For a long time, the primary religious question in the Western world has been whether or not you believe in God. Are you a believer, or are you an atheist? Yet the late American novelist David Foster Wallace argued that: “in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” 

Foster Wallace is right. People worship money, or power, or bodily beauty, or celebrity and popularity. All these things become substitutes for God – idols – and in our age of advanced communications technology they are magnified as we are bombarded on social media with commodities we must own, bodies we must attain, and celebrities we must revere (until they’re cancelled, and then new ones take their place).  

More conventional powers, like nationalist movements, extremist religions and ultra-Right groups have also harnessed these platforms so that people may be snared into worshipping them too. We are all worshipping, and the screens on our phones and our laptops have become the new medieval rood screens onto which we project our deities and before which we bow. 

But while they are amplified by new technologies these idols are as old as humanity itself. In the Fifth Century, St Augustine of Hippo saw all these false gods as objects of what he called the libido dominandi, the lust for power or the will to dominate. And it’s that will to dominate that characterises, for Augustine, the Earthly City, the sinful state in which fallen humanity finds itself. 

So in this world of domination, intensified by the screens that demand our attention, the question for Christians on Good Friday is ‘who is the god that you worship?’ Who is the Christian God? He is the antithesis of the will to dominate. He is the god on a cross. Arrested, tortured, executed. Our god does not compete in the Earthly City, he becomes its victim.  

And he does so to lead us to what Augustine calls the Heavenly City, or what’s referred to by Jesus in St John’s passion story as “a kingdom not of this world”. He stands in front of Pilate, a man who knew the will to dominate as well as anyone. Perhaps he knew it so well that he realised he might as well release Jesus because Jesus was not competing with him in that game. But the logic of the fallen world demanded that you compete for domination, or you perish, and so the crowd cried for him to be crucified. And we are told that this was within the purposes of God the Father for the redemption of creation. 

To refuse the will to dominate is to be gentle. To us the term gentleness may evoke something soft and unremarkable. To describe someone as gentle barely even seems a compliment in our culture. But our god chose gentleness. He chose it, not just as the passive rejection of violence; he chose it as the power by which he would redeem the world. The gentleness of submitting to death, the gentleness of giving his mother and his friend into each other’s care as he dies. The gentleness of bowing his head and giving up the ghost. 

So gentleness was the means of our redemption, and it is also the means by which we overcome the will to dominate in our lives today. The late philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle was one of the few intellectuals to take gentleness seriously in her work. In her 2013 book, The Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, she describes gentleness as “a force of secret life-giving transformation… Without it there is no possibility for life to advance in its becoming.” And she points to the power of gentleness in the moments of life where we allow ourselves to tap into its potential: in parenting and caring for the vulnerable, in welcoming, in forgiving, in listening, in affirming, in resisting. These are all expressions of the fruit of gentleness that heal us from the will to dominate. And this fruit grows in us as we learn to give our attention and our devotion less and less to the idols of this world and more and more to the Kingdom of the god who was crucified. 

Dufourmantelle herself died at the age of 53 in 2017 while rescuing two children caught in dangerous waters in the Mediterranean off a beach near St Tropez. The risk of living is indeed the risk of dying. Gentleness is not passive; it is our liberation from the will to dominate so we may participate in the life of God, giving ourselves to others in love and service, in small ways and, by God’s grace, in our totality. St Augustine described this as the service that is perfect freedom, the liberation from the idols of the Earthly City that brings us home to the City of God, in this world and in the next.