Submission, Weakness: Double Loss or Strength?
by Jesse Masai
When the editor drew my attention to 1 Pet 3:1-5 and Col 3:18 as the Scriptures she needed me to reflect upon, I went into some mental blackout wondering how best to weave it into some feminine context.
In the end, I ended nowhere close to a woman in thinking about it.
Instead, my thoughts have been drawn to the image of the suffering servant, Jesus Christ, and how we cease to be a Church the moment we also cease suffering with Him in this world.
Sufferings are commonplace in God’s world, yet how many of us, female or not, are familiar with them?
How many of us are familiar with the man of sorrows, so submissive, so weak?
How many of us are familiar with the abdicating King, in a world so in tune with in-your-face images of “look-at-me?”
Beyond gender roles and expectations, there are two other areas, in addition to suffering, in which submission and weakness may be helpful to us: incarnation, vulnerability.
The Christ we encounter in the Scriptures is one who becomes like us so as to penetrate our dark world with His saving knowledge, light, love and wisdom.
Those from media backgrounds like yours truly would have savored a scene in which the Trinity makes short of everything redemptive by way of a megaphone from high above.
Those from other backgrounds will certainly resonate with