Weaknesses

 Sexagesima Sunday
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Especially for guys, weakness is not a trait that is desired.  No one is impressed by the 98-pound-weakling.  We are impressed by muscle mass, by big biceps, and the ability to do great feats of strength.  And yet, St. Paul today relates to us a weakness of his.  He tells us about a thorn in his flesh that he asked the Lord three times to remove.  But God told him that His power was made manifest in weakness.

St. Paul

    Isn’t this the whole history of salvation?  When God chose a people, the Jews, He did not choose the strongest nation on earth, or the wisest, as God tells Moses in Deuteronomy.  God chose the weakest.  But, because of that, no one could argue that the success of the Jews was because of their own strength or cunning.  No, it was because the true God was their God and supported them.
    So, too, through the times of the Judges.  When the Israelites relied on God and turned back to Him and away from their foreign gods, God would give them victory over their enemies, even though their enemies were stronger than they.  Think of the Book of Judith.  God chooses a woman, who would have been considered a weak sex from a weak nation, to conquer the great Holofernes.  Or consider King David: he was not the son of Jesse even Samuel thought would be king.  And yet, this small, shepherd boy dispatches the great giant Goliath.  And during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, even though Sennacherib and the great Assyrian army was at his doorstep, after Sennacherib had destroyed the Kingdom of Israel, and mocked the soldiers in their own language, God grants the victory, as Isaiah the prophet had foretold, thanks to Hezekiah’s continuing trust in God.
    But, of course, the example of God choosing weakness par excellence is our Lord Himself, who came, not in the power that was and is His, but as a defenseless baby.  He conquered the dominion of the devil not by strength of arms and force, but by His weakness of taking upon Himself human flesh.  
    And the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is no different.  The princes that Christ chooses to be the new leaders of His Church are generally uneducated men who do not have much to them.  If anyone could boast about being a theologian and a religious man it was Paul, who came to the Church after first persecuting it.  But none of the twelve was anyone to talk about when it came to being a natural leader or vision of spiritual strength.  Even Peter, the great rock chosen by Christ as our first pope, was, after being named pope, called Satan by our Lord and rebuked for his lack of trust in God’s plan of the crucifixion and death.  Weakness is how God works.
    And it is how God works in us.  The more that we trust in ourselves, the less God can work through us.  This is not to say that God lacks any power, but to say that God loves us, and so does not force Himself on us.  He could, but He doesn’t.  But, when we decrease, we allow the Lord to increase, as St. John the Baptist said.  
    So how do we decrease?  How to we remain weak so that the Lord may be strong in us?  One easy way is to consider how we make decisions, especially big ones, but even the daily decisions of life.  Do we trust in our own reasoning, our own intelligence, or do we take our decisions to God in prayer?  Asking God to guide our decisions means acknowledging that another is wiser than we, and may have a better plan.  When it comes to a job to take or leave, a path of business to pursue, the choice of a car, the decision of whether or not to try to have another child, how to educate our children, etc., we should place it first at the feet of our Lord, and ask for His guidance.  He may have some wisdom to impart to us, which may even seem counterintuitive sometimes.  St. Maximilian Kolbe is a beautiful example of relying on the Lord’s wisdom, rather than our own.  When founding a monastery in Japan, St. Maximilian decided to build his monastery on the opposite side of the mountain from that which seemed the best.  The name of the town outside which St. Maximilian built his monastery was Nagasaki, and because St. Maximilian had built it on the opposite side of the mountain, it was not destroyed by the atomic bomb that was dropped in 1945.  
    Sometimes, after placing the decision at God’s feet, God does allow us to use our reason to arrive at a prudent decision.  God sometimes gives us signs of how we are to proceed, but sometimes He trusts our judgements.  But He always loves being consulted so that we might know His will first.  We see this even in human relations, where we may think we know what is best, but we ask our spouse or our friend first to get their opinion.  Of course, God doesn’t deal in opinions, He deals in truth, but still it is good to have access to the source of truth when we make decisions that affect our present and future.  
    Paul was not afraid of his weakness, and neither should we be.  In fact, the Apostle recognized that, without God, he had nothing.  But with God, he had everything, even in the midst of his sufferings for spreading the Gospel.  So should we recognize that, without God, we are nothing; we have nothing.  And recognizing our poverty without God, we can cry out to God to give us what we need, and to supply for us in our weakness.  And we can have confidence that we will receive what we need from our Loving Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen.