The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Micah 6:1-8 | Ps 15 | 1 Cor 1:18-31 | Matt 5:1-12
Jesus is full of contradictions today, as he so often is. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the persecuted.1 These are not people we usually think of as particularly blessed. And they are not the people who end up in power. They are not people who end up winning fights. They are not even necessarily the people who are best placed to help others. They are the powerless.
Jesus’ instruction to embrace, to accept, our own powerlessness and our own smallness doesn’t make much sense if we want to build up our own power. And who doesn’t? We want to be powerful for God. We want to be strong, to be a force of good, to be able to save people, to do something meaningful in the world. But since we know that power tends to invert itself in God, that the last is made first and the first is made last,2 we know that somehow, powerlessness is salvation, and salvation is the power of God.
Weakness is strength and God’s strength is weakness. It’s a paradox that keeps going around and around and never settles, because we need to embrace both. Fully accepting God’s weakness and God’s strength, our weakness and our strength, not as things in competition with one another but as equal parts of a whole. It’s so easy to focus on one of those and forget about the other. I tend to perseverate on not being enough, on all of the ways in which I wish I were stronger, or more eloquent, or more disciplined, or simply got more done. Good things–and yet. And sometimes when I feel good about myself, productive and strong and competent, I tend to think that that’s all there is, that this is great, and I’m doing good, and who needs to work on all that other stuff that I’ve been ignoring?
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
1 Cor. 1:20
But when we share our weakness in full honesty with God, full honesty, God helps us see that it’s just a weakness. Nothing more, nothing less. And the same thing with our strengths. When we share our strengths in full honesty with God, we see that it’s just a strength, just a gift, whatever it is. Nothing more, nothing less. That knowledge is pretty powerful. And accepting it fully, sharing it with God fully, means that as we become–in a way–powerless and small, our vision becomes large. We open our eyes and see so much beyond ourselves: the world, God, the world and ourselves as God sees them. When we exercise our own strength, we are often met with God’s weakness–it places itself in front of us like a stumbling block. And when we exercise our own weakness and confess it and bring it to God, we are met with God’s strength, that big-ness of vision and possibility. And we realize that our weaknesses too, as big as they can seem sometimes, are actually pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
I have a passage from Thomas Merton that I wanted to share; I think I’ve read it from this pulpit before. He says,
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love–outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
We are not very good at recognizing illusions, at least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves–the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in this world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A light devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge, and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.
But there is no substance under that with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake. (New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 33-34)
What good is all our skill and power and fame and cleverness? None of that touches the deepest and most luminous part of ourself, the part that shines brighter and brighter as the bandages around it are torn away.
And so it was with Jesus. Sent by God, God sending God’s self, into a part of the world, into a time and a place with very little power or fame, and no riches: with few bandages to wrap around itself for security. There, the thing that is most important could not be clouded by, or covered over by, or confused for, fame or power. As Christians, we understand that–we believe that–the Most Important Thing happened in the life of Jesus. And that means that the Most Important Thing must not be about wisdom or power or skill, but instead about will and love, which shows itself most clearly when it shines alone.
Some people want complex theology or charismatic signs or beautiful churches or a venerable hierarchy to know what to value and what to follow. But we insist that the one thing above all is Love alone, Love bleeding, Love on the cross. Love doesn’t win fights. Love accepts loss over and over again. Despite centuries of the Church’s own attempts to replace love at the center with hierarchy, with institution, with orthodoxy, Love keeps pulling us in a different direction. Love keeps saying, “don’t put your trust in the clever one, or the powerful one, or the experienced one, or the charismatic one. Only put your trust in the one who loves.”
It’s the clever one and the powerful one and the charismatic one and the experienced one that usually win fights. And yet love keeps coming back, keeps calling us and saying–you can be clever, you can be powerful, you can be charismatic, you can be experienced. You can have all of these things. They are neither here nor there. We don’t despise these virtues or tools in ourselves, or in one another, or in the world, because they can work for good. We become more and more ourselves under the rule of love; these gifts given to us, they multiply when we put love over us and over them. They don’t diminish, they multiply.
And love, by its nature, it takes these gifts and it inverts them. It adds a better dimension to everything and turns them around in ways we never expected. Cleverness itself is strengthened by foolish ideas. Experience is strengthened by naivite. Power itself is often strengthened by weakness, somehow. Strength itself is strengthened by weakness. The strength swallows up the weakness and is transformed into it and by it. This paradox again, that goes around and around and never settles. God is always unsettling the world. This happens within ourselves, as we pray with and accept and grow into our own strength and weakness and grow more and more into love. And it also happens in community. As we learn to love both our own shadow and the stranger – and our neighbor – we find that however much strength we might have stored up to ourselves by refusing to admit our own weakness, or other people’s, God’s power and strength is unfathomably greater than that.
Not all of us are wise or powerful or wealthy or clever. Every single one of us, on one day or another, has something that makes us feel objectively foolish and powerless. But that doesn’t matter for salvation, because God doesn’t require us to be anything except loving. And I want to be clear here that love is not about feelings, a flood of oxytocin in the brain, making you affectionate towards your loved ones, while that’s a great thing. It’s also not even really about action. People say love is an action, and love inevitably results in action, but love itself is not just an action. I think love is all about the will. Love is all about our will uniting itself with God’s will: the universal, staggering will to good. Our own good, our neighbor’s good, the stranger’s good, the world’s good. And it’s sure hard to figure out exactly what that means and what to do with it, which is why we have so much theological writing out there. But that, I think, is the essence of what love is. Will to be united with God. Universal will towards the good.
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong
1 Cor. 1:27
God chose love, and love chooses weakness, in order to knock over the houses of cards that we try to build out of our own strength and power and wisdom. When we start to think that those things are Important, that they are our center and our foundation, love comes to knock them all down: the edifices of power, skill, fame, and security, let alone our societal edifices of industry, growth, and acquisition. In Micah’s day it was “thousands of rams, tens of thousands of rivers of oil. Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” And Micah says, “No, the word of the Lord is, all God wants is justice and kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”3 God does not want your cleverness or your rams or your oil. God wants all of those things, but God wants your love first. All of those things have to be under love, or they mean nothing.
As long as we keep building up those towers, Love will keep finding them and will keep knocking them down. A small and weak as it is, as few fights as love wins, none of those other powers and principalities have managed to destroy it. You kill love, and it just comes back again, over and over and over again. When we are proud of our wisdom, our cleverness, our strength, our accomplishments, it tends to cloud our view of God and covers the light that’s shining through us. All we need to be human, to be proud of, to sustain us, is love. And in the light of love shining through us, all our gifts shine brighter, when we let them just be gifts. Not the framework of our identity, not idols, not trophies: just gifts, given to us to take good care of for now.
The only thing we can be truly proud of is love. Not even our own loving feelings or actions, but Love itself, beyond us and in us; Love with a capital L, the love that surpasses our understanding and embraces all the weaknesses we cannot bear. To be proud of that love is to set it above all of our gifts and strengths, to let it rule them and use them for its own purposes. And love by its very nature transforms everything into God’s strength, God’s compassion, God’s power. In other words, “let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”4