When Weak Is the Strong Part

Near the end of his long letter to the church in Corinth, Paul came to the part he least wanted to write. He had already called himself a cheap clay jar with treasure inside. Now he was going to show them the cracks.

The new teachers were still in Corinth, still making splendid speeches and telling everyone how important they were. "We have seen visions!" they bragged. Some of the Corinthians had begun to agree with them.

Paul called these teachers the "super-apostles." (He did not mean it kindly.)

"All right," he wrote. "If bragging is what you want, I will brag too, even though it makes me talk like a fool." Then he wrote the strangest brag list anyone had ever read. He had been beaten and whipped. He had been shipwrecked three times. He had gone hungry and cold and without sleep. And once, in the city of Damascus, when guards watched the gates to catch him, his friends put him in a basket and let him down the outside of the city wall through a window.

(Most people brag about climbing up a wall. Paul bragged about being lowered down one like a sack of onions.)

"I know a man who belongs to Christ," he wrote next. "Fourteen years ago he was caught up into the third heaven, into paradise. Whether he was in his body or out of it, I do not know. God knows. He heard things too wonderful for words, things no person is allowed to tell."

(The man was Paul. Everyone reading could tell. He would only brag in his own name about his weak places.)

"So that I would not become proud," Paul went on, "I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan, to hurt me."

Paul never said what the thorn was. People have guessed for two thousand years, and nobody knows. It hurt, it kept on hurting, and it would not leave.

"Lord, take it away!" Paul begged. The thorn stayed.

He begged a second time. The thorn stayed.

He begged a third time. And God answered him, but the answer was no. "My grace is all you need," the Lord said. "My power is made perfect in weakness."

So Paul stopped hiding his cracks. "I will gladly brag about my weaknesses," he wrote, "so that the power of Christ can rest on me." Paul made tents to earn his living, and the word he chose here is a tent word: Christ's power would be pitched over him like a tent. "When I am weak," he said, "then I am strong."

The thorn did not go away. Paul went on being tired and beaten and laughed at, and one day he would die. Paul's weakness could not save anybody, not even Paul.

But Paul had learned this upside-down way from someone. Years before, on the night before he died, another man knelt among the olive trees and prayed three times for the cup of suffering to pass. "Father, if it is possible, take this cup away from me. Yet let it be what you want, not what I want." The cup was not taken away. At the cross, people shook their heads. "He saved others," they sneered, "but he cannot save himself!" He did not come down. He died there, and in that weak place he saved them. On the third day God raised him.

Later in this same letter, Paul wrote that Jesus "was crucified in weakness, but he lives by the power of God." That same power was pitched over Paul like a tent as he wrote, thorn and all.