First Friday of Lent: Omnipotent Weakness

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)

Human beings are weak – often painfully so. Run though we might, each of us must face the fact of our frailty and insecurity. In His infinite mercy, however, God has come down to our level in Jesus Christ, embracing human weakness in order to win for us the graces – and give us an example to imitate – in every challenge we face. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Passion, where He chooses to exercise His omnipotence precisely through weakness.

In His Agony in the Garden, Jesus took upon Himself the human frailties of fear and anxiety. These powerful emotions can overwhelm and paralyze us with incredible ease. Our God does not stand aloof – He embraces the crippling anguish and inner distress of those who feel crushed by the weight of emotional struggles. He even begs the Father for deliverance. And yet, in the midst of this agony, He utters the most powerful words that can fall from human lips. “Not My will, but Yours be done.” In that moment, Christ wins a grace for all of us: even in the depths of fear and anxiety, we can find the strength to surrender to the Father, Who will never let our suffering be in vain.

In the Scourging at the Pillar, God Incarnate embraces a different kind of weakness: physical vulnerability. He, the All-Powerful, willingly chooses to be defenseless in the face of hatred and violence. Chained to the column, powerless to defend Himself against the cruelty of the whip, Jesus enters into profound solidarity with all victims of abuse and torture. Yet, as the blows rain upon His body, His sovereign freedom of heart is unbroken. He chooses to love those who are inflicting pain upon Him, thus winning the same powerful grace for all those who are made to suffer at the hands of others. In union with Christ, they can receive the astounding strength to return love for hate.

The Crowning with Thorns brings Jesus’ love into yet another level of human frailty: humiliation. Anyone who has suffered mockery, contempt, or ostracism knows how profoundly these experiences can hurt the heart. Human beings are made by love and for love, and this makes us uniquely vulnerable to such “invisible wounds.” Therefore, Christ wants to meet us at this level of suffering as well. He freely allows Himself to become the object of the soldiers’ scorn and mockery, and His Sacred Heart is pierced even more deeply than we can imagine. Yet even in this hour of humiliation, there is peace at the deepest point of His soul. Why? Because He is unshakably confident in his identity as the Beloved of the Father. By this confidence, He wins for us the strength to imitate Him in our own hours of humiliation. Men and demons may rage – yet they cannot take away our dignity as children of God.

As we follow Christ on the Way of the Cross, we can witness how He accepts even the weakness of exhaustion for love of us. Physical weariness is a true suffering in the life of so many: hourly workers, overtaxed parents, busy parish priests, the sick, the elderly … Jesus does not hesitate to enter into this universal human experience. Burdened with the heavy wood, weakened by loss of blood, falling to the ground over and over again, He nevertheless struggles to His feet and continues on. He thereby wins for us the grace to tap into the sources of His own strength: love of the Father and of all mankind.

Hanging upon the Cross, the Lord embraces the greatest and most universal human weakness of all: death. From Adam onward, humanity has feared death – and God-made-man is not exempt from this fear. And yet, He does not run from death as we do. Rather, with love beyond all telling, He  runs towards it, knowing that only thus can He break its power over humanity. He enters into communion with each and every one of us in our final hour, and as He breathes forth His Spirit, He wins for us the final strength to give up our souls in total trust. “Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit!”