Contradictions riddle life everywhere.
At home you are soaked in so much love it’s like being immersed
in a warm bath. In the
workplace, however, the bathtub becomes a shark tank, and only your wits
keep you from being eaten alive, even as you know your wits might not
save you from the workplace sharks forever.
Again, you are amazed at the affection so many people lavish upon
you, and amazed once more that the people who cherish you are often the
ones you wouldn’t expect to. You
are just as amazed at the hostility of people who don’t like you, and
don’t like you for reasons you’ve never been able to figure out.
Life is like this; life abounds in contradictions.
The contradictions of life are all the more startling when we
move from the horizontal plane to the vertical, when we move from the
contradictions found in our life with our fellows to the contradictions
confronting us as the truth and reality of God seizes us.
One such contradiction stood out in the life of the apostle Paul.
On the one hand he was exhilarated at being “caught up to the
third heaven”, as he put it, “the third heaven” being a Hebrew
expression for utmost intimacy with God; unmistakable, unsurpassable,
unforgettable. On the other
hand he was tormented by his “thorn in the flesh”, an occasion of
chronic pain that tortured him relentlessly.
On the one hand, an exposure to God so very vivid and ecstatic as
to leave him speechless; on the other hand, an infirmity that continued
to bring him anguish comparable to being speared.
What did it all add up to?
I:
-- Let’s
begin by looking at his ecstatic experience.
It wasn’t the only instance of spiritual vividness in his life.
Paul appears to have had uncommonly rich visions, revelations and
ecstasies. His encounter
with the risen Christ on the road to
Damascus
had certainly been one of them, foundational, in fact.
Later he had been praying in
Jerusalem
when he had fallen into a trance and was mystically told to leave the
city before he was beaten to death.
Another day he had had a vision of a man from
Macedonia
crying out, “Come over here and help us.”
Yet again he had had a “visitation” in which he had been told
to speak boldly in a particular city in that God was going to bring many
people to faith there through his proclamation.
If the
Damascus
road experience was foundational in the life of the apostle, his
experience fourteen years before his first visit to the congregation in
Corinth
was the climax of all such experiences: “Caught up to the third
heaven.” He means
“Admitted to intimacy with God, an intimacy whose intensity defies
description.” “Caught up
to paradise”: he means “Given, amidst the savagery and sorrow and
frustration of this earth, a vision of God’s final restoration of the
creation, all of it enveloped in an ecstasy no language can capture.”
Unlike religious exhibitionists today who are only too eager to
chatter and prattle on TV talk shows, Paul didn’t yammer on and on
about this. What, after all,
is to be said if an experience is beyond words?
Then why did he speak of it at all?
He attempted to speak the unspeakable in that his detractors
goaded him into speaking. His
detractors in
Corinth
snickered that he was a kindergarten Christian, a spiritual midget,
someone the shallow Christians there could laugh at one minute and
dismiss the next. It grieved
the apostle to hear this. When
they kept it up, however, and used it as the pretext for dismissing what
he had to say to them, he felt he couldn’t turn a deaf ear to it any
longer: he would have to refute them if he was going to minister to
them. “Listen to this”,
he told them; “fourteen years ago I heard what cannot be uttered; I
saw what cannot be described.”
We mustn’t trivialise Paul’s experience and pretend that it
was merely short-lived psychological fireworks, a Queen Victoria’s Day
sparkler that coruscated in his head for a few seconds and then fizzled
out cold. I’m convinced,
rather, that his experience fired his apostolic work for the rest of his
life. Whenever he was
ridiculed, slandered, beaten up; when he was afflicted with the worst
affliction of all, simply being ignored because not taken seriously; in
any and all of this all he had to do was recall the event of his
immersion in the innermost depths of God and his zeal for the gospel was
renewed again. It wasn’t a
thirty-second “rush” as if he had inhaled a lungful of “wacky-baccy”;
it was a disclosure of God so intense and so vivid that he never lacked
its light and heat for the rest of his life.
If his detractors in the Corinthian congregation had been half as
smart as they thought they were they would have known they had a
spiritual giant in their midst, someone as huge as Elijah with his
experience of earthquake, wind, fire and still, small voice; someone as
huge as Elisha with his “double portion” of Elijah’s spirit;
someone as huge as Daniel with his prostrating vision of the awesome Son
of Man; someone as huge as Ezekiel when, in Ezekiel’s own words,
“the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God”.
The Christians in
Corinth
, however, weren’t even half as smart as they thought they were.
They were the spiritual
midgets.
Since Paul’s innermost ecstasy was private and ultimately
inexpressible, he referred to it at all and stammered out the most
inadequate expression only because his detractors forced him to.
