The Secret Power of Christ's Weakness
There comes a time for every girl when she is forced to see, whether she wants to or not, the difference between the men that the boys around her are growing into, and the woman that she is becoming. I can’t remember exactly when it happened for me—maybe it the first time my parents told me to stop roughhousing with the boys, or the summer when I found that my younger brother had suddenly grown a head taller than me. But from that point on, I learned that womanhood would come with more than frilly dresses and high heels: it would also come with weakness and vulnerability. To be a woman meant that no matter how hard I worked or how fast I ran, I would always be a little bit smaller, a little bit weaker, and a little bit slower than my brothers—and that little bit made all the difference. People have, of course, been responding to this distinction for millennia. As boys and girls reach adolescence, a kind of invisible partition between the sexes begins to emerge. Girls learn the mysterious and inexact art of “acting like a lady,” and conscientious mothers teach their sons things like “ladies first” and holding the door open for their sisters. Borrowing a word from medieval feudalism, we call this, chivalry.
Whenever I think about the word chivalry, I’m brought back to a childhood memory of reading St. George and the Dragon in a collection of illustrated children’s stories. In the story, St. George hears of a beautiful princess whose life has been demanded by a fire-breathing dragon. Good old George charges in to the rescue, slaying the dragon and winning the hand of the lady. Everyone (we are led to presume) lives happily ever after. Even though I used to enjoy looking at the pictures, the budding cynic in me found something dissatisfying about the whole thing. There was something contrived about the soppy way the flaxen-haired damsel clasped her hands together as her knight pinned the writhing serpent, and I found myself put off by St. George’s self-consciously noble brow as he rode off into the pastel sunset, fair lady in tow. Something about this romantic ideal rubbed me the wrong way, but it would take a long time—and many answers that turned out to be wrong—before I would be able to put my finger on what was missing.
A better consolation for weakness was hiding, as it turned out, in plain sight. It was nestled within an unassuming doctrine that I had been singing about by rote, every December since I could remember:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail th’Incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel.
The doctrine of the incarnation is easy to take for granted because it is deliberately unimposing. We usually approach it in the holiday spirit of the Christmas season, and we almost can’t help but be superficially comforted by its docile vocabulary. Words like “infant,” “nativity,” “manger,” and “mild” have the sound of a warm fire on a winter’s day, but it becomes easy for us to warm our hands for a moment then hurry by without letting the comfort of Christ’s advent penetrate all the way to our hearts. The incarnation doesn’t demand our attention; it offers itself to us when we most feel our need of it, and perhaps that is part of its great power. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times, we can sing “Lo, how in a manger lies, He who built the starry skies” without giving it a second thought, only to have it take our breath away the thousandth time. Finally, we are struck with a sudden awareness that what we have needed all along—for every misery, affliction or shame—is a Savior who did not come clothed in the “shining armor” of divine power, but in the unimpressive robes of human frailty.
A Different Kind of Salvation
In our contemplation and worship of Christ, it is easy to fall into one of two ditches: the first is to emphasize His deity to the exclusion of His humanity, and the second is to emphasize His humanity to the exclusion of His deity. But paradoxically, we will appreciate the incarnation best when we understand it in the context of Christ’s divinity.
To understand Christ’s deity is to understand how, as God, He is not like us. The Westminster Confession describes God as,
“infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will.”
God’s power makes the leap from measurable to immeasurable in the word, “sovereign.” Isaiah 40 says that God considers the nations of the world as nothing more than a drop in a bucket, and earth’s inhabitants like grasshoppers. Whatever powers there are on this earth—whether kings, princes or mighty men—God can bring them to nothing with a mere word. As an eternal Being of pure spirit, the Almighty Creator stands apart from His creation in a way that makes any distinction between male and female seem inconsequential—like measuring one grain of sand against another.
God’s attributes are awe-inspiring, but outside of faith, the “otherness” of God only serves to erect a partition that makes the walls between men and women seem paper-thin. We grow suspicious and resentful of God’s power, and perhaps we secretly find it unfair that God judges us from the privileged seat of heaven, while we live out our miserable little lives down below, suffering calamities and temptations which He, by His very nature, is free from. We know He is able “to do all His holy will”—but can we rely on His will being favorable towards us? What does the God of the universe know about the lives of, well, grasshoppers? Just how far can we trust the “chivalry” of God?
Today, I find myself wondering what happened to St. George and his lady after the storybook ending. The biological weaknesses that women are subject to, day in and day out, are not always as romantic as they are in stories. Would chivalry inspire our good knight to rescue his lady from the dinner dishes when she was suffering from a bad case of cramps? Would he be understanding when shifting hormones resulted in mood swings and short tempers? Would his gallantry run dry when pregnancy transformed his willowy princess into a puffy-eyed whale, barely capable of lumbering from one room to another? Would he rush to her side when she felt the pangs of labor, or would manly dignity demand that he sit outside the delivery room and not involve himself with “women’s matters?” Once the lance was hung up and the dragon a distant memory, I wonder if St. George ever privately thought of his lady’s biological infirmities as silly, foolish or irritating, and I wonder if the princess ever found herself saying, like so many women have said before, “You just don’t understand what it’s like.”
