One of the most unusual — and, I think, one of the most interesting — things about Christianity is its claim that God is revealed to us through weakness. Think about this for a minute: The One who created and sustains the entire universe is most clearly shown in the birth of a baby in Bethlehem who, after he grows up to be a man, is convicted as a criminal and crucified. In that life — with all its frailty and vulnerability — God is seen most clearly. Now, I should note that by describing God in this way, we’re a long way from what people typically understand God to be. Religions don’t usually work this way. And yet that is one of the central claims of Christianity: That our God is revealed in weakness.
So what does this mean for us who claim to worship this God? One implication that I want to tease out today is the way in which God seems to work powerfully in the midst of human weakness. I’m not saying being weak is always good or comfortable — it isn’t — only that it can create space in our life for God to do something beautiful and unexpected.
So I want to focus this morning on our second reading, taken from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. I’ve always loved Paul’s Corinthian letters. The churches in Corinth were messy and full of problems, so in the letters Paul is mostly doing damage control. But Paul’s love for the Corinthians churches is obvious, and there is a real warmth and passion that comes through the pages.
Our reading today is from the 12th chapter of 2 Corinthians, toward the end of the letter. Paul has been defending his ministry, because certain teachers in the church were leading the churches astray into falsehoods and accusing Paul of being a fraud. So Paul spills a good deal of ink trying to clear up his good name.
Apparently these false teachers were bragging about receiving visions and revelations from God. So Paul, backed into a corner, reluctantly (so reluctant in fact that he speaks in the third person) begins talking about his own extraordinary visions and revelations. Paul describes being raised to the third heaven (whatever that means!), an experience so strange and disorienting that he wasn’t sure if he was still in his body or not. Now this in and of itself, while rare, is not entirely unheard of; within church history, there is a long tradition of mystics who have such profound experiences of God that they are brought outside of themselves and encounter God in a more immediate way. I’m thinking of figures like Bernard of Clairvaux (who wrote the words of the wonderful hymn “Fairest Lord Jesus”), or remarkable women like Julian of Norwich (whose Revelations of Divine Love are some of the most beautiful and moving pieces of writing in the church). No doubt there are still people today who receive powerful messages from God in this way.
But here’s the thing: Paul doesn’t draw attention to these mystical experiences as an ends in themselves. They are amazing and wonderful experiences, but for Paul they’re actually not the most important thing. So what’s the most important thing for Paul? For Paul, God’s faithfulness and continued presence in the messiness of human life is far more important than extraordinary experiences. Another way to put this is to say that, for Paul, the main thing is not mountaintop experiences but moments of vulnerability. It is there where God is most visible.
And so after describing his extraordinary visions and mystical experiences, he says: “Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.”
What a strange phrase:what does Paul mean by a “thorn in the flesh”?
No one knows for sure what this means, but some have suggested that it was a physical ailment, like poor eyesight. These are the days before eyeglasses, so poor eyesight would have been devastating. Others have suggested it might be a speech impediment, like a stutter or a stammer. Others still have wondered if it was some kind of chronic physical suffering, like migraines maybe. In the days before modern medicine there often wasn’t much to do but suffer. No one knows for sure, but what we do know is that this thorn in the flesh was not just a passing problem. It was a steady, ongoing, difficult, painful experience. It may have been physical, or psychological or spiritual but the point is that it didn’t go away.
Paul says he begged the Lord three times to get rid of it. This is a figure of speech, it doesn’t mean he literally asked three times and then stopped asking. It means that Paul persistently begged God to take this away. Over and over and over again he kept asking God to get rid of this. And, for whatever reason, the problem stayed with him; God did not take it away.
I would venture to say that all of us here this morning have what we could call a thorn in the flesh. All of us have a persistent problem in our life – it may be a physical problem, it may be a psychological problem, it may be a spiritual problem, but it’s there and it hasn’t gone away. I don’t know what your thorn is: maybe it’s a health problem or maybe a persistent feeling of unworthiness or shame; maybe it’s an addiction that you can’t fully overcome, or maybe an ongoing struggle with anger or depression or grief.
Maybe, like Paul, you’ve asked God again and again to take it away, but it still persists. If that has happened to you, it will be good for you to remember that God didn’t take Paul’s thorn away either. And we don’t know why God didn’t take away Paul’s thorn, and we don’t know why God won’t take away your thorn.
But — and here is the encouraging part — God still continues his work in you in spite of your thorn in the flesh. Listen to the answer Paul gets from God after persistently asking to have this problem removed: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
For me, this is one of the moving verses in the entire Bible. God’s grace — his unmerited love and kindness, his faithful and ongoing presence — is enough for us. No matter what we’re going though, God’s grace is enough. What this means is that if you are connected to God, who is the deepest source of life and being and beauty and joy and meaning, then anything in your life can be endured.
