Our Christian faith is full of paradoxes. We confess that God is both three and one, that Jesus is both true God and true man, and that he was born of a virgin mother. Today, the Lord offers us another paradox through Saint Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). It seems a contradiction at first, yet if we examine our experience of God at work in our lives, we will find the truth of this statement. One of the priests in my Jesuit community, for example, is a gifted preacher, and part of his gift stems from his willingness to speak—in an appropriate way—of his own weaknesses. God’s power shines forth in those moments, as I can attest that I have found myself convicted and brought to a deeper conversion in those moments.
Weakness, of course, is uncomfortable. It is much more pleasant, in a natural sense, to feel confident and strong than to feel weak, but the key about weakness is that it reveals to us our own deep need for God’s love and grace. This need for God is the strength and power that is to be found in weakness, if we only pay attention to it and respond by crying out to the Lord in prayer. As in all things, of course, Jesus himself shows us the way: he accepted the weakness and powerlessness of the Cross, and in doing so, opened the way to the Resurrection, which is the greatest sign of God’s power over sin and death. Let us give thanks to God, then, for our weaknesses, and pray that when we encounter them, we might turn to the Lord for the help and grace that we need.