A Most Amazing Paradox

I expect you have a favorite movie, or movies. One of mine is The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel which came out in 2011. Who remembers seeing it?

A quick reminder for those of you who haven’t watched it as many times as me. A group of older British people (all played by familiar actors) decide to retire to India to a hotel which has a wonderful brochure. But when they get there, they find that instead of being beautifully appointed it is direly in need of repair – one bedroom has no door and another is full of pigeons. The hotel is run by a young and eternally optimistic Indian man, Sonny. In the face of their indignation, Sonny frequently declares “Everything will be alright in the end, and if it is not yet alright it is not yet the end.”

Which is a wonderful statement of the Christian hope of the eschaton – that is the end of the age when all things will be reconciled in Christ. “Everything will be alright in the end, and if it is not yet alright it is not yet the end.”

Today we celebrate that hope - the hope of the fully realized Creation, reconciled to God in Christ. The day when everything is brought into balance and the lion lies down with the lamb in the Great Shalom. Today is the last day of the Church’s year and so it is a fitting day for us to celebrate our hope and our trust that “everything will be alright in the end, and if it is not yet alright it is not yet the end.”

And yet, and yet – our Gospel reading is not the victorious Sovereign Jesus seated on the heavenly throne surrounded by Cherubim and Seraphim and by all the beings of the cosmos worshipping and praising, living fully the love of God. No, it’s quite the opposite. Jesus, dying on the cross.
And here my friends is the contradiction, the paradox, the conundrum which is at the heart of the mystery of our faith.

In the middle of human agony, betrayal, suffering, Jesus IS the Sovereign of the world

The Apostle Paul tells of a time when he heard the Holy Spirit tell him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor. 12:9)

My power is made perfect in weakness.
God’s power is made perfect in the weakness of the cross.
It makes no sense, does it?

Yet this knowledge of God’s power in weakness is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of Jesus’ teaching. He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek…” (Matt. 5:2-5) and “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt.5:44)

These are not positions of power as we understand power. Yet this is the way of Jesus. And as his disciples, it is our way.

On the night of his arrest, Luke tells us that, ‘when Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear. But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him. And on the cross, he said, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing."

Forgiveness and healing, not hatred and violence. This is the way of Jesus the Christ.

God’s power is made perfect in weakness. God takes the total disaster of the crucifixion and turns it around. We cannot separate the crucifixion and the resurrection. You can’t have one without the other. The resurrection and subsequent ascension of Jesus the Christ come directly out of the crucifixion.

Jesus did not defend himself against the soldiers who came in the night. Jesus did not defend himself against the accusations of the high priests. He did not defend himself against Herod, or against Pontius Pilate. His non-defensiveness was his strength. God’s power is made perfect in weakness.

This is not as simple as when we humans are weak and down on our luck, God is strong. It is something much greater and more difficult to understand. It is the paradox that in God’s topsy turvy kingdom, the terrible weakness of Jesus is also his glory.

Philippians puts it like this, “And being found in human form, [Christ] humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.” (Phil.2:8-11)

And how does that passage start? It starts with the instruction that we are to have the same mind as Christ. We are to think like Christ who did not cling to the status and power of being God but instead became human and was obedient to the point of death.

We are to think like Christ?     Wow.

There’s another Greek word for this idea - Kenosis  which means pouring out. Just as Jesus poured out his life for us, so we are to pour out our lives for one another and for the life of the cosmos.
And therein lies the power of God.

We have an example of this pouring out in our galaxy. The sun, which provides the light which is the source of our physical life, the sun is burning itself out. It is steadily using up its fuel and in about 5 billion years it will stop giving out light and become a red giant. The kenosis  - the pouring out and dying of the sun is what gives us life.

In a similar way, the pouring out – the kenosis - of Jesus gives us life as he is the Sovereign of the cosmos.

I find it really difficult to wrap my mind around this paradox. For some Christians, power is in having firearms, or in political power or even in armies and militia. But that’s not how we understand Jesus the Christ. God’s power is made perfect in weakness, in forgiveness, in generous healing love.

Jesus dying in agony on the cross is also, at the same time, the Cosmic Christ.

And the calling forth of Creation, Jesus dying and rising again, the hope of the eschaton is all one story -the story of God’s creative and powerful love which calls a cosmos into being and into intentional and loving relationship consummated in the Christ.

People of God, we are called to live like Jesus. We are called to pour out our lives for one another and for the flourishing of all beings. We are called to risk being seen as weak when we don’t retaliate, when we don’t take up arms, when we don’t fight back. We are called to be seen as weak when we refuse to hate but rather love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

And we can take that risk because we know that God’s power is made perfect in weakness. And we know that Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God and that “Everything will be alright in the end and if it is not yet alright it is not yet the end.”

Or as the 14th century mystic, Mother Julian of Norwich put it, 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.' 

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall