The Weakness of God

"The weakness of God is stronger than human strength" (1 Cor 1.25b, NIV). What does that mean? One of the truths we meditated upon yesterday was this. It was in weakness that God was mighty to save. For the Apostle Paul, the cross of Jesus calls us to a wholesale  transformation. Jesus' cross must transform our understanding of God. A more literal translation of 1 Corinthians 1.25 would go like this: "For the foolish thing of God is wiser than humans, and the weak thing of God is stronger than humans." What is the foolish thing? What is this weak thing? The foolishness of God and the weakness of God is the cross. This is why Richard Hays writes: "This foolish and weak thing is the event of the cross itself. The cross is the key to understanding reality in God's new age. Consequently, to enter the symbolic world of the gospel is to undergo a conversion of the imagination, to see all values transformed by the foolish and weak death of Jesus on the cross." Have we been converted by the cross? What does it look like to be converted by the cross?

A Transformed View of God

To be converted by the cross is to have our understanding of God transformed. Most of us seem to be born into this world with a theology that goes a bit like this. God is very big and very powerful and very high up on something like a mountain. His natural mood is disappointed and I must summon as much strength as I can to neutralize his opinion of me. I firmly believe Jesus came to destroy this idolatrous understanding of what God is like. Indeed, Jesus reveals a God who humbles himself in order to save his enemies! John 17 defines for us what the one true God is really like. Before his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion, John records Jesus' final prayer. Listen to how Jesus' prayer begins and ends.  

Jesus spoke these things, looked up to heaven and said: "Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, ... Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they will see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the world's foundation. Righteous Father, the world has not known you. However, I have known you, and they have known that you sent me. I made your name known to them and will continue to make it known, so that the love you have loved me with may be in them and I may be in them (John 17.1, 24-26, CSB).

In this passage Jesus uses words like glory, know, and name, so we may understand him to be speaking of what is essentially true about God. He prays the Father will glorify him, the Son, so that the Son can in turn, glorify the Father. In other words, the glory of the Father and the Son will be made visible through what is about to happen. Furthermore, Jesus declares that as the Son, the one who knows the Father, he has come to make the Father known and will continue to make him known, so that the love the Father has loved the Son with, may be in us! How will this sharing of love happen? What will be the means by which the Father is made known and the love of the Father and the Son is shared with us? The cross is how. Yes! As the blood and water flowed from the wounds of the Son, the love of the Trinity was being shared with the world. Jesus opens his prayer with these words: "Father, the hour has come." Throughout John's gospel it has been declared that the hour has not yet come (See, John 2.4, 7.30; 8.20). But now, Jesus knows the hour has come for him to leave this world and return to Father (See John 13.1). This means, "the hour has come," means it is now time for the crucifixion. You see it is through the weakness and foolishness of Jesus' death that we learn of the inner love of God and it's through the cross that love the Father and Son have shared for eternity is poured out for us. This means that our understanding of what God is like must be shaped by the cross. This is why Paul argues in Philippians that because Jesus existed in the form of God, "he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death - even to death on a cross" (Phil 2.7-8, CSB).

What does the "god" in our heads look like? According to Christianity the one true God looks like Jesus pouring himself out for his enemies on the Cross. Let us confess with the Roman soldier one of the most essential truths of our faith.

When the centurion, who was standing opposite him, saw the way he breathed his last, he said, "Truly this man was the Son of God" (Mark 15.39, CSB)! 

It is Jesus' dying breath that reveals Jesus' true identity. The cross calls us to a transformed understanding of God. Not just Jesus, but God! God is like Jesus dying on the cross. There is no other God behind the cross. God was in Christ on the cross reconciling the world to himself. This is summarized well by Plantinga.

“The Son of God just does what he sees his Father doing. He empties himself and takes the form of a servant because that’s the way they do it in his family” (Cornelius Plantinga Jr.). 

Click here to download and listen to yesterday's sermon, The Curse of the Cross.