The Amazing New Testament: Power and Weakness
“The Lord said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me… for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).
Several years ago, I was asked to teach a class at Duke Divinity School on Leadership. I thought it was high time I absorbed a sampling of the vast literature out there on leadership, and I did – but found myself either amazed or buffaloed by how easy it sounds just to apply time-tested techniques and become fabulously successful. And then I applied my mind to study leadership in the Bible. Lead like Moses! Or David! Or Jesus! – and you would create much heartache, or you’d run your company into the ground.
The glory of biblical leadership, if there is such a thing, is Paul’s paradoxical notion that what the Mighty God can use isn’t genius or skill or muscle, but weakness. Vulnerability. King Jehoshaphat prayed maybe the Bible’s finest prayer, one we’d love to hear cocksure leaders pray: “Lord, we do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you” (2 Chronicles 20:12). Gideon had 10,000 soldiers to cope with the Midianites; but God said “Too many.” Send all but 300 home. Weakness is God’s opening to be… God.
Isaiah, when the world was on fire and Ahaz was trying to flex what military muscle he could muster, pointed to a pregnant woman with a small child on the way and spoke of the holy name, “Mighty God.” How mighty is a newborn? When my first daughter was born, I brought her to church. Blue collar workers, the men of that place, with large, calloused, muscular hands and gruff voices would gather her in those same hands become soft as pillows, and they would coo gently.
Wise theologian W.H. Vanstone notes how, in any setting, “Nothing so disrupts the normal and expected procedure of a meeting as the physical collapse of someone who is present… The presence of a helpless person suddenly generates in such a situation a whole new range of possibilities… As a result of his helplessness, a great many things happen which would not otherwise happen… The helpless person becomes, in his helplessness, extremely important.”
Francis of Assisi joined the knights and hordes of Crusaders marching off to battle the Saracens, the Muslims. At Damietta, with Christian and Arab armies arrayed in preparation for battle, Francis walked, unarmed, across No Man’s Land into the teeth of the enemy. They started to slaughter him – but he was so little, so feeble, so unarmed, so laughably not dangerous, that they brought him to the Sultan, Malik Al-Kamil. Francis and he became friends over several days, and peace was bought for a season.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after making himself vulnerable by sticking with the Gospel in the face of Nazi blasphemies, wrote a letter from a concentration camp to his friend, Eberhard Bethge: “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.”
Paul never shied away from talking about “power.” But for him, “power” was a problem; the “powers” were insidious manifestations of evil, dressed up impressively, but spelling doom for God’s people. The “powers” existed, not to be seized by the Christians, but to be crushed by the Lord. “Our struggle… is against the cosmic powers of this present darkness” (Ephesians 6:12); “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15).
The most dramatic, subversive, and compelling theme in Paul’s talk about leadership is the way he countered his critics by speaking of his failures. Instead of hiding his weaknesses, or compensating for them, he blurts out in the open his maladies and inadequacies, as if they are trophies. Accepting the charge that he was neither trained nor skillful in speech – reminding us of Moses! – Paul bragged that “I came to you in weakness and in fear and much trembling” (1 Corinthians 2:3) – reminding us of Jehoshaphat. “We have become a spectacle… We are fools for the sake of Christ… We are weak” (1 Corinthians 4:9-10).
The Gospel is not about a powerful God being powerful as we know it, or a God who masquerades briefly as weak only to leap out from behind the curtains to show how mighty he really is. All measures of power are inverted, and shattered, by the humble, holy, compassionate, and merciful heart of God. “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength… God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised… to reduce to nothing the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 25).