Having mentioned it once to make his point and establish his
credibility, however, he wanted to get off the topic lest anyone think
him to be posturing himself as other than, greater than, the fragile,
frail creature that all of us are. Just
in case he was ever tempted to imagine himself lifted above the mundane
existence that no one is ever lifted above, “third heaven”
experience or not, he told the Corinthians of his thorn in the flesh.
His “thorn” wasn’t a sliver; in classical Greek skolops
meant a sharpened stake. The
sharpened stake could be anything from a sharpened tent peg to a
sharpened fence post to a sharpened instrument of torture and execution
on which someone was impaled. It
wasn’t a sliver. In other
words, there remained in the apostle the twin vividness of his “third
heaven” ecstasy and his ceaseless torment.
Regardless of his immersion in the heart of God, he suffered the
pain of any human being; and suffered it not once, not even
occasionally, but relentlessly.
II:
-- His
inescapable torment: what was it? We
don’t know. Some people
have guessed epilepsy; some have guessed recurring bouts of malarial
fever accompanied by fierce headaches.
In any case we don’t know.
Neither is it important to know.
But it is important to know what his pain-riddled weakness meant
to Paul. It meant that
regardless of how strong he might appear to some people all the time, or
how strong he might appear to all people some of the time, in fact he
was weak and would always be weak. Unlike
so many others, however, he owned his weakness.
Unashamed of his weakness, he didn’t attempt to deny it or
disguise it. Own it?
He did more than own it; he even gloried
in it.
It’s important that you and I own our weakness.
Before we even think of glorying in it, we are going to have to
own it. Regardless of
whether the pain attending it is slight or severe; regardless of whether
the impediment surrounding it is little more than a nuisance or nothing
less than disabling; regardless of whether it occasions minor
embarrassment or major humiliation; in any case it’s important that we
own it. For if we don’t
own our weakness, then we are denying something that everyone else can
see in any case, and we are living in a world of make-believe.
If we don’t own it then we are consciously suppressing or
unconsciously repressing something that will fester until the ensuing
“infection” distresses us.
But in the church we shouldn’t pretend that psychological
categories are the last word; in the church we must admit that theology
is the last word, the truth of God.
Then we must say that if don’t own our weakness we are plainly
more concerned with looking good than with doing good; more concerned
with how we appear than with who we are and how fruitful we can be in
the service of God.
What’s more, if we don’t own our weakness we shall always be
thrusting people away from us; not deliberately, I admit, yet holding
them off none the less. You
see, in a world where everyone is weak somewhere, it’s our weakness
– owned, joked about even – that endears us to people.
Where we are weak we endear them; where we are strong we
intimidate them. To pretend
that we are always strong, everywhere strong, nothing but strong is to
barricade others from us. Not
to own our weakness is forever to be deceiving ourselves and forever to
be repelling others.
The saddest thing about not owning our weakness, however, isn’t
that we isolate others and falsify ourselves, sad as these are; the
saddest thing, rather, is that we prevent the power of Christ from
resting upon us. Paul
insists that it’s precisely at the point of our weakness that the power
of Christ rests upon us. So
certain is he of this truth, so consistent is the evidence supporting
this truth, that he finds himself going one step farther: he glories
in his weakness. He wears
his weakness like a badge of honour.
I am moved every time I ponder today’s text.
I am moved whenever I think of the woman I sat with on the Board
of Directors of the Peel Mental Health Housing Coalition.
The coalition endeavours to procure living accommodation for
those who are chronically wounded psychiatrically.
The woman I have in mind has, in the course of a year, several
good months, several bad months, and several months whose horror is
indescribable. She is
schizophrenic herself and moves in and out of the episodes that most
schizophrenics know. She
suffers terribly. But she
isn’t ashamed of her illness. She
doesn’t try to hide it. (She’s
not so foolish as to think she can.)
She doesn’t pretend she’s non-schizophrenic, doesn’t
pretend anything at any time. She
does, however, have a credible word to speak to people who suffer as she
does; she has a believable word of encouragement, a weighty word of the
gospel – a word that you and I can’t speak in the same way to such
sufferers in that their weakness isn’t ours and ours isn’t theirs.
We all want to think we’re of greatest use to God at the point
of our greatest strength. Just
imagine how super-effective God could render my strongpoint, already
effective in itself (I like to think.)
Just imagine how fortunate God is that my talent is available for
his kingdom. This is what we
all want to say, even though our postured modesty prevents us from
saying it loudly. The truth
is God is nervous about so much as acknowledging my strength.
He knows I’m always one step away from being a show-off; he
knows my lurking pride would inflate insufferably if my strength were
given the recognition I think it deserves.
For this reason the apostle’s declaration is as sensible as it
is startling: our strength is of some use to God, to be sure, but only
of moderate use to God; our weakness, on the other hand, is simply
indispensable to God – for it’s our weakness which God suffuses with
that power which raised his Son when his Son was so weak he couldn’t
have been weaker.
