The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
February 8, 2009
Vol. 12 no. 06

Everything But...
           “I am weak, but He is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me ... the Bible tells me so.” The simplest children’s song, but there are theologians who keep going back to sing it because its word are the simple truth.
          A battle of thinking has been raging for quite a few decades, if not centuries, in segments of the Church. It revolves around whether we characterize Jesus and our faith as weak or strong. Not surprisingly, the churches that object the most to the image of Jesus and the Christian faith as weak are those who proclaim almost exclusively the writings of Paul, from whom the characterization of holy weakness comes most clearly.
          In this world and all the worlds before us, we prefer to be strong and powerful. That is why tales of soldiers and wars are so important to us, for they demonstrate this power most forcefully. There are many places where armies become the law because they possess the physical strength and intimidation to enforce whatever law they wish. One reason why there has been so much ambivalence surrounding Afghanistan is that we do not know where or how we are strong in that kind of guerrilla conflict.
          Violence and strength do not always win, but they never disappear. Jesus lived out a non-violent path that many have tried to follow, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Their persistent vulnerability opened doors the strongest people were not able to budge.
          “To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak,” Paul explains. Christianity is not in the first place a faith of power, but of weakness which undermines the only thing power has, its violence. The Cross was a crushing defeat according to most measures; it is only in its weakness that it came to be the ironic power that a Christian can wield.