Why We Boast of Our Weakness
Homily for 19th Sunday after Pentecost / 2nd Sunday of the Holy Cross
2 Corinthians 11:31-12:9.....Luke 6:31-36
Sometimes the Epistle and Gospel readings for a Sunday complement each other in unexpected and challenging ways. Today, for example, the selection from St Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians challenges us to untangle the Apostle’s rhetoric before we can work out his message. On the other hand, our Lord Jesus Christ makes His message quite clear in the passage from St Luke’s Gospel, but in doing so He challenges us to act in ways that seem completely contrary to human nature.
If we have difficulty understanding St Paul, it’s at least in part because we don’t think like a First Century AD Hellenized Jew. Both traditions, Jewish and Greek, valued disputation as a way of digging out the meaning of texts and ideas. They argued to discover possible helpful meanings, not to find one right meaning, as we have come to expect 20 centuries later, after the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and the Digital Revolution. Both Jews and Greeks also believed that how you said something enhanced and enlarged the meaning of what you said. So they liked word play and complicated arguments with surprisingly simple solutions.
With this background in mind, let’s take a close look at what St Paul writes to the early Christians of Corinth. What we hear in today’s reading comes at the end of a long passage in which the Apostle defends himself and his ministry against the accusations of unscrupulous false apostles who have misused Christ’s message for their personal benefit. (Be sure to read Chapter 11.) He acknowledges that some people regard his humility as foolish and accuse him of deviously boasting about being humble.
So he turns the accusation around, saying that as the messenger of the Gospel he must boast in order to refute the opponents of God’s message. But he can boast only of what humbles him—his human weakness—because God is his only strength. His mystical experience—the vision of Paradise—demonstrates this point, showing God at work, not Paul. And if he does boast, he won’t be foolish, because his boast will be true. However, to keep him from giving in to the temptation to boast of God’s extraordinary presence in his life, God gives him a mysterious “thorn in the flesh” and will not take it away. (Generations of readers and scholars have speculated about this “thorn,” but we do not and cannot know what it is.) God tells him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” And so, because God’s power is made perfect in his weakness, Paul says he will boast of his weakness, because it shows Christ living in him.
Our modern minds want to ask why St Paul couldn’t just say that. He would probably not understand the question. But the rhetorical framework of his argument means that we have to work harder to grasp his meaning, and when we work harder we understand and remember better.
From St Paul’s sophisticated rhetoric we turn to the blunt commandments of Christ recorded in the Gospel according to St Luke. The first one and the last one are general directions for how to live: “"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” The other three provide concrete examples of these precepts: “love your enemies, do good, and lend without expecting anything in return.”
It is hard to see how we can do what Jesus commands unless we embrace the lesson St Paul teaches. Human beings don’t have the strength to obey Jesus’ commands on our own. To obey Jesus, we must accept our weakness and rely on God’s power. We must give up our inclination to do what benefits us and brings us something in return. When we act without expecting a reward, our “reward will be great.” We will be “children of the Most High,” who is kind even to those who don’t deserve His love. As children of the Most High, letting God’s power live in us and to work through our weakness, we can fulfill our creation in God’s image and likeness. We can live like God, loving, doing good, giving freely, and being merciful.
So let us live God’s way, knowing that our weakness shows God at work, treating others as we want them to treat us, and giving thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now and ever and to ages of ages. Amen.
