“No More Normal: Weak or Strong?”

Reading: Isaiah 52:13-53:12; 1 Corinthians 4:8-16

Written and preached by Luke Richards

        We spend a lot of time in the church talking about things that should make your head spin.  For example, the message of Christmas is that God, who is one God who exists eternally in three distinct persons, became incarnate in human flesh in a way that created an eternal union between divinity and humanity so that humans might be able to be adopted into God’s family and receive nothing less than God the Holy Spirit as their inheritance in Christ.  Whew.  We talk about angels filling the sky to announce this savior’s birth, and we claim that this baby went on to heal the blind and the lame and the demon-possessed, and He could even forgive sins.  We claim that He was executed and that He really, certainly died, but then several days later He was raised from the dead and will never die again.  We claim that He poured out the Holy Spirit on His church, and where the Holy Spirit is present, you never know what He might do.  And I’m afraid that sometimes we make these claims so casually that we don’t realize how incredible they are.  If we worship a God who really can do all that stuff, why are we sitting here so comfortably?  What if that sort of God actually shows up one Sunday morning and gets hold of us?

        One of the things you do when climbing a mountain is to literally tie yourself to someone else.  And of course the reason for this is that when you’re up on a mountain you can’t always predict what will happen: you might lose your footing and slip, the ground underneath you might literally open up into a crevasse hundreds of feet deep, or a rock might fall from above and hit you in the head, and so you tie yourself to someone else so you stand a better chance of regaining your footing if something should happen.  And sometimes I feel like we should come to church lashed together because we can’t predict what God might do.  We make worshipping God so normal, when in fact we ought to come prepared to get bowled over by Him.

        And so our theme for this Advent season has been “No More Normal,” because Christmas is anything but normal and therefore life in Christ should be anything but normal.  My goal for these last few weeks has been to ask us some hard questions about whether we as a congregation and we as individuals are satisfied with the same old same old, or whether we are hungering and thirsting after the abnormal promises of God.  Two weeks ago we focused on the announcement that Christmas is good news that should bring great joy, and we asked whether our news actually does that.  Last week we focused on the action of the Holy Spirit in Christmas, and we asked whether we are satisfied with the safe, sentimental, powerless, generic “spirit of Christmas” that most people think of, or whether we are actually interested in the Holy Spirit, the true Spirit of Christmas, who is God and is hardly soft and fuzzy and warm and safe.  And today, we’re again focusing on the sort of thing we don’t normally talk about at Christmastime.  Our Scripture readings for today are generally more suited to Good Friday or Easter.  But we don’t want to be normal this year, so here we are.

        The verses we read from chapters 52 and 53 of Isaiah are incredibly powerful verses, and more than a few of them are probably familiar to many of you.  This is probably the most famous of the “servant songs” in Isaiah; almost from the beginning of the church, Christians have been recognizing this passage as a prophecy about Jesus given hundreds of years before His birth.  You can probably see why: “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed.”  Verse after verse in this chapter was applied to the suffering of Jesus by the writers of the New Testament.

It hardly seems very Christmasy to talk about how the adorable baby in the manger would one day be “marred beyond human likeness” and “despised and rejected by men.”  But it’s central to the Christmas story that Jesus came on a mission, and that mission would put Him in direct conflict against the powers of this world, and the powers of this world were bound to respond as they respond to any such threat.  Remember how John’s gospel begins the story of Jesus?  It tells of how Jesus, the Word of God and the Light of the World, came to us, but “the world did not recognize Him…His own did not receive Him.”  That conflict was expected from the very beginning, because the darkness is not willing to give up its dominion easily.  Isaiah knew that hundreds of years before Jesus was even born: the servant of the Lord, if he is truly serving the Lord, is likely to have a pretty difficult time of it.  But what is really troubling is what Isaiah has to say about the result of that conflict.

        I would wager that you have probably, at some point, seen the iconic picture of the boxer Muhammad Ali standing over his fallen opponent in the 1965 fight for the Heavyweight Championship.  It’s one of the most famous sports photos ever; Sports Illustrated used it as the cover to their special issue on the greatest sports photos in history.  Of course that photo makes it incredibly clear who is winning in that fight: Muhammad Ali is standing there, throwing his fists in the air, angry determination on his face, while his opponent is flat on his back on the mat.  There is no doubt who has won, partly evidenced by the fact that many of us could name the guy standing in victory (Muhammad Ali), but probably very few of us could name the guy on the mat (Sonny Liston).

        The outcome of the fight described in Isaiah 53 sounds a lot like the fight between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston.  It sounds like the same basic picture: there is a very clear winner and a very clear loser, and the winner is not the one who’s been beaten beyond recognition.  Isaiah is saying that this is what happens to this servant of the Lord who is the standard by which all other servants of the Lord are judged: He is beaten, ignored, rejected, despised, pierced and crushed because of other peoples’ sins — He is so weak that He can’t even defend Himself against injustice — compared to a lamb led to the slaughter, given a nameless grave among the criminals, despised even in death, He doesn’t even have descendants to redeem His name; surely in light of all this even God must hate Him.  He’s the weak one, the loser, the guy flat on his back on the mat.

