2024-04-02 A Meditation on Weakness and Resurrection Strength

“5 On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses— 6 though if I should wish to boast, I would not be a fool, for I would be speaking the truth; but I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. 7 So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor 12:5-10 ESV)

All life teaches of weakness as a persecuted estate: to be humble in the world, to be weaker, to struggle to make ends meet, all these things—far from being poetic—invite disdain and opposition. Yet in the steel and strength of the Resurrection, no more do we have shoved in our face the opprobrium, the hatred, the dismissive belittling, of come-who-may. A good bark, a good proclamation, a good confidence is now ours, not in our own pitiable estate, but in His who returned a reigning King.

That is, poetry and denial put aside, real people incur real compromised status: real suffering meets an uncaring world. Real differences, real adventuring not authorized, real newfangled generational sins or rather indulgences or rather natural outlays, do first and foremost draw attention for the perceived vulnerability, not for the perceived relevance and dictates of existence, of belonging, of respectability. We hate what is weak, as an evolutionary tidal pool meets a Christianity post-evolved, one that has pursued Evolution on the front of ideas, one that has found blessedness and beauty in the maligned weaker beggar.

The tidal pool then is the question of do we go all the way? Is it enough to care for a few oppressed souls, or is our doctrine that all are persecuted, all things are faked and false assurance unless grounded in genuine weaker cruciform hardship? Do we actually believe that the response to some weakness is total mercy? Do we actually believe that to love the compromised, simpler, challenged in mind or weaker in body, parishioner is to coach and educate our own soul as to its prospects for salvation? We learn because we love. We love because we were Met, by the roadside, on the Emmaus road, near even the cold Cross. And our calling was individual, first and foremost one acquainted with rejection, acquainted with being passed over for the more fashionable or reputable pedigree, the long glance at a parish not actually near to sensitive awareness, but hard up in its sins and merciless wanderings and senseless inward gazing. On some level we are called to act Here and Now, no more to fuss around perceptions of bettering and of holiness, but to be that individual proactive and Risen with Him.