This brings us to back to where I began, with a paradox at the very heart of the Christian faith: The fact that God’s power is shown most clearly in weakness. I began with the observation that Christ’s crucifixion is the central revelation of God. The logic holds true for our lives as well: God is most powerful in our lives when we are weakest.
This truth is recently being discovered by the broader culture. Brene Brown, a speaker and writer, has spent a career studying shame and vulnerability. A few years ago she gave a TED talk called “The Power of Vulnerability.” That talk was viewed by millions of people, which means that issues surrounding shame, weakness, and vulnerability are very important to people and hits close to home.
Brown describes shame as that voice in us that says “you are not good enough; you will never be good enough; and there is nothing you can do to make yourself good enough.” When shame rules our lives, we feel constantly inadequate and always feel the need to prove ourselves. It’s an exhausting and demoralizing way to live.
But through research and reflection Brene Brown discovered a way to undermine shame by severing it at the root. The root of shame is the need to prove ourselves worthy, the assumption that with more hard work we can make ourselves worthy of love and acceptance. But after living that way for years, we discover that no amount of effort can make us feel like we are “enough.”
But Brown discovered the power of embracing vulnerability, which involves recognizing that we are weak, but letting our weakness be an opportunity for growth. Rather than letting our shame and weakness close us off from people, Brown suggests that it should instead help us recognize our common brokenness and help us reach out to others. Vulnerability is so powerful because it refuses to play the shame game. Shame says to us: “You are not good enough” but then vulnerability says: “Yeah, so what? No one is good enough. And what does ‘good enough’ even mean anyway?” Vulnerability, says Brown, is the birthplace of joy, creativity and love.
What Brene Brown has discovered here is hugely significant, because I think what she has stumbled across in her research is nothing less than the grace of God. She is teaching people to stop listening to voices of accusation and condemnation and instead to listen to the voice of truth which tells us the same thing it told St. Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
The point in all of this is that human weakness — which means your weakness and my weakness — is not a problem for God; rather it is an opportunity to show forth his power. Do you understand how counterintuitive this is? For God to work in your life, you don’t need to be strong, you don’t need to have your life together, you don’t to be perfect. You simply need to let yourself be loved and received God’s grace. God seems to work best with deficient, broken, imperfect people like you and me.
Let me close by offering a few suggestions as to how our thorn in the flesh can allow God to show forth his power in our lives:
(1) First, it can move us away from ourselves. Paul said his thorn in the flesh was given to keep him humble. We all have a tendency to think more highly of ourselves than we should. We all have a tendency to elevate our own needs at the expense of other people’s needs. For most of us, our basic problem is egotism. Life is all about me, my life, my accomplishments, my needs. We think mostly of ourselves and God becomes an afterthought. Maybe our thorn in the flesh is to remind us that it’s not all about us. Maybe our thorn in the flesh is to keep us humble, to remind us that our life ought to be about serving God and others.
(2) Second, and following on the first point, our thorn in the flesh can move us toward others. Our suffering can give us empathy and compassion for other people, and make us more willing to help them. Often the people who have the most love in their lives are the people who have suffered most. Our thorn in the flesh may be God’s way of turning us toward other people in need.
(3) Third, and lastly, our thorn in the flesh can turn us toward God. Suffering can often force us like nothing else to rely upon God. When we’re in trouble, it often becomes clear that there’s nothing we can do to fix our problems. We’re at the end of our own resources. This can drive us to God, because with God there is never an end to his resources, never an end to his love and care. So we are forced in a new way to trust God.
In all these examples, I’m trying to suggest that suffering and experiencing weakness and vulnerability can be a way for God to work in our lives, to direct us away from ourselves, and toward other people and God. Maybe God has allowed your thorn in the flesh to continue because that is the way in which God is working in your life.
Paul concludes this passage by saying: “when I am weak, then I am strong”. As I said earlier, this is a paradox and a great mystery, but somehow God uses our weakness and our vulnerability and our suffering to bring his strength and power into the world. Divinity is revealed most clearly in suffering humanity. I’m not saying that suffering and pain is good; it’s not. But someday we may find, when years later we look back, that those uncomfortable experiences and stubborn problems had a purifying effect on us, making us more like Christ and getting us ready to live eternally with God.
May God continue to show us the truth of these things.
Amen.
The Rt. Rev. Joey Royal is the rector of Holy Trinity, as well as a suffragan bishop and the director of Arthur Turner Training School, the diocesan theological college.
The Rt. Rev. Joseph “Joey” Royal is a Guest Writer. He is Canadian Anglican bishop currently serving with the Christian Embassy of Canada, a non-profit organization dedicated to ministering to diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. He resides in Ottawa, Ontario, with his wife, Jennifer, and their son, Benjamin.