        That would be normal, but the birth of Jesus did away with normal.  Isaiah has a very different, very odd, very abnormal way of judging the winner in this particular fight: it is precisely through His weakness that this servant of the Lord accomplishes His mission.  He wins the fight by being beaten and killed and rejected.  Sonny Liston is the winner in this fight, not Muhammad Ali, Isaiah is saying.  After the suffering and death of this servant, Isaiah tells us, the tables are turned because God vindicates Him.  He is given a portion among the great, He’s the winner, He’s the one whose mission of salvation for others is a success.  That’s not normal.  It is this complete dependence upon God for His vindication that Isaiah sees as the reason He won.  He chose to follow God completely, and the result would appear to be weakness on His part.  He didn’t fight back.  He didn’t defend Himself.  He was completely beaten in every measurable way, but God declares Him the winner.

        We see that so-called weakness all over the place in the gospel.  We see humility and vulnerability right in the beginning of the Christmas story: He rejects power and is born not in a palace but among common people and common animals; He comes not as a conquering, divine figure, but as a human baby; He was born not to a family with wealth and connections but to an obscure, average working family.  The fact that Jesus was born a humble baby in a manger is a first glimpse of this weakness, but really it is only setting Him on a trajectory for what would seem to be even more weakness, as Isaiah foretold.  If you had to place odds on who was going to win this fight, you’d have to put the odds against Jesus, because it looks like God has given away every advantage.  The fantastic hymn in Philippians 2 sings of how our attitude should be like that of Jesus, who willingly walked a path of humbling, emptying, and weakness all throughout His ministry beginning with His birth and reaching a low point at His death, and through that weakness, God exalted Him.

        It continues even beyond the life of Jesus and into the age of the church.  We read a passage from 1 Corinthians, just one example of many, where the Apostle Paul is making it clear that it is through his weakness that God has chosen to work most powerfully.  It is, in fact, central to his theology that the message of Christ is foolishness in the eyes of the world and Christ’s messengers, therefore, are also seen as fools.  Paul says that he’s been hungry and thirsty, living in rags, brutally treated, homeless, cursed, persecuted, slandered, the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world.  He’s spent a good portion of his ministry flat on his back on the mat, in other words, clearly the loser.  He compares himself to a captive at the end of a victory procession, being paraded through the streets on the way to his execution.  And yet he sees these as being the fulfillment of his mission in Christ; he’s even taunting the Corinthians a little bit since that church was apparently proud of its wealth and power when in fact Paul thinks they should be doing the opposite.  We could continue that on with example after example of how some of history’s greatest saints have specifically chosen to do the work of the kingdom among the most obscure, forgotten, ignored, hated people in the world; how saint after saint has given up strength and power for the sake of weakness in Christ.

        Here’s what it boils down to: the prophecy of Isaiah promises that this savior whose birth we celebrate at Christmas accomplishes His mission through what appears to be weakness.  He changes what is normal because, as Paul says elsewhere, “when I am weak, then I am strong.”  Weakness is central to the gospel and it’s central to how God works among His people, because our weakness allows God to demonstrate His strength.

        So here’s the problem: why do we spend so much time trying to be strong?  It sounds to me like the message of this suffering servant in Isaiah is that my strength gets in the way of God working in and through me.  My comfort can distract me from God, my desire to have enough and look strong enough and be smart enough actually makes it harder for me to know God.  I don’t want to be weak, but I claim to want God; I’m afraid those two desires contradict one another.  It’s okay for Jesus to walk that path of weakness, because after all, He’s God and He can do that, but I’m not sure I have that kind of faith.  Do I really want to celebrate Christmas if Christmas is calling me to give up my own strength?  Do I really want to celebrate a savior who says that in order for God to work most effectively through me, I need to give up my power?

        It makes me think of that encounter between Jesus and a rich young man.  The man asks Him what he must do to enter the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus tells him that beyond following the instructions of God’s law, what really matters is that he be willing to sell all his stuff and give his money to the poor.  And as the rich young man walks away solemnly, Jesus remarks that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom.  What if He was serious about that?  What if it’s really true that all my stuff and money and education and influence is actually getting in the way of me knowing that savior born on Christmas?

        It’s not an easy question.  Are we comfortable with being weak?  Are we willing to give up our strength so that we can really let God work?  That makes for a hard Christmas.

        It leaves us, I think, in a web of tensions.  I don’t think there are easy answers with this.  On the one hand, we need to recognize that our desire to be strong and self-sufficient can be a danger in our walk with God, but on the other hand, that doesn’t mean it’s a sin to have wealth and power.  There have been many great saints of the church who have had both money and power and still done great things for the kingdom.  God makes great use of people who can manage their resources well for the blessing of others, and yet He also makes great use of people who are willing to give up all things for His kingdom.  There is also the tension in the fact that we don’t want to glorify abuse and say that everyone should seek out suffering; however, we do recognize that God can do great things through our suffering and weakness.  If you are suffering or if you are in a time of weakness, that is not necessarily a bad thing from a spiritual standpoint, as difficult as it may be.

        There are some hard questions here.  It takes some hard, honest self-examination, and I don’t know what the answers will be for each of us.  I do know that we shouldn’t be ashamed of our weakness when it comes, and in fact we should probably do a better job of rejoicing together in the ways God works through that weakness.  I do know that God can do an incredible work even in the most terrible suffering.  I don’t know that God is calling each of us to sell all we have and give it to the poor, you may be relieved to hear.  But as we approach Christmas, this time when we celebrate the God who came to us in humility and weakness, I need to take a good, hard look at myself and see whether I’ve built up things, wealth, relationships, habits around me that I rely on before God.  When Jesus comes back — and He is coming back — will He find me content in weakness and relying on God?  Or will He find me saying that I want to follow God while in reality I chase after my own comfort and power?  It’s a hard Christmas.

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