I don’t know about you, but 2021 was a year unlike any other. Much more took place in my own world than “just” the pandemic. My soul literally underwent a bloody crucifixion. With that, I pray that “I” (my egoic self) no longer lives, but Christ (Jesus Christ of Nazareth, crucified and yet Risen) lives in me. From February of 2021 until this present moment I have been fully immersed in suffering. No need to even go into details, many, many people I’ve talked to have undergone their own. Perhaps this will resonate.
I had no idea what “to do” when my world came crashing down. In a way, I still do not know what “to do”. I am learning it is ok to be human because God was. I literally felt like a man nailed to a cross crying out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me” at times. What happened to the high of “tetelestai”?
I was very focused on the “finished” works of Christ. Perhaps I had a perverted image of what that all looked like and was still immersed in a form of my Pentecostal roots of triumphalism. He said it was finished. A victorious gospel. Yet I was lost. I surely did not “feel” whole or “saved”. I sat in the suffering, with God, sometimes/most times with God but ignoring God and just isolating. But handfuls of times He would pierce through that moment and arose things within me. In a strange turn of events (the wind of the Spirit will blow where she wills), I found myself, a walking dead man, encountering/re-encountering LIFE at a funeral of all places. Bizarre. But just like God. In the tomb is where He does His best work.
In and through the tomb He tramples down death by death, and upon me upon us, upon us all in the tombs, bestowing life/LIFE. That was just prior to Christmas. I have been in therapy the whole time, immersed in this thing with God, and found God/Christ is fully immersed in this with me. The scary part was I found He wasn’t the God of my Pentecostal roots per se. There was no NOW word of faith that would appear like a genie in a bottle, waving a magic wand, and BAM, breakthrough came, and all my cares are cast away. Nope. I was nailed to a cross. There, I encountered ONE nailed to a cross with me, and later paradoxically IN me, and all of my egoic “principalities and powers” met that ONE. Through grit and grime, blood sweat and tears, pain, and shame, condemnation and suffering I encountered THE ONE who entered into all of the things listed therein, with ME, in ME, and there was no BAM magic wand. There was “follow ME”.
Last Saturday 1/22/22, while sitting and reading A More Christlike Word by Brad Jersak, I had heard in my heart simply the passage John 20:22. Here is John 20:22: When He had said this, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
Interesting to me is David Bentley Hart’s rendering. He has the last part as “receive *a Holy Spirit”. When I read John 20:22 I heard it in my heart in that moment as: Jesus breathed upon them and said “receive a holy spirit”. Receive a holy spirt. Of course, that would subsist from/in The Holy Spirit. But the Lord was definitely dealing deep in my heart. Receive a holy spirit. Interesting “receive” in Greek “lambano” seems to suggest “3. to take what is one's own, to take to oneself, to make one's own;”. I thought that was interesting as well. Receive a holy spirit. Take what is already yours, make it your own. That which was breathed into us (Genesis 2:7).
If that Spirit which was breathed into us, which was made flesh in Christ, was “mine” well I was even more lost. It was obvious to me that my concept of “power” was warped. It was also interesting to me that it wasn’t until Jesus had been crucified and yet He is risen, that he comes with the message of peace on his lips to all, and it’s *then that he breathes on the disciples and tell them to receive the spirit. Fast forward to today. Today in my sitting in the “silence” another passage was highlighted to me. 2ndCorinthians 12:9: But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
I have been stuck on this passage the whole day. I see it in an entirely new light. The light of the crucified One. It doesn’t matter to me honestly whether you believe Satan to be a literal being, or a dark dynamic, a spiritual phenomenon, etc. Darkness and evil and sin are real. Paul encountered an intense measure of it and pleaded for God to take whatever this adversity was away. God does neither take away the adversity nor does he remove Paul from it. He says to Paul, “My Grace is sufficient for you.” In my looking, I found that “my” was inserted in front of “power” in some translations such as I shared. It is actually: He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Power is perfected in weakness. I even saw it rendered as “strength”. I was beginning to intuit something here, so I went to some commentaries and bizarrely found none saying what I was “feeling” (I still lean Pentecostal). They all pretty much were exhorting us that God is the strength in our weakness, and it's precisely because we are frail and finite, we live dependent upon God. That is all true. That is not what I was “feeling” though. I “felt’ as if something much deeper is being conveyed by Paul here.
