{"id":5489,"date":"2026-06-08T08:45:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T12:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5489"},"modified":"2026-06-08T08:45:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T12:45:19","slug":"in-command","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/08\/in-command\/","title":{"rendered":"In Command"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>

On March 30, 1981, just 69 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan and members of his entourage were attacked by a lone gunman outside a Washington D.C. hotel.

A bullet shattered one of Reagan’s ribs, punctured a lung, and lodged perilously close to his heart.

By the time he had been driven to George Washington University Hospital, the president’s blood pressure was so low that doctors later acknowledged\u00a0that most 70-year-olds in his condition would not have survived.

For the president, it turned out to be a day of memorable quotes.

“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he said to Nancy when the anxious First Lady arrived at the hospital.\u00a0In the operating room he pulled back his oxygen mask and said to his surgical team, “I hope you are all Republicans.”\u00a0Dr. Joseph Giordano, the lead surgeon, happened to be\u00a0a committed liberal Democrat.\u00a0After laughing aloud with the rest of the team, he assured his patient, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.” It was a kinder, gentler time.\u00a0

It also turned out to be quite a day for\u00a0the Secretary of State.

General Alexander Haig had recently assumed that key Cabinet position.\u00a0Both praised\u00a0and feared for his take-no-prisoners\u00a0style, the former\u00a0Supreme Allied Commander in Europe\u00a0had startled even his closest friends by suggesting that the U.S. fire a “nuclear warning shot” to deter the Soviet Union.

Just two weeks before the president was shot, he appeared, hands on hips,\u00a0on the cover of Time<\/em> magazine.\u00a0“Taking Command,” read the caption.

His image was never quite the same after March 30.

Leaders of the Soviet Union, hearing the news that Reagan had been shot, immediately moved their nuclear submarines closer to the American coast.\u00a0Vice President George H.W. Bush, the future president, was on a jet returning from Texas.\u00a0Who was making strategic decisions?\u00a0Who had access to The Football, the briefcase with America\u2019s nuclear launch codes?

Haig stepped before a roomful of reporters and announced, “As of now, I am in control here.”\u00a0Several reporters in the room actually laughed.\u00a0

If he meant the presidential line of succession, he was clearly wrong.\u00a0Both the Speaker of the House and the president pro temp of the Senate came before the Secretary of State.\u00a0

If he meant he was in control of the White House \u2013 well, those watching got the distinct feeling that Haig at that moment was too rattled even to command a troop\u00a0of Brownies. Haig looked pale. Fretful. Anything but in control.\u00a0 That moment of anxious, grab-the-bull-by-the-horns \u201cleadership\u201d actually raised the country\u2019s level of nervousness.\u00a0

And it doomed Haig\u2019s dreams of winning any future national elections.

On the day that Jesus died, Pontius Pilate had his Alexander Haig moment.\u00a0

Pilate commanded Jesus to speak. But Jesus remained silent.\u00a0“Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” he asked the prisoner (John 19:10). “Can’t you get it through your head that\u00a0I’m in control here, and that you’ve got nothing?”\u00a0

The Gospel accounts make it clear that Jesus wasn’t fazed by Pilate’s threats.\u00a0In fact, he was almost certainly counting<\/em> on Pilate to give the orders to execute him.\u00a0Jesus knew that he was about to take the ultimate symbol of Roman power \u2013 the cross \u2013 and turn it into the very means of accomplishing his own mission.

Pilate couldn’t fathom Jesus’ claim to be a king, for the simple reason that he was measuring Jesus with the wrong yardstick.

In the governor’s mind, a\u00a0real<\/em> king would have\u00a0a kingdom.\u00a0And an army.\u00a0And a palace.\u00a0And bodyguards.\u00a0How could\u00a0this man who had no power and no authority claim to be royalty?

“My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus had explained. But Pilate didn’t get it.

It is one history’s great ironies that the peace that comes through the kingdom of God was not achieved through violence against the king’s enemies.\u00a0Rather, it came about through violence to the King himself. Jesus was trying to explain to Pilate \u2013 and is still trying to explain to us today \u2013 that in order for God’s reign to succeed, first it had to fail.\u00a0

Good Friday had to come before Easter.\u00a0

This summer, you might be counting on the fact that you’re going to be in control.\u00a0You\u00a0have places to go, and your list of things to do, and you’ve planned all the details, and you’re not going to let circumstances overwhelm you.\u00a0You’ve got this<\/em>.

Except, you really don’t.

You’re not in control.\u00a0You’re not even in control of whether you’ll still be breathing by the time you make it to the end of this sentence.\u00a0Our illusion of “taking command,” standing with our hands on our hips before the watching world, is just that: an illusion.

But there’s good news.\u00a0Somebody is<\/u><\/em> in control. Somebody who can be trusted with all the details of our lives.\u00a0

And if our out-of-control lives seem to have taken us for the moment to a dead end, there’s even better news:

That Somebody is in the business of raising the dead.

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here On March 30, 1981, just 69 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan and members of his entourage were attacked by a lone gunman outside a Washington D.C. hotel. A bullet shattered one of Reagan’s ribs, punctured a lung, and lodged perilously close to his heart. By the time he had been… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5490,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1089,523,1061],"class_list":["post-5489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-authority","tag-control","tag-pontius-pilate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5491,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5489\/revisions\/5491"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}