Saved in and through Weakness
I recently submitted a prayer for publication in a collection that appealed to “the weakness of God.” A copy editor wrote a marginal note for me observing that “God is not weak.” The editor then proposed an alternative phrasing that assigned weakness to those who respond to God, thus transferring “weakness” from God to God’s human partners and subjects. And of course the church has a powerful legacy, including its hymns, of affirming that God is strong:
I am weak but Thou art strong;
Jesus, keep me from all wrong;
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.
The comment of the copy editor has led me to reflect more upon the notion of God’s weakness. There is no doubt that the Bible attests to the power of God (as in the defeat of Pharaoh). That same majestic power, moreover, is evident in the capacity of Jesus to govern even the demons. Such an accent on the power of God, moreover, has been a long-running seduction for the church, as we have imagined the power of God to be not unlike the worldly power of mighty empires and imperial rulers. Insofar as the church has been seduced in this regard, attentiveness to the “weakness of God” may be a deep and significant corrective. Thus my rumination in what follows.
I had in mind three accent points when I considered the “weakness of God”:
the exposition of paul
1. Paul’s lyrical summons to the church in I Corinthians 1:18-31 is an astonishing exposition of the weakness of God. The “message about the cross” is “to us who are being saved” the power of God. This is the central truth and the core claim of Christian faith, that the crucifixion of Jesus is the performance of God’s power that is unlike any power in the world. In his exposition Paul works a pair of themes:
The wisdom of the world…the foolishness of God;
The strength of the world…the weakness of God.
To this pair may be added, to complete the triad,
The wealth of the world…the poverty of God:
For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich
(II Corinthians 8:9).
Before he finishes his exposition Paul, not surprisingly, will go on to trace out the implications of this declaration about God for the life and practice of the church:
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are (I Corinthians 1:26-28).
We may judge, moreover, that this entire riff by Paul is a commentary on the triadic formulation of the prophet Jeremiah:
Thus says the Lord:
Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom,
do not let the mighty boast in their might,
do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth;
but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness
in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord (Jeremiah 9:23-24).
Jeremiah sets up two triads, the wisdom, might, and wealth of the world, and the steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in which the creator God delights. The second triad in Jeremiah does not speak directly of the foolishness, weakness, and poverty of Paul, but the three relational-covenantal terms move in the same direction of vulnerability that contrast decisively with the triad of worldly “virtues.” Thus the weakness of God is central to the differentiation of the work and being of God, contrasted to the way of the world of predatory greed. The point is reiterated by Paul at the end of his letter:
It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power
(I Corinthians 15:43).
In this text “weakness” is the way of crucifixion as power is the way of resurrection. The point, moreover, is reiterated in Hebrews 5:2 as well.
He is able to deal gently with the ignorant wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness (Hebrews 5:2).
the force of good friday
2. Thus the shape of I Corinthians is from crucifixion in chapter 1 to resurrection in chapter 15. The pivot of Paul’s reasoning is the centrality of the cross, so that we are led to Good Friday as the great performance of the saving weakness of God. On that Friday Jesus is in the hands of the power of Rome. It will of course be asserted that no one can take his life from him. In this instant, however, Rome exercised power over his body in a way that left him abandoned.
In his magisterial exposition of Good Friday, The Crucified God, Juergen Moltmann prefers to talk about the “homelessness” and “abandonment” of the Son. And from that he readily concludes that as the Son is homeless, so the Father is also homeless:
To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms. The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son (243).
The emergence of life-giving power in the world can and will arrive only after the deep riskiness of weakness. Moltmann, so far as I know, does not speak of “weakness.” But it is surely implied in his daring imagery of forsakenness. Jesus is done in by the unflinching power of Rome. In that dramatic moment the weakness of God is no match at all for the power of the empire. Good Friday is the exhibit and the enactment of the weakness of God.
The Witness of the Gospel Narrative
3. This claim for Friday, so central to Paul’s evangelical reasoning, has its remarkable substantive counterpoint in the gospel narrative. In his gospel Mark reports on Jesus’ presence in his hometown of Nazareth:
And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief (Mark 6:5-6).
The text is quite explicit: “Could do no deed of power” (ouk edunato ekei poesesai) “was not able.” It is essential to note that the negative “not able” utilizes the same term in “deeds of power” (oudemian dunamin). He had no power to be powerful. The next verse specifies their “unbelief,” but it is not parsed as cause-to-effect. His performance in Nazareth simply bespeaks his weakness. The matter is softened in the parallel text of Matthew:
And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief (Matthew 13:58).
