Jesus speaks with striking clarity about leadership and danger.
“I am the good shepherd,” he says. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
He contrasts this with the hired hand, who runs away when the wolf comes. Elsewhere he warns of those who come clothed as shepherds but are, inwardly, ravenous wolves.
Jesus is not naïve about the world.
He does not deny predation, violence, or threat.
Wolves are real. Power can be abused. Fear is understandable.
What is remarkable is not that Jesus recognises danger—but the form of power he chooses in response to it.
Faced with a world where domination often appears the only effective answer to danger, Jesus refuses to become a stronger wolf. He does not out-compete, out-threaten, or out-control. Instead, he describes authority in terms of presence, responsibility, and risk. The shepherd does not secure himself first; he stays.
If Jesus is the image of God, then this is not a pastoral metaphor alone.
It is revelation.
And it brings us directly to the uncomfortable question most Christians would rather avoid:
What does Jesus reveal about power itself?
If Jesus is the true image of God, then the way he handles power is not a secondary detail. It is not a strategy adapted to circumstance, nor a temporary humility before a later display of dominance. It is the clearest window we are given into the nature of God.
This is where the Christian imagination often falters.
We are comfortable saying that Jesus shows us God’s love. We are far less comfortable allowing him to redefine God’s power. And yet the Gospels insist that these two belong together. The God whom Jesus reveals does not love despite weakness, restraint, or vulnerability; God loves through them.
To look seriously at Jesus and power, then, is to allow one of our deepest religious instincts to be challenged—the instinct to associate divinity with control, certainty, and the capacity to prevail.
Power refused
The Gospels place the question of power at the very beginning of Jesus’ public life. In the wilderness narratives, Jesus is offered the kind of power every age understands: command, visibility, mastery, and control. “All the kingdoms of the world” are placed before him, with the promise that they can be possessed, directed, and secured.
Jesus refuses.
This refusal is not incidental; it is decisive. He does not negotiate terms or seek a gentler version of domination. He rejects the entire framework in which power is exercised over others, even for supposedly good ends. In doing so, he exposes something profoundly unsettling: that the desire to control outcomes, enforce righteousness, or secure allegiance can exist even under religious language.
From the start, Jesus signals that the Kingdom of God will not arrive through coercion, spectacle, or fear. Whatever power he exercises will take a different form altogether—the form spoken of by the prophets: the blind seeing, the lame walking, the poor hearing good news, and those long excluded discovering that God has not forgotten them.
Power redefined
Jesus’ teaching reinforces this again and again. When his disciples argue about status, precedence, and greatness, he does not correct their ambition by lowering the bar. He dismantles the category.
“The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them… not so with you.” (Matt. 20:25–26)—signals not an improvement of power, but its redefinition.
Here Jesus does not merely offer better leadership techniques. He offers a complete inversion of how power is imagined. Authority is no longer measured by distance, insulation, or command, but by proximity, service, and cost.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the foot-washing scene. This is not a sentimental object lesson about humility; it is enacted theology. Jesus takes the posture of the lowest servant and declares, without irony, that this is what authority looks like in God’s Kingdom.
If this is the image of God, then divine power is not the ability to compel obedience, but the freedom to give oneself away.
The cross as revelation, not transaction
This is why the cross cannot be understood merely as a mechanism to solve a problem. Whatever else one says about atonement, the Gospels are unambiguous on this point: the cross reveals who God is.
Jesus does not lose control on the way to the cross; he relinquishes it. He does not suffer because power has failed; he refuses to use power in the way violence demands. The cross is not God finally asserting dominance through suffering, but God refusing dominance even when violence appears to win.
This matters deeply for how we understand discipleship.
To take up the cross is not to choose suffering in order to earn legitimacy, holiness, or the right to exist. It is to commit oneself to the way of love in a world structured around fear, control, and exclusion—and to accept that such love will often be resisted.
The cross names the cost of truthfulness, not the requirement for worth.
The Church and its uneasy relationship with power
Here the discomfort intensifies.
The Church has always struggled with this vision of power. Again and again, we have affirmed Jesus with our lips while quietly defaulting to other models in practice: hierarchy that silences, certainty that controls, authority that cannot be questioned without punishment.
We often speak of Jesus as Lord while resisting the form of lordship he actually embodies.
This tension surfaces wherever leadership becomes brittle, criticism becomes dangerous, or loyalty is demanded rather than discerned. When power is exercised defensively, when dissent is pathologised, or when maintaining order takes precedence over truth, we are no longer reflecting the image revealed in Christ—we are protecting an image we have made.
This is idolatry of a subtle and religious kind.
Power that creates space
Jesus’ power does something strikingly different: it creates space.
He does not overwhelm those he meets. He does not hurry people into certainty. He allows misunderstanding, slow growth, resistance, and even failure to have their place. His authority does not crush fragile faith; it makes room for it.
This is why Jesus can tolerate disagreement. Why he can endure being misunderstood. Why he refuses to shore himself up with spectacle or force. Truth does not need protection through domination. Love does not require fear as its ally.
Power, in the image of God, is exercised for the flourishing of the other—even when that flourishing cannot be controlled.
When power protects the strong and feeds on the weak
Jesus’ imagery of shepherds and wolves is not accidental. Wolves do not merely attack; they consume what cannot defend itself. They thrive in systems where vulnerability is unprotected and scarcity is treated as inevitable.
