means to lay it down.

The human tendency to cling to power once we’ve tasted it is one of the most ancient story tropes. From Macbeth to Anakin Skywalker, from Doctor Octopus in Spiderman to Professor Umbridge in Harry Potter, from the Nazgul in the Lord of the Rings to Regina George in Mean Girls, our popular culture has always warned of the seductive and destructive trappings of power. Whether it’s the power-hungry or the power-mad, we are told from infancy that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Each of us, as children of the King of Kings, rule our own little kingdoms. A kingdom, as Dallas Willard would say, is where what the king or queen wants to happen happens. That’s the power of a monarch – to rule and reign over their dominion. To a greater or lesser extent, we each have a dominion. Starting with our minds and our bodies – our thoughts, our movements, our actions are ours to control. We might have dominion in our homes, maybe in our place of work, over those we line manage or are responsible for; we get to control our little bit of reality. We each have the power, at least to some extent, to make what we want to happen happen. And often, when we recognise that power, we want to keep what we have and we get hungry for more.

But the visions of Revelation give us an alternative storyline for power. We see through John’s eyes in Revelation 4 the 24 elders crowned and enthroned around the Throne of God, and yet they do not cling to power, usurp each other or wage war. Instead in worship, the elders lay their crowns before Him and say, ​“You are worthy, our Lord and God.”

To be human is to be made in the image of a powerful God. Our nature is powerful because we are made in the likeness of the most powerful being. But each of us have a choice to make, whether we lay our crown before the throne of God and allow the kingdom of God to reign or cling to our own power and authority.

Each of us will have experienced moments when we have twisted Jesus’ words and spoken in our hearts, ​‘not your will be done, but mine’. And when we do, it can get painful to watch and damaging to be around. But when we lay down our power, seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, power is redeemed, our humanity restored and what we long for, even more than what we merely want, is given to us.