Picture, picture

You know something about power by the number of pictures people take of you with them. It is a strange feeling, to be likened to the Maria Cristina Falls, a high and mighty rush of water against which countless pictures are taken. It can be a heady experience for them and for me, and I try my best not to get that all to my head. After all, Maria Cristina has been falling for thousands of years, and I as president have been falling only for four.

I wonder what it does to us, this portrait or pose with powerful things like waterfalls or personages. If I had the chance to visit the Pope in Rome, I would surely grab a camera and tag him in my facebook collection of pictures. But then, after the tag, what then? Well, I can at least show off to my facebook friends: look, I was in the Vatican. I was there; I have arrived. Look at who I’m standing with. I may not be the greatest, but I’m chika (rubbing elbows) with the high and mighty.

One thing I’ve discovered about being head of a school is that power-tripping can, well, trip you on your way to the truth about others and yourself.

Makes you wonder what the disciples were thinking when they were arguing in the Gospel today about who was the greatest. Were they thinking about Jesus at all? Were they thinking of him as the greatest ever? Or were they thinking of themselves, and of who was closest to the Lord, or of who had the ear of the Lord and was in his inner circle?

Such perhaps is the intoxicating, magnetic power of power. Those who wield it, even power of the good kind, the kind that attracts so many others to bask in its atmosphere, know that power can draw the good as well as the bad out of people.

In today’s first reading, Wisdom gives us a picture of how goodness and its quiet power can give rise to envy, and how envy compounds itself and conspires to bring down the just and virtuous one. In the second reading, it is James who warns us about envy conniving with selfish ambition: “where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every foul practice.”

Of course, the conspirators and connivers think themselves just and right. They even justify their plot with a perverse logic that endures to this day and was painfully present when cruel taunts were hurled on the One crucified on Calvary: if you are God’s favored one, come down, and we will adore you; if you are the son of God, save yourself and us as well.

The simple yet shallow syllogism goes this way: sons (and daughters) of God are protected. Jesus is a son. Therefore, he is protected. In other words, if he is the son of God, God will save him. God forbid that he should suffer and die.

But then the son of God dies, leaving them satisfied, their logic still intact. Some go their separate ways, confirming their shallow theologies and syllogisms about God’s benevolence and the fate of those who have the misfortune to be out of the divine circle.

It is the same logic or syllogism that we apply to daily life: if you are close to God, you will be spared the plots and antipathy of angry men.

To tear that logic apart, Jesus places a child in the midst of their wrangling about who was the greatest, wraps his arms around it, and says, “whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.”

Anyone who would be first “shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” You want that picture taken of you? Get off center stage and be the background.

To those who would be president of the country or to those who would be leaders, stay down and stand your ego down. Spare us the speeches and stand the weak up on center stage. If you must speak, learn to be quiet and listen. Then move on behalf of those who are as needful as little children.

Were Jesus to pay a courtesy call to my office, I know I would surely grab that camera and ask for a shot to be taken with him. When I post that picture on facebook for all my facebook friends to see, then what? I can be a show off and sell stampitas of “Jesus and me” and earn the envy of my little facebook world. 

Or I can just keep that picture in my wallet, or on my bedside table, to remind me that the only power that is true is the power of love to endure being off-center, which is love’s power to stay back and bring forth a portrait of all the goodness we are meant to be.

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Fr. Jose Ramon T. Villarin SJ is President of Xavier University, Ateneo de Cagayan. For feedback on this column, email [email protected]