On several occasions I’ve been asked to speak at services for
physically disabled adults. One
evening I noticed a fellow with severe cerebral palsy, twitching in his
wheel chair, who seemed inconsolable.
The music that night was brought by a husband and wife who could
sing like larks. They could
both sing, but only one could walk: the wife.
Her husband was in a wheelchair, paraplegic, the result of a
hunting mishap. (His hunting
companion had accidentally shot him in the spine.)
The paraplegic hunter sang with his wife, spoke briefly, noticed
the distraught c.p. sufferer. A
few minutes later he wheeled over to the distraught fellow to speak and
embody and bestow a solace that no one else in the room could have.
Dr. James Wilkes, the psychiatrist under whom I studied and from
whom I learned more than I can tell you; Jim’s wife worked as a nurse
at Princess Margaret Hospital after she had been diagnosed with cancer
herself, and continued nursing there until she was too ill to work.
Clearly she had something to share with the patients at Princess
Margaret that I don’t have – yet.
I spoke with her at home when she had become too ill even to
attend church. She told me
that housebound as she was, and growing sicker every day, she spent much
time praying for others. “Intercession
is the one ministry left me”, she remarked, “but it’s ministry
enough.”
Moses stuttered. Because
he stuttered no one ever confused that Word of God which he uttered –
most noticeably the Sinai pronouncement that has forged and formed the
consciousness of the western world – with the words of Moses.
Hosea
was heartbroken and humiliated when his wife became a “hooker” and
flaunted it. Out of his
heartbroken humiliation Hosea became the prophet who spoke unforgettably
of God’s heartbreak at the waywardness and infidelity of
Israel
. “How can I give you up?
How can I give you up?”
All of us have weaknesses both great and little.
Our weakness can be something as obvious as physical disability.
Or our weakness can be something less evident (or something we
think to be less evident, since there are never as many secrets about us
as we pretend there are.) Our
weakness can be something tinged with shame.
Like the aftermath of sexual abuse endured in childhood; like the
psychological vulnerability acquired through who knows what assaults in
life; like – like what? Our
weaknesses are as varied as any other feature of humankind.
Ownership of our weakness would
give us access to others who’ve been victimised in the same way;
ownership would give us a
ministry that others will never have.
Perhaps our weakness concerns a besetting temptation with which
we’ve struggled for years. Beset
with it, we have had to continue resisting it.
Most likely we’ve thought we were alone in our struggle with
this particular matter. To
own it and shed our shame concerning it would also end the isolation of
another lonely, frightened struggler who has also thought she alone had
to contend here and wondered
why she had to and for how much longer she’d be able to.
Let’s never forget that to find ourselves tempted relentlessly
somewhere in life is to be saddled with additional temptation, the
temptation to self-rejection. Think
of how we could be used of God right here on behalf of someone else.
We have to get beyond thinking that our weakness is the like the
sign on the empty, darkened bus, “Out Of Service”.
Remember, the apostle glories
in his weakness.
III:
-- We
shouldn’t be surprised that he does.
After all, he tells us elsewhere that he glories in the cross;
the cross of Jesus, that is. He
knows that the power of God is simply the efficacy of the cross.
Of course he knows this: his apostleship is the result of it.
Furthermore, it’s no accident the apostle tells us he pleaded
with God three times for the removal of his affliction.
He has in mind his Lord’s torment in
Gethsemane
when Jesus pleaded three times to be spared having to drink the cup to
the dregs. Yet so
unforeseeable is God’s power, so insuperable, so startling is God’s
power that not even the cross – and apparent victory of the evil one
– not even the evil one’s gloating could frustrate the purposes of
God. And just as grace was
sufficient for our Lord in Gethsemane, just as God’s strength remains
effective in the weakness of the crucified one, so you and I must trust
God’s grace to be sufficient for us and trust his strength to be
effective in our weaknesses, whether those weaknesses are great or
little. Ever since the
Damascus road event the apostle had known the resurrection to be the
efficacy of the weakness of the cross; and ever since Damascus road
event he had known he could glory and must glory in his own weakness,
for to be ashamed of his weakness would mean he was ashamed of his Lord;
and this he was never going to be.
Unlike Paul I’m not going to say that I’ve been caught up to
the third heaven. But I want
to say I’ve been caught up to the first.
My exposure to God, my experience of God, my vocation to the
ministry; it’s all rich enough to find me resonating with the
apostle’s experience and affirming the apostle’s declaration.
“About my thorn in the flesh”, the little man from
Tarsus
said, “It hurts; it hurts terribly.
But I’m stuck with it. Still,
I know it to be the occasion of God’s grace and the venue of his
strength. Therefore I regard
my weakness as no impediment at all to my usefulness in that kingdom
which is like no other kingdom.” So
said the little man from
Tarsus
to the congregation in
Corinth
.
Did the congregation in
Corinth
ever hear him?
Victor
Shepherd July
2007
