Body and Blood of Christ: The Grace of Weakness

Luke 9: 11-17
The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, ‘Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place.’ But he said to them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said, ‘We have no more than five loaves and two fish—unless we are to go and buy food for all these people.’ For there were about five thousand people. And he said to his disciples, ‘Make them sit down in groups of about fifty each.’ They did so and made them all sit down. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And all ate and were filled. What was left over was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12: 9-11)

For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:25)

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. (1 Corinthians 1:27)

"Do you know, daughter, who you are and who I am? If you know these two things you will have beatitude within your grasp.  You are she who is not, and I AM HE WHO IS." (The Lord speaking to St. Catherine of Siena)

God always takes what is small, weak, empty and foolish and transforms it into a receptacle of his greatness, strength, abundance and wisdom. This was a consistent principle in Christ’s life whether he was choosing disciples, changing water to wine, taking a few fish and some loaves of bread to feed a multitude or anointing the humble elements of bread and wine to contain his whole substance and being.

The most radical choice he made to transform what was weak to display his power was his choice to become a human being, subjecting himself to the inherent weaknesses of that state, including death which is often experienced violently in this world. When he was resurrected and awesomely transformed, he went from being a body with blood to being The Body and Blood – the life source and resurrection power for the whole world.

The Warrior cannot get this. Oh, it definitely tries to grasp it but it struggles mightily with the whole concept of being weak in order to be strong. Its intellectual belief in this principle may be firm but the whole concept is one of anguish. It cries out, “I am weak! Help me Lord!” only to feel like it’s calling out to an empty universe. It asks, “Lord, how weak do I have to become before you will step in with resurrection power? How can I make myself any weaker?” It doesn’t realize that the very question it is asking indicates that it hasn’t grasped the true essence of weakness at all.

To the Warrior, weakness means the point it comes to when it has already tried everything in its power to change a situation, itself or another person. It has tried every prayer, every change of attitude it can muster and every method that promises relief. To the Warrior, weakness is the failure of its own strength. If God does come to it in this "last resort weakness" (and he often does because of his compassion), the Warrior easily forgets how inept its own strength is to resolve anything and it fairly quickly returns to its own strength and control systems.

But the weakness the scripture speaks of is beyond the Warrior. It’s beyond the Warrior's capability because the weakness God values is a state where there has been a revelation that the old wineskin is too small to be able to hold the new life being sought. It is a state completely open to transformation. 

Transform: to go to the other side of a visible shape or configuration of something. The real transformation of people in the Gospel came when they realized the absolute uselessness of the Warrior to get them across the divide. Like Peter, what they ultimately grasped was that their inner Warrior’s strength was futile and more likely to take them further away from Christ than closer to him. Because the Warrior can’t even conceive of a life of real weakness, it ends up using its own strength to make Christ into its own image rather than being transformed into the image of Christ. 

What the Warrior works with is untransformed strength. Just as bread and wine in their natural states have no transforming power, our Warriors' natural strengths cannot change us from one shape to another. They cannot reconfigure our inner beings. Only when Christ is the substance of power does transformation become available but when the Warrior’s faulty and static strength is filling the cup, there is no room for Christ’s dynamic strength. Only those who embrace their own weakness with joy will be able to fully experience it.

Embracing your weakness means reveling in it. It means rejoicing in being “he or she who is not” so that Christ can be the “I AM WHO IS”. Weakness is not simply coming to the end of your rope. Weakness is a full recognition that there is nothing one can do on one’s own to attain transformation - even before there’s a rope to come to the end of. In fact, as long as a person receives the Eucharist with the mistaken idea that the body and blood of Christ will make self stronger, there will be no transformation. It never was intended build anyone’s self-strength. It was intended to be the source of resurrection power for the lonely grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies.

Remember the Pharisee and the publican? The Pharisee was full of his own Warrior strength and righteousness. He was not open to the transformative power of God; all he wanted was justification and maybe a little gratitude from God. He felt his cup was already full. The publican was the one who went home justified. He wasn’t justified because of his words but because he didn’t try to be any more than what he was: weak. He was empty and ready to be resurrected and transformed.

The True Self gets this. True Self doesn’t need to be strong. It doesn't strive for approval and self justification because it lives in communion with Christ. It feasts on the transformative power of the resurrected Body and is infused with divine Blood.

What a life!