The Emperor’s Powerlessness +

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately about the "powers" of the New Testament.  This morning, I was combing back over parts of Walter Wink's Naming the Powers when I came across a section that I had previously highlighted.  It jumped off the page at me this morning and stirred up my sense of ultimate victory in the gospel.  I thought it was worth sharing with you.

"Such sedition could not go unpunished.  With rebels the solution was simple.  No one challenged the state's right to execute rebels.  They had bought into the power-game on the empire's terms and lost, and the rules of the game required their liquidation.  The rebels themselves knew this before they started.  But what happens when a state executes those who are praying for it?  When Christians knelt in the Colosseum to pray as lions bore down on them, something sullied the audience's thirst for revenge.  Even in death these Christians were not only challenging the ultimacy of the emperor and the "spirit" of empire but also demonstrating the emperor's powerlessness to impose his will even by death.  The final sanction had been publically robbed of its power.  Even as lions lapped the blood of the saints, Caesar was stripped of his arms and led captive in Christ's triumphal procession.  His authority was shown to be only penultimate after all.  And even those who wished most to deny such a thing were forced, by the very punishment they chose to inflict, to behold its truth.  It was a contest of all the brute force of Rome against a small sect that merely prayed.  Who could have predicted that the tiny sect would win?" -- Walter Wink, Naming the Powers