A while back I wrote about the first enemy being ego. Ego is toxic enough in each individual. Unfortunately, it is the normal condition of everyone. When a bunch of ego-centric individuals get together and pool their ignorance, fear, anger, and shame, they manufacture the society characterized by violence and lies into which we all are born. This conglomeration of blind egos regulated and held in tension by laws and power in pyramidal order is called Empire. Empire is the collective, mass, macro expression of the narcissistic nihilism of which ego is the individual manifestation. Motivated by the drive for wealth, fame, and power, the strongest people, class, race, or nation will prevail and impose a self-serving order on the weaker.
In Scripture this abomination appears at the beginning of the Book of Exodus when a new Pharaoh “who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), that is, who did not know the story of God, takes power and reduces the Israelites to slavery. This collision between the people of God and the Empires of the world becomes a — if not the —major theme of the whole Bible. It reaches its final destiny in Revelation when Empire’s true nature and identity is disclosed as the Beast conjured by the Red Dragon (Satan, the Accuser) who, failing to conquer heaven, decides to destroy God’s creation (Revelation 13).
Empire is therefore an inherently ecocidal project in which people are organized for the destruction of the Earth. This gets accomplished by the application, approval, and spread of practices of ego-centric ideology, like greed, envy, lust, gluttony, pride, vanity, resentment, deceit, and sloth.
In other words, the Accuser finds within humans the most effective tool in organizing the annihilation of life: the human ego which falsely believes itself to be separated from and independent of creation and acts that way. Binding such egos into a tight fasces, a weapon of mass intimidation and destruction, Empire proceeds upon its work of reducing the Earth to a lifeless rock.
Of course, that is not what Empire tells itself it is about. It prefers to spew self-serving propaganda about “prosperity,” “progress,” and “liberty.” And that is the way it gets sold to people, as a matter of security, comfort, convenience, health, and happiness. But the end result of Empire’s policies and practices is the abolition of creation itself.
This has never bee more clear than in the last few decades, culminating even in the last few months of overlapping crises. The underlying catastrophe, of course, is the climate crisis and related ecological depredations. On top of that we have the current pandemic and the economic disaster it has wreaked, and the awakening of people to racial injustices. All of these are connected and basically share the same root in Empire’s regime of destruction and consumption.
The apotheosis of Empire is the one under which we now languish: global consumer Capitalism. The sole purpose of this Empire is to annihilate God’s good creation by means of feeding the infinite desire of individual human egos, especially those at the top of the economic food chain. It is the most perfect and effective manifestation of the Beast/Empire yet concocted by human ego-centricity. Capitalism, along with the other characteristics of Modernity, has succeeded in largely neutralizing and coopting any spiritual/moral dimension of human community, which had served for millennia as societal control-rods hopefully regulating and mitigating the violent reactions of ego and Empire. It is the supreme example of “a new king who did not know Joseph” (and therefore God) assuming hegemony over people. Modernity, in short, reduced reality to what was empirical, measurable, and sellable, and rejected as superstition and subjective anything else, including faith, hope, love, beauty, and any understanding of truth that did not meet Modernity’s criteria for objectivity.
Modernity’s values, which undergird Capitalism, are thus unmoored from what is actually true and real, the depth of Reality which can only be approached interiorly by faith/trust, hope, and love, described in myth, story, poetry, song, ritual, and parable, in community with others. This means that Modernity, like all Empires, is based on lies and falsehoods invented by fearful egos, and cannot stand in any encounter/collision with Reality. It will crumble and fall into chaos and nothingness, which is all it ever was. This is what is going on poetically in most of the Book of Revelation. It is always happening. Disintegration is the basic story of Empire.
The role of the Church, the ecclesia, the people called and gathered by God, is to witness to the story of Jesus Christ, who embodies and fulfills the “Joseph” that Empires don’t know. That is, it is to bear witness to the Truth of God in creation, and live according to Christ’s life, poured into their hearts by the Spirit of God.
The church does this by addressing the problem at its core, which is our ego-centricity, and healing that through Sacrament and story, in community, and sending them into the world to practice justice, non-violence, inclusion, forgiveness, compassion, equality, and love.
Jesus Christ, in and through the Church, is the antidote to ego and Empire. He is the medicine that heals the world, and delivers creation into the shalom for which it was created, which is himself.
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