Friends
Peace be with you.
Recently, a priest friend was telling me about an email he received relatively early in a previous assignment which said “I prayed that the bishop would assign someone here with half a brain and I guess I’m going to have to keep praying.” Now, please don’t take out your phones and start sending me similar emails. At the time, my friend was really hurt by the email, not because he felt particularly close to the writer or because of how caustic the remark was, but because he felt like the guy was right. He never felt like he was suited to be a pastor, that he had the organizational and leadership skills capable of dynamically giving a strong vision for success to several corporations at once. He wasn’t particularly good looking, didn’t spend enough time preparing his homilies, didn’t visit the sick and find shelter for the homeless. He didn’t visit the school classrooms or respond as quickly to phone calls or emails as people wanted. He could easily list all his failures and struggled to find much he could call an accomplishment. He was a bit in a funk.
As my friend was talking, I had two reactions. First, I could sympathise. At several points in the past year, I have felt like I could get this same email but that you folks are just a lot more patient and kind. But, secondly, I thought of our second reading for today. St. Paul puts forth one of his more difficult to understand theological perspectives that, I think, is central to understanding his theology. And, as I transition from focusing my homilies on the first reading to the second, this is a good place to start. In the early part of this letter, St. Paul writes about how there are these “super apostles” who are great public speakers and who are very good looking and whom everyone loves. But, these “super apostles” tend to say only the things people like to hear, not necessarily what people need to hear. They are the priests who fill their homilies with jokes or safe theological messages focused on personal improvement and never seem to get around to preaching the hard truths of the gospel. St. Paul, on the other hand, feels compelled to teach about how salvation is offered to us by faith in Jesus and cannot be earned and everyone says that he’s just too serious or not interesting or not entertaining. It appears that, while St. Paul is getting this outward criticism of his ministry, he’s also getting some kind of bodily ailment like headaches or a fever or soreness. It may be because, as St. Paul said in a previous part of this book, he’s been beaten twice and almost stoned to death once. That had to take a toll on his body. St. Paul connects his physical ailment with his rejection by the people as a “thorn in the flesh”. Still, he doesn’t lash out at the people or see it as an indication that it’s time to move on. Both of those reactions would be the flight or fight reaction common in the animal kingdom. Instead, St. Paul says he “glories” in this weakness because, in it, he is made strong. What St. Paul is saying is that, because of this thorn in the flesh, any success in terms of evangelization and the church will not be seen as his action but, as it is, the action of God. And he thinks that is just the bees knees, if you will.
Let’s compare this to the way the world handles failure. First, we make fun of people who fail. There are television shows that feature home videos of people who fail while an audience laughs at them. We make fun of people who are bad at sports or school or work and we probably talk about those people to others and laugh at them. Or, if we don’t make fun of people, we may try to say that the failure is actually a success. We give out participation trophies to every kid, even the one who sat by the fence and picked his nose the whole game. This is probably good when the child is in kindergarten but there comes a point when we need to be able to admit that people have weaknesses. We don’t want to hurt people’s feelings but not everyone is a gold medalist and, by confusing the perfect and awe inspiring with the mediocre and utterly disastrous, we are losing our eye for beauty.
St. Paul says, instead, to glory on our weakness, glory in the email that says they are still praying for a pastor with half a brain because that means people will look to the true leader of the community to be our guide. They won’t seek the leadership of perfect human beings from imperfect human beings but will rely entirely on the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to lead us to himself. We glory in our weakness to make room for the strength of Christ in our lives.