It’s interesting to me that God connected grace with both power/strength as well as “weakness”. His strength was connected to grace, synergistically I suppose. One and the same. This strength was grace. This strength, this grace, was power. Yet paradoxically, this “power” is “perfected” in weakness. Another word for weakness was infirmity, and yet another was suffering. This “power” was “perfected” in weakness, infirmity, suffering? This sounds nothing like the Word of Faith camp of my roots. Yet maybe there is a deeper word of faith, deeper than the clenched fists of certitude, as deep as the very depths of the love of God in Christ, who is our word, The Word, of faith/trust. As deep as the hole in his side, as deep as the womb of the universe. This power was perfected in weakness, suffering and infirmity. Sounds morbid. I don’t want, in my own suffering, to make a literal theology of suffering as if God “uses” it as an instrument, that is not my intent. Yet suffering is a reality at my doorstep. And God, through the lens of the incarnation is present in all things; so I knew all was not lost. He doesn’t use suffering as his “tool”, he is present in it to do what he does best.
How did John 20:22 tie together with 2nd Corinthians 12:9? I knew both to be breathed upon my soul immersed in this journey. I found it right there in the word “perfected”. This “power” was “perfected” in weakness/suffering. Paul said to us that Jesus Christ and Him crucified and risen are both the “power” and “wisdom” of God. Upon the cross, right after he thirst and drank, he let out his breath, gave up his spirit, and said it is finished. Τετέλεσται
Interestingly still is that Paul chose to use the same word here, translated as “perfected”. τελεῖται (teleitai), “is perfected”. My power, my strength IS perfected. Present and ongoing.
Paul here master of words and rhetoric connects grace, power and strength to the cross. It wasn’t until after Jesus was crucified and risen did he appear with the message of peace on his lips to all and able to “share” the Holy Spirit. I too see Genesis 2:7 and John 20:22 together, coupled with Jesus breathing out his last breath as well, as one grand scene. Its where man is completed. Perfected. Fulfilled.
Τετέλεσται
Power/strength is perfected in suffering. We see this in Christ. This “power” is what dethroned the principalities and powers. The power of radically forgiving, other-centered, co-suffering love. Cruciform love. Jesus, as Michael Hardin says, is the “true human”. To follow this thought out, just keep reading into 2nd Corinthians chapter 13, verse 4 where, speaking of Jesus, Paul says that “indeed, He was crucified in “weakness”, yet He “lives” by God’s “power”. There again we see weakness in the same sentence as power. Interestingly still is the word Paul employed for “lives”. #2222 “Zoe” is the Greek root word here for “life/live/lives”. The definition in the lexicon is to paraphrase, basically the life within/inherent to God that he shares with us. Again, weakness tied to power, and now “life” is inserted in here. Paul is saying that cruciform love IS the very life of God, the very life he is causing to emerge from within us, and does the best work in times of adversity. Jesus is the true human. He didn’t just come for us he came as us and with us. And says follow me.
It seems to me that Paul realized, and the text now tells us, that God is present in suffering to literally forge Christ in us, to cause the Christ (the crucified and risen One) to emerge from within us and the divine be manifest in the earth, through us, His body. Hello, Jeremiah on the potter's wheel. Hello, Malachi’s messenger who comes as a refiner’s fire and launderers soap. Paul said that the weakness of Christ crucified was the very power of God. Paul realizes that this is what was happening to him in his adversity, what happens to all believers in adversity. That understanding helped him not run away from, but lean into his adversities IN GOD, both intentionally and contemplatively; opening his soul to Christ who does his greatest work in darkness.
He said that His grace was “sufficient” or “suffices”. A few definitions are “to be more than enough”, even “to assist”. What/who comes alongside us in our adversity that is more than enough, that is sufficient, that is there to assist? Jesus Christ and Him Crucified and Risen, the friend that sticks closer than a brother.
Behold even if I make my bed in hell you are there. Harrowing our hells, conquering our deaths by his death, and upon all of us in the tombs bestowing life. He sparks his death to live in us. Cruciform love. The Beauty that saves the world.
It’s the human journey and the love of Abba in the midst of it, placing us on the potter's wheel. We will all pass through the fire. He will baptize us in the Holy Spirit and fire. Jesus said you will all be salted with fire. Our God is a consuming fire. It’s almost as if the sufferings of Christ is what “saves” us. Makes us whole. Of course, Jesus saves us! But what I mean, for me, and it's only through my own suffering (the sufferings of Christ?), that the veil over my heart was torn wide open, and a compassion and empathy I knew not of began to emerge. It didn’t come into me; it came from within me.
Something is blooming on the soil of my once seemingly barren soul. Perhaps the treasure in the field is starting to be rid of the earth that covers it. Perhaps the crucified and risen Jesus is beginning to rise from/in my tomb. Perhaps I am catching a glimpse of the narrow way. Perhaps I am ready now to re-read the chapter in The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Oliver Clement titled “The Difficult Love”. Perhaps. Perhaps I was once blind and am beginning to see men as trees walking. Spit one more time on this earth Jesus and let me see.
Τετέλεσται. It is finished. And yet, the journey is just beginning.
Behold…..I make all things new.
😭-->" He sparks his death to live in us."
Posted by: Karina | February 03, 2022 at 10:53 PM