Understanding Paul Non-Dually
Weakness and Strength, Part II
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Paul’s encounter with the Eternal Christ on the Damascus Road must have sparked his new and revolutionary consciousness. He recognized that he had been chosen by God even “while breathing murderous threats” (Acts 9:1), and that the God who chose him was a crucified God and not an “Omnipotent” or an “Almighty” God. In fact, Paul never uses the word “Almighty” for the Divine, despite its common usage to this day. His image of God was of someone crucified outside the city walls in the way a slave might be killed, and not of a God appearing on heavenly clouds. Christ was not the strong, powerful, military Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for throughout their history of being enslaved, oppressed, occupied, and colonized. Surely Paul saw in his own Jewish family that God consistently chose the weak to confound the strong (1 Corinthians 1:17-31). It becomes Paul’s very definition of wisdom.
Paul’s view of himself, of God, and of all others was turned on its head. He had to utterly redefine how divine power worked and how humans changed. All he knew for sure at the beginning was that it was not what anyone expected. Paul went off to “Arabia” for perhaps as much as three years to pray, test his ideas against the tradition, and slowly allow the metamorphosis of his soul. (Is this not the necessary path for all of us?) Only later does Paul have the courage to confront Peter and James in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:16-21), and then a full fourteen years later he tells Peter “to his face” that Peter is wrong (2:11) for imposing non-essentials on people. (Apparently Peter, the first Pope, was indeed fallible!)
It takes a long time to move from power to weakness, from glib certitude to vulnerability, from meritocracy to pure grace. In Paul’s letters, he consistently idealizes not power but powerlessness, not strength but weakness. It’s as if he’s saying, “I glory when I fail and suffer because now I get to be like Jesus—the naked loser God.”
The revelation of the death and resurrection of Jesus forever redefines what success and winning mean—and it is not what any of us want or expect. On the cross, God is revealed as vulnerability itself (the Latin word vulnera means woundedness). We ourselves grow through vulnerability and not through any need to posture, pose, or present. How clever of God! Now only the humble will ever find God.
Until you understand that truth on some level, even if it takes until the later years of your life, you can’t fully understand the Gospel. And I don’t think most people do, not even most Christians. The egoic or unconverted self reads everything in terms of its own ascent, various attempts at spiritual achievement, the attaining of merits and rewards, climbing upward, performing for God, concocting my own worthiness game, and then pretending I am succeeding at it. It is all so futile and so unnecessary. Despite the immense freedom and permission of the Gospel, most of Christian history has been trying to run up the escalator that Jesus (and Reality) has aimed downward. This has produced many frustrated people and frustrating clergy. Yet it is so natural and even easy to go down the downward escalator.
Gateway to Silence:
“When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).
Reference:
Adapted from Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation, disc 3 (CD)