The Greek is ouk epoisesen. The formulation in Matthew asserts that he did not do acts of power “because of their disbelief.” That formulation, however, may mean only that he refused to act in the face of their lack of faith. It does not say that such a lack of faith prevented his action. Nor does it say he “could not.” Thus the matter is left starkly unresolved. We might conclude from these verses that the matter of healing by Jesus is something of dialogical act; if the other party is not fully engaged in the act, there can be no restorative outcome. Either way, we are in a moment of the weakness of Jesus. Thus if we take the trouble to consider the force of Good Friday, the exposition of Paul, and the witness of the gospel narrative, we are led to see that Jesus is portrayed as exercising a kind of power that is other than unilateral, imperial, or preemptive. His capacity is fully shadowed by the mark of weakness while performed in the world of alternative power.
Here I will pause to reflect on one odd parallelism to the direct contestation of power in the Exodus narrative. In Exodus 7:14-25 and 8:1-15 Moses and the Egyptian “magicians” perform to a draw concerning water-to-blood and frogs. Concerning the third plague of gnats, however, the Egyptian magicians are unable to compete with the power of Moses. After Moses and Aaron produce gnats, it is reported:
The magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, but they could not (Exodus 8:18).
The Greek reading is ouk edunanto, “could not!” The phrase is closely parallel to that of Mark concerning Jesus. Of course everything else is different in the two contests. I cite the Exodus parallel only to call attention to the reality that even strong Pharaoh had limits and came to an insurmountable weakness. Beyond the obvious parallel, everything is different. The Exodus narrative aims to exhibit the power of God and God’s capacity to work emancipation in the face of hard-hearted Pharaoh. The gospel narrative, by contrast, witnesses Jesus on the way to the cross in his pilgrimage of weakness and vulnerability. But the usage in the gospel narrative clearly has one eye on the old Exodus narration.
The payout of this three-fold articulation of the weakness of Jesus is the conclusion to be drawn about the community that seeks to follow Jesus in his weak power. In the Pauline exposition, the articulation of the foolishness and weakness of God that counters the wisdom and strength of the world moves from verse 26 toward the community of the church. It is the church that is to act out the foolishness and weakness of God:
God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written [in Jeremiah 9], “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (I Corinthians 1:28-31).
The church consists in those who have no claim to make about wisdom or about might, or for that matter, about wealth. All of these worldly insignia are distractions from the single source of “your life in Christ Jesus.”
We are able to see this accent articulated concretely in the life of the church. Paul himself can freely acknowledge his own weakness and dependence upon the truth of the gospel:
If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus (blessed be he forever!) knows that I do not lie. In Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped from his hands (II Corinthians 11:30-33).
Paul adds compelling specificity to his grand gospel claim. It must indeed be weakness to need to be rescued “in a basket through a window in the wall”!
On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses… He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses [plural!], insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong (II Corinthians 12:5, 8-10).
For Paul the notion of “weakness” is not a therapeutic ploy, but a real life experience. The matter is articulated as well in the letter to the Hebrews:
For the law appoints as high priests those who are subject to weakness, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever (Hebrews 7:28).
Jesus as high priest follows in the train of those who are “subject to weakness.”
Contrasting Kingdom Powers
This entire exposition bears witness to the reality that God’s power for life is not in any way like the power of the world. It is a form of power that proceeds in vulnerability and fragility. And from this it follows that the power of God offered to the church is not like the power of the world. All too often the church has sought to imitate the power of the world in its wealth, grandeur, pomp, and affluence. Protestantism in the United States has known enough of the worldly exhibit of power in the church. And now that same seduction seems operative in some of the mega-congregations of so-called “evangelicalism.” We can see some of the most egregious examples of this seduction in Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Du Mez.
These themes of weakness, vulnerability, and fragility are evident among us as we witness and experience the deconstruction of the church as we have known it. In a series of helpful books, Conrad Kanagy (e.g., A Church Dismantled: A Kingdom Restored (2021), Ministry in a Church Dismantled (2021), has traced the dismantling of the institutional church that is all around us in US society. That process will of course be anxiety-producing indeed. But the church of “evangelical weakness” is a compelling reminder to us that our attraction to wealth, power, influence, or grandeur is all a colossal mistake. Thus the “dismantling” may be an opportunity to flourish in weakness. Such dismantling is not an invitation to withdrawal or retreat into safety and self-defense. It is rather an opportunity to think again about how vulnerability is a great gift in a fearful society. In its vulnerability and weakness, the church has a chance for the work of emancipation and restoration, because it need not be implicated in the violence, intrigue, and greed that so mark the world of predatory power. It is enough to have ringing in our ears the assurance, “My grace is sufficient for you.” It is hard work to translate that bottom-line assurance into actual practice. Such a translation summons us out beyond many of our assumptions concerning what it means to be the church in a society that delights in flexing its muscles of power and control.
Walter Brueggemann
November 25, 2022
