Made perfect in weakness

7 July 2024

2 Corinthians 12.2-10

Mark 6.1-13

Have you ever felt not quite good enough? Maybe for that job you really wanted to succeed in even even though on the inside you weren’t quite sure you knew what you were doing? Maybe as a new mum or dad, when deep down you wished you knew what to do with this wriggling, unbearably loud, vulnerable little being that depended utterly on you? Maybe just in general, when everybody else around you seemed competent and sure of themselves and you just - weren’t? The truth of course is that we’ve all been there. We all want to succeed at the things that are important to us, we all want to be accepted - yet deep down, there’s all too often the nagging feeling we’re not quite up to it.

Which brings me to the topic for today’s sermon – the all-too human tension between our dreams of success and the realities of weakness and vulnerability.

Paul’s ministry to the church in Corinth was a pretty good example of this contradiction. A major seaport serving two oceans, Corinth was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan and fashionable city. It seems that Corinthians thought pretty highly of themselves. They were impressed by power and authority, and apparently they didn’t think St Paul was quite good enough for them. They were impressed by clever orators and the latest fads – and they measured spirituality by the ability to see visions and talk in tongues. It seems Paul was under attack from flashy competitors who looked and perhaps sounded a whole lot more impressive than he did.

In his second letter to the Corinthians that we have been reading through over the last couple of weeks you can just about hear the defensiveness and hurt – St Paul is feeling rejected and judged by this fractious and unruly congregation. The passage set by the lectionary for this morning is part of what scholars call his ‘sorrowful letter’. Paul, you get the feeling, was never really at a loss for words, but here his words are almost falling over themselves, coming out in an almost incoherent jumble but remarkably never quite losing sight of what is most important – not Paul, but God. Not what I can do, but what God can do in spite of me.

Well, now, if we’re going to boast, Paul says – talking about himself in the third person as though he doesn’t want to boast at all but letting them know that if he was going to then he’d have a fair bit of ammunition – not that I would boast but actually I do know a thing or two about visions – dropping a veiled reference to experiences so profound that he’s not even permitted to talk about them but don’t be in any doubt that he could if he was!  In fact, St Paul is having a dummy-spit. Lashing out verbally. And yes, he admits, I know as well as you do that I’m not really up to the job. There’s a bit of a dark area on my CV that I wish I could make go away. A thorn in the flesh. Actually, Bible scholars have argued for centuries about this – is Paul talking about a physical weakness or illness, or maybe depression or social anxiety? Or as some commentators believe, is it his blemished reputation as a one-time enemy and persecutor of the Church? At any rate, Paul knows that he is deeply flawed and inadequate and he has prayed that this burden could be taken away. It’s a curious mix of defensiveness and vulnerability. But here’s the wonder and the sheer breath-taking depth and beauty of Paul’s spirituality centred on the crucified and broken Christ – because God’s response to his prayers, he tells us, is to remind him that God’s ‘power is made perfect in weakness’. 

So there – right in the middle of a defensive dummy-spit: I know I am an inadequate, fallible human being with weaknesses that are obvious to anybody. Paul’s humanity is being tested to the limit in this relationship with the Christians at Corinth. Nothing he does is good enough. But that’s how God works. God’s power is made perfect in weakness – Paul’s own weakness, for sure - but also, if we dare to follow his argument, in the weakness and vulnerability of God.

Because the core truth of the gospel that Paul keeps hammering home is that it is not in strength but in weakness that Christ accepts and redeems us. The crucified figure of Jesus that Paul keeps coming back to is hardly a figure of overwhelming strength. Quite the opposite, it’s a figure of overwhelming vulnerability and suffering love. That’s how God comes to us, Paul keeps reminding us, not as the God of irresistible power but as the God who dares to let us not believe in him, the God who dares to let us find him irrelevant and to push him aside onto the cross. That’s the God whose power is made perfect in the depths of weakness. As the 20th century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it, writing in the dark days of World War II awaiting execution by the Nazi State -  maybe, only the vulnerable, wounded and powerless God who shares our mess and heartache can do us any good.

This is the God of what we might call relational power, the subtle influence of love that works not on the brute facts of our lives, but on the more intricate, crisscrossing web of what makes us who we are, flawed and fragile people who have to work out our identity in the context of our relationships with one another and with God. Our relationships with one another are the problem, and they are also exactly where God works to transform us. God does that, not through force but by being vulnerable, persistent, nagging us right at the place where we too find ourselves weak, broken and inadequate.

So - get in touch with your sore spot, your own place of desolation. Your own nagging credibility gap. You know where it is. It’s where you’ll find God’s Holy Spirit hardest at work.

It hardly needs much explanation, does it, when Jesus comes back home to Nazareth – as he does in our Gospel reading today - and finds that people in the town where he grew up remember him as just Mary’s boy who turned out to be a tradesman. Home of course is the place where they remember you from back when, and often when you go back they don’t give you the chance to be the person you’ve turned into in the meantime. In Mark’s gospel, too, there’s the suggestion that relationships were already a bit strained. Jesus’ family were worried about him, remember a few weeks ago back in chapter three his mother and siblings came to fetch him because they thought he was going mad, and here things aren’t getting much better. When Jesus finally comes back home to Nazareth after his baptism in the Jordan by John, after fasting in the desert and healing the sick and driving out demons, after showing his authority over wind and waves and raising the dead – well, back here he’s just Mary’s son – just Mary’s eldest boy who left her without any apparent means of support and now who does he think he is?

And Jesus spits the dummy. We forget, sometimes, what it means that we believe Jesus was truly human. It means he can feel hurt and rejected, it means his pride can be punctured – and here we see him giving it back with interest, in one breath insulting his village and his own family as well. Outsiders recognise who Jesus is – just not the people he grew up with.

You see, when we dare to believe in each other, we give each other the ability to become who God intends us to be. It’s one of the greatest gifts we can give one another. But the opposite happens when we expect the worst or the least from one another. When we leave our relationships with one another unexamined and untransformed, we end up standing in the way of God’s work in the world.

Jesus seems to have changed tack, at this point, sending out the disciples in twos, deliberately making them reliant on whatever goodwill they might come across. The point seems to be that actually the only way to proclaim the gospel is to become vulnerable. In Mark’s version Jesus tells them they can take a staff and a pair of sandals, but no lunch box, no cash and not even a change of clothes. They are going to be dependent on whatever goodwill they can find, and they are going to need each other. At a human level proclaiming the good news of God’s love and forgiveness is always going to meet with a mixed response. There’s going to be success, and there’s going to be failure. The apostles are going to meet with both hospitality and hostility. They are going to spend half their time inspiring and supporting each other, the other half arguing. We’re none of us perfect. We’re sent out under-equipped. We get stuff wrong. But that’s the whole mess and the beauty of it. We’re sent into the world to be God’s people, reliant not on what we can do but on what God can do, called to be God’s people not in strength but in weakness, so that God’s grace can be made perfect - in us.

Amen