St. John the Evangelist
July 8th, 2018
Proper 9 (B): Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13
In season 3 of the sitcom, The Office, the well-meaning but buffoonish boss, Michael Scott, is interviewing for a promotion at the corporate offices of his employer. Looking the part, but ever the unwitting clown, the interview unfolds as follows:
Interviewer: “So, let me ask you a question right off the bat. What do you think are your greatest strengths as a manager?”
Michael: “Why don’t I tell you what my greatest weaknesses are? I work too hard. I care too much. And sometimes I can be too invested in my job.”
Interviewer: “Okay. And your strengths?”
Michael: “Well, my weaknesses are actually… strengths”
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9aee5d62-54e8-4a68-9f88-eaa9c6635dac
We’ve all had to field a question like this in an interview, right? What are your greatest strengths, what are your greatest weaknesses? And there’s a good amount of mental jujitsu involved with answering it, especially when it comes to articulating our weaknesses. On the one hand you don’t want to come off as incapable by choosing some weakness that disqualifies you for the job you are interviewing for, like, “I’d love to be your personal chauffeur, and my greatest weakness is that I have a terrible sense of direction.” On the other hand, you don’t want to come off as pompous and not self-aware, by saying “I have no weaknesses.” You know you have weaknesses. You know theoretically your potential boss knows you have weaknesses. But you don’t want them to really know what those weaknesses are, only that you know that you have them. So very often we choose some minor imperfection that is really inconsequential, like, “Sometimes I can be impatient.” Or we do something akin to what Michael Scott does in his interview and choose a weakness that actually is a backhanded way of stating a strength: “I work too hard. I care too much.”Now the awkward dance of a job interview may not be the best place to observe truths about human nature, but there is a deep truth about us as human beings on display here which, however comical, is spiritual poison to those of us trying to live lives of faith. And that truth is, we don’t do weakness very well. You might say, weakness is our weakness. We are excellent at acknowledging other people’s weaknesses, that’s a real strength of ours. But even if we are aware of what our personal weaknesses are, we work very hard to keep them hidden; from our coworkers, sometimes from our closest family members, and even from God. Why do we hide our weaknesses? I’m tempted to say it’s because of the cutthroat contemporary culture we live in, where to expose a weakness means you will never succeed. But our aversion to weakness is not just a contemporary problem. I think we hide our weaknesses, our imperfections, our flaws because we see them as places where we are lacking, things we need to be ashamed of. We think that it is our strengths that are the measure of what we have to contribute to this world, the good we can do, the value we can impart. Our weaknesses are to be apologized for, and hidden because they are what hold us back. Another, more theological, way to put this, might be to say that very often it is in our strengths that we think God is present, and our weaknesses are where we think God is absent.
Take this morning’s Gospel passage as an example. In this passage from Mark, Jesus returns home. He’s been travelling around for a while, attracting large crowds, doing some amazing things, but now he comes back to Nazareth. And when he shows up the people are really astonished to see who he has become. He left them an average young carpenter, and now has returned as a prophet. They perceived him in human terms because when they knew him, that’s all he was to them, and humans have weaknesses, so that’s what they assumed he had too. Therefore the hometown crowd could not believe, would not believe, that the Jesus they knew could do all the things he was doing. They shut their ears to the wisdom he was offering, they took offense at him, it says, because, they knew him only from the human point of view. The irony of the famous line, “prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house,” is that those are the very people who know the prophet best, they have seen the most of him, and yet that is the very thing that prevents them from seeing that person as a prophet. Our weaknesses, common though they are to all of us, are seen as symbols of how far we are from divine perfection, and therefore we work very hard to hide them.
But what if that’s wrong? Of course we know, that’s wrong in this case because it’s Jesus and we have the benefit of standing on the other side of the Resurrection, a benefit the hometown crowd did not yet have. But what if, instead of being absent in our places of weakness, God was actually most present, most potent, in them? What if instead of seeing our weaknesses, as limitations or failings, we looked at them as the clearest opportunities for God to get in and get to work. What if we looked at those places of imperfection in ourselves not as places where God didn’t bless us, but as places where God’s blessings can actually be realized most immediately? What if we looked at someone we knew so well that we knew their imperfections and their weaknesses, and instead of seeing those as things that kept them from being marvelous, we saw them as exciting opportunities for God’s activity in them? Then we might share in Paul’s remarkable realization when he writes that, God told him, actually, Paul, rather than needing to be hidden, rather than an absence of my presence, “[my] power is made perfect in [your] weakness.”
Weaknesses are not cracks to be plastered over, but occasions for God’s power to shine forth more fully in us. We have a God whose son undertook the supreme weakness of physical arrest, torture and death, who became powerless in every traditional sense of the word, precisely to show us that it was in weakness that God could exhibit His power most completely. And this is the epiphany Paul is coming to in his letter this morning. It is in his weakness, in our weakness, that God’s power is most fully on display. And so he writes, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” Christ dwells in us, through our weaknesses. That’s a pretty radical inversion of our personal predisposition to hide them.
But we need to invite Him in. We need to surrender our weaknesses to God and put them on full display so that God can take those parts of ourselves that we see as lacking, as weaker, as imperfections and flaws in our character and prop them up, fill them with the life-giving power of His Spirit, because those are moments where we can see just how much power is on offer to us when we put ourselves, our lives, into God’s hands. We are strong when we are weak because those points are the most direct areas of God’s activity in our lives—where God is most needed, and where God can have the greatest effect, because even “the weakness of God is stronger than any human strength.” Our weaknesses are not blemishes to be covered up or liabilities to be ignored, they are the source of our salvation; they are potential places of God’s revelation and power to be at work in us. So as we confront our weaknesses, let us look at them not with shame, not with fear, not with an eye to how we can best hide them or compensate for them, but let us bring them into the light, invite God into them, and look at them with hope, and expectation and with faith, so that we might experience the mighty power of God at work in us, in those places where we are most broken, of which we are most ashamed, where we are weakest. For only then might we know the truth of those great teachers, Paul, Jesus, and even, in his own twisted way, Michael Scott, when he says, that our weaknesses, are actually, strengths.