People are waiting to see if they can pay their bills and keep food on the table. They wait to be told whether they have value, and they wonder if they ever had value. If their work can be taken away so easily, was any of it ever real?

The anxiety of waiting corrodes the human spirit. The shame that keeps us from sharing our pain with others corrodes human community.

When Jesus warned his disciples that he would suffer, be rejected and die — and so, by extension, would they — he was talking about exactly this dynamic. When people have power over us, they will abuse that power. The powerful and privileged will always make sense of their own lives by denying safety and basics to others. Call it addiction, call it human depravity, the evil of power-abuse is always with us.

The answer to power-abuse isn’t the “human thing” of seizing power and changing places with the oppressor. A society at war over power will destroy everyone in it.

The”divine thing” is to relinquish power, to move beyond control and money-generated security. The divine thing is to break through the fog of suffering by trusting in God, doing God’s work, letting God make sense of our lives.