This is where Jesus’ vision of power becomes acutely economic and political—not in the sense of party allegiance, but in the sense of how societies organise survival.
In the early nineteenth century, the economist David Ricardo1 articulated what became known as the Iron Law of Wages: the belief that labourers must be kept at—or near—subsistence level. If wages rise, population increases; if population increases, wages must fall again. Poverty, in this view, is not a failure of the system; it is the system working as intended.
What matters is not merely that this idea once existed, but that its assumptions still quietly shape modern economic thinking. Stripped of its nineteenth-century language, the logic remains familiar: markets must be disciplined, labour kept “competitive,” insecurity tolerated as the price of growth. Vast inequalities are rationalised as unfortunate but necessary side-effects of prosperity, rather than as moral failures that demand correction.
This is why contemporary wealth concentration can present itself with such confidence. When scarcity is assumed to be unavoidable, abundance for the few becomes evidence of success rather than a question of justice. Billionaires need not see themselves as wolves; the system itself assures them that the outcomes are natural, even virtuous.
This was not a fringe theory in Ricardo’s time, and it is not a fringe logic now. It has given intellectual respectability to the idea that some lives must remain precarious so that others can flourish, and it trains us to accept suffering as structural rather than chosen.
This is power with wolves built in.
What Jesus reveals stands in direct contradiction to this logic. His ministry consistently centres those who cannot repay, cannot compete, and cannot protect themselves: the sick, the poor, the excluded, the expendable. The signs of the Kingdom he points to—the blind see, the lame walk, the poor receive good news—are not decorative miracles. They are disclosures of what God’s power is for.
Jesus refuses a world where abundance depends on scarcity, where stability depends on suppression, and where flourishing for some requires disposability for others. He does not merely criticise such systems; he starves them of their moral authority by embodying a different order altogether.
This is why wolves feel threatened.
Power that feeds on fear, scarcity, and competition cannot coexist comfortably with power that creates space, restores dignity, and insists that every person bears the image of God. One must eventually devour the other.
Why this refusal still provokes resistance
Seen this way, Jesus’ rejection of coercive power is not naïve. It is dangerous.
To those invested in systems that function precisely because people are afraid, precarious, or replaceable, a Shepherd who refuses domination is not gentle; he is destabilising. He names as “normal” what God calls intolerable. He exposes as “necessary” what is, in fact, a choice.
This helps explain why Jesus is so frequently resisted—not only by overt tyrants, but by respectable structures that benefit from things staying roughly as they are.
Wolves do not mind religion.
They mind shepherds.
A power that gives life
What Jesus offers in place of coercive power is not mere restraint, but abundance of a different kind. “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” (John 10:10) he says—not promising accumulation, insulation, or invulnerability, but fullness of life grounded in truth, love, and relationship.
This abundance is not easily measurable from within systems built on scarcity and fear. It cannot be hoarded, monetised, or controlled. It is discovered as we become more fully ourselves: less defended, more truthful, more capable of love. Where power no longer needs to dominate, people begin to blossom. Where fear loosens its grip, imagination returns. Where dignity is restored, community becomes possible again.
To embrace the Jesus who refuses domination is not to settle for less life, but to step into a deeper one—harder to grasp, perhaps, but richer, more human, and more alive than the world of wolves ever allows.
What this demands of us
If we take seriously the claim that Jesus is the image of God, then we are left with an uncomfortable responsibility.
We cannot appeal to God to justify forms of power that Jesus consistently refused—even when doing so looks inefficient, risky, or dangerous.
We cannot sanctify coercion, control, or exclusion without quietly contradicting the revelation we claim to trust. And we cannot imagine discipleship as self-erasure or the suppression of personhood, as though love required us to disappear.
Jesus does not ask us to earn the right to exist through suffering. He asks us to learn how to love truthfully in a world that will often punish us for it. To live this way is not self-erasure, but image-bearing: becoming more fully human by reflecting the power of God as Jesus reveals it.
This reframes both leadership and faith. The question is no longer how powerful we can become, but how faithfully we can reflect the power we have been shown.
The image that remains
In Jesus, God does not overpower the world into submission. God enters it, shares its vulnerability, and transforms it from within. This is not weakness masquerading as virtue; it is strength disciplined by love.
If we are made in the image of this God, then our task is not to seize power, but to learn how to carry it differently—with integrity, imagination, restraint, and courage.
And perhaps the final, unsettling question is this:
If the image of God looks like Jesus, what forms of power must we now be willing to let go?
Jeremy Marks, 31st January 2026
Footnote 1: David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), especially the chapters on wages and population. While Ricardo’s formulations were later challenged and revised, the assumption that labour insecurity and scarcity are necessary disciplines within economic systems continues to shape modern economic thought often without being named as an ideological choice.
Note on the Image of God series:
The Image of God is a short series exploring how Christian faith is reshaped when we take seriously the claim that God is revealed in Jesus.
Beginning with God revealed, not discovered, moving through idolatry as misdirected imagination, and now Jesus and power, these essays trace how Jesus re-forms our understanding of God, authority, and what it means to be fully human.
Each piece asks what must be unlearned if we are to reflect the God Jesus shows us.
Thank you Jeremy. Reminds me a lot of the approach by Tom Wright, with his interpretation that the Kingdom is only created and spread via the way of the cross.