On Christmas morning,1 Father gave a homily that focused on the weakness of the infant Christ. Since I had custody of a 3-year-old and an infant at the time, I didn’t hear much, but I’ve been meditating on the weakness of the omnipotent one a lot since then.
I tend to focus on Christ’s weakness and poverty as a manifestation of his desperate love for us, that he was willing to suffer anything to be united to us. And certainly that’s true–he wanted to be like us in every way but sin2 and so he began with that most basic of human conditions: weakness. And yet I think there’s so much more than that to learn from a God who can’t hold up his head–in the manger or on the cross.
There’s something about the helpless baby Jesus that draws us, something about his very weakness that appeals to what is good in our humanity. We turn from Christ stripped and beaten, take him off our crucifixes or at least wash off the blood, but we can’t help but approach the little God-child in the manger. In his weakness, he calls to us as his strength never could.
You see, our God is terrifying. He’s anything but approachable. In the moment of the Fall, Adam and Eve saw God through the eyes of sin and hid from him. And in spite of everything God sent to our ancestors to draw them back to him, in spite of floods and plagues and prophets, in spite of the Song of Songs and the temple restored, still they hid. The only god worth worshiping is a God who holds galaxies in his hands, a God who rends mountains and smites nations. But who would dare love that God? So the Israelites did what was logical–they worshiped the true God with incense and sacrifices and then went home to pour their hearts out to their weak little household idols.
Because a god who can do nothing is at least a shoulder to cry on but a real God, one with real power? That’s not something to be trifled with.
Our God would not be distant from the hearts he so loved, though, and so he fought for us. The entire Old Testament is a history of God’s attempt at wooing man. But whatever he did, still we hid and cowered and held him at arm’s length. Despite our need for him, we ran from him.
And so the almighty, immortal, all-knowing God chose to need us. Not in any real sense of the word, of course. But he became that most needy of creatures: a human infant.3 Because we would not approach his majesty, he became supremely approachable in the form of a soft, sweet, chicken-legged little baby who needs to be held and rocked and loved. Through his weakness, he draws us to himself. We would not love him reigning in heaven, so he asks us to love him powerless on earth. Our beloved Holy Father spoke about this at Midnight Mass this year:4
Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love me.
And in becoming weak to draw us close, he dignifies weakness. He teaches us that suffering and poverty and even shame have value and meaning. He teaches us that the weak are not despised by God who himself became weak.
And if we are Christ-lovers, then we must become lovers of the weak, the scorned, the poor, the abused. We must love him in them not simply because he told us to (Mt 25) but because in the womb of the 13-year-old girl waiting for her bus with swollen ankles and a more swollen belly we see our Savior, threatened from the moment of his conception by a world that thought he had no right to exist. In the little boy whose daddy is being deported, we see our God in exile with no legal right to safety from the terrors of what should have been his home. In the little girl who’s three years behind in school, we see the Word illiterate, learning to read at his mother’s knee. In the losers and the freaks sitting alone in the cafeteria, we see Love rejected and despised. In the homeless, the unemployed, the terminally ill, the criminal we see Christ. And if we’re serious about this Jesus thing, we fight to love them not despite their weakness but because of it.
Still it gets harder–further up and further in, after all. We love God in his weakness and so we love people in their weakness and so we must love ourselves in our weakness as well. We refuse to be discouraged when we are lonely because, after all, Christ was lonely. We weep beside him, hunger beside him, long to be loved beside him. The God of power and might did what seemed impossible–became weak–not only to show his love or call out for ours, not only to dignify weakness or teach us how to love others. He shivered and cried and toddled and fell and lisped and stank and suffered and died in order that we might not grow weary and lose hope.5 To give us patience with ourselves, to remind us that he’s not done with us yet. Tonight, I am weak and a little discouraged. And maybe as the world makes lists of resolutions, what we need isn’t more gym memberships or book lists but the simple promise that when we fail, it will be okay.
God became weak for us. Maybe weakness isn’t something to be ashamed of after all.
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If you’re in the Mobile, Alabama area, make sure to check out Vino and Values, a women’s evening with speaker Hallie Lord. Free wine, cheese, door prizes, fellowship, and a fabulous speaker–what’s not to like? (And if you’re not in Mobile, at least check out this great article by Hallie on how being hard is what makes marriage great.)
- Merry Christmas! It’s not Christmas day anymore, but it’s still Christmas. [↩]
- Hebrews 4:15–did anybody hear me talking about Hebrews on the radio the other day? [↩]
- Believe me–we’re dealing with two right now and we’re all just a little bit crazy from all their neediness. [↩]
- Thanks to Christina for helping me find this quotation! [↩]
- Hebrews again–12:3 this time. [↩]