To know that God is set apart from us—first as the sovereign Creator of mankind, and then as our holy, sinless Judge—is necessary knowledge, but by itself, it cannot stir up our affections toward Him. We can be impressed by His power, or intimidated by His judgments, but we cannot be moved to love of God merely by contemplating the attributes that make Him not like us. And this is why, in the great work of salvation, God has been pleased to make His infinite nature a vast backdrop, while placing something entirely unexpected in the foreground: a man—bruised and beaten, despised by men and accursed by God—breathing out the last breaths of a finite life, upon a cross.
The crucifixion and burial of Christ mark the end of what theologians call His humiliation—the descent of the eternal Son of God into the world of sinful men, to die as a substitute for us (Philippians 2:6-8). But Christ’s humiliation begins with God giving Himself as a fleshly son to His own creation, taking upon Himself “the very nature of man, of the flesh and blood of the virgin Mary.” The incarnation is at the heart of what we confess as Christians, but why did Christ have to save us in just this way? Why couldn’t God simply hurl a bolt of lightning into the heart of hell without even bothering to rise from His throne? Why did it have to be the promised seed of Eve who crushed the serpent under His heel?
The incarnation was necessary because, in order for God to save us from His own just wrath and expel the darkness of sin, humanity needed something better than a knight in shining armor—we needed a Great High Priest. Hebrews 5:1-2 says,
For every high priest taken from among men is appointed for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins. He can have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is also subject to weakness.
A few chapters earlier, the author of Hebrews reveals how the incarnation has qualified Christ for this priesthood by making Him like His brethren:
Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham. Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
In becoming a High Priest for mankind, it was necessary that God come to us, as one of us—“taking the form of a bond-servant, and coming in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). In the person of the Son, the Creator descended to the station of a creature. The Lawgiver placed Himself “under the law.” The Giver of life took on a vulnerable body that could be crushed under the cruel foot of death. And perhaps most shockingly of all, God’s righteous Son felt the shame of sin and the unalloyed wrath of the Father (Galatian 3:13; 2 Corinthians 5:12). And for all these tasks, it was human weakness—not divine strength—that qualified the Son.
The incarnation makes God’s salvation sweet to us in ways that mere gallantry never could. We will never have any cause to say to Christ, “You don’t know what it’s like,” because He is an advocate who does know what it’s like to be weak, to be powerless, to suffer infirmities, afflictions and temptations. The God who sits enthroned in heaven, “without body, parts, or passions,” has allowed Himself, through the body of Christ, to be touched by everything that touches us.
A Power Made Perfect in Weakness
Everything in the universe comes to the foot of the cross to be reconciled, and the cross, in reconciling, also reinterprets. Surrender becomes victory, death leads the way into life, and the passive weakness of the Lamb of God is shown to be stronger than the strength of mighty men (1 Corinthians 1:25; Colossians 2:14-15).
The paradoxical nature of salvation brings us a riddle worth pondering: is the power of God ultimately lessened through the incarnation, or made greater? The writings of Paul do not leave us with any room but to conclude the latter. He writes in 1 Corinthians 1:18 that the message of the cross is the power of God for those who are being saved, and in 2 Corinthians 12:9, God assures the suffering apostle that His power is “made perfect”—or complete—in weakness. Outside of faith, these statements sound like logical fallacies. What power could possibly be added to absolute sovereignty, and why would accepting the limits of a creaturely body, being tempted as only a creature can be tempted, and passively submitting to death on a cross be the way to attain it? The Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin saw the answer clearly in his book The Heart of Christ,
Whereas it may be objected, that [Christ’s human nature] were a weakness, the apostle affirms that this is His power, and a perfection and strength of love surely, in Him … that makes Him thus able and powerful to take our miseries into his heart … and so to be affected with them, as if he suffered with us, and so to relieve us out of that principle out of which he would relieve Himself.
In the incarnation, Christ did something better and more complete than all the heroic rescues of medieval romance combined. In emptying Himself of majesty, He gained one seemingly insignificant ability that would become the crowning perfection of His power. He made himself, in Goodwin’s words, “able and powerful” to sympathize totally with His body, the church. Better by far than the detached pity of human noblesse oblige, this power of sympathy tears down the partition between a holy God and His redeemed people, and it is offered to us as the sure guarantee of Christ’s help in every kind of trouble, whether great or small:
For no one ever hated His own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. (Ephesians 5:29-30)
