Dear Friends,
You know that moment when you think of the perfect snarky comeback several hours after a painful conversation? It’s so frustrating not to have thought of it in time to use it. But, as I’ve walked with Jesus over time, I’ve gone from wishing I’d thought of the snarky comeback sooner to being really glad I didn’t. Most of us hate feeling foolish or weak, and it can be hard not to fantasize about turning the tables in order to humiliate whoever has humiliated us. There are countless movie moments like this that make audiences cheer, and it can be hard not to get sucked into the spirit of vindictiveness that I can only describe as “Ha! Now I have the power!” But this desire to feel and look powerful is not what Jesus has called us to.
Midway through teaching on the life of Joseph last Sunday, I was struck by the thought that Joseph’s story is often told quite differently from how I was telling it to you. I have heard Joseph held up as a great example of how to resist sexual temptation. But an interesting thing about Genesis 39 is that it never says Joseph was interested in his master’s wife sexually. It only says that she began demanding sex from him. This must have been terrifying from moment one, regardless of how desirable she might otherwise have been. As soon as she made her intentions known, Joseph would have recognized that he was in a life-threatening, lose-lose situation.
I’ve been thinking about this off and on since Sunday, and I think that imagining Joseph as victorious over his own lust makes him seem more powerful and that this often feels better to us than recognizing his powerlessness as a victim of sexual exploitation. For whatever reason, human beings love heroes. We seem to want someone to admire and seek to emulate. And we want our heroes to be strong and victorious, someone who defeats and humiliates their enemies and ends up on top. Perhaps this is because we desire to be this sort of person ourselves, and we imagine our heroes as preferred versions of ourselves. But God invites us to identify instead with those at the bottom, with the weak, the small, the overlooked, and the cast aside and to cultivate in ourselves an awareness of our own weakness and dependency.
Paul speaks in 2 Cor. 12:7 of receiving a “thorn in my flesh” from God “in order to keep me from becoming conceited.” When he pleaded with God to take it away, he received the response recorded in verse 9, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Those in Jesus are not meant to be powerful in the eyes of this world but to be living examples of God’s power and goodness at work in our weakness. And so Paul says in verses 9-10, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Let’s be like Paul and boast only about our own weakness and the goodness and strength of God.
A prayer:
Lord Jesus, take away from me all desire to be or appear strong, powerful, or wise in my own right or to be vindicated in front of people I perceive to be my enemies. Let me instead be content to be weak and foolish and to depend on your strength and wisdom. Help me to trust you that this will bring me the peace and joy I long for. Amen.
Love in Christ,
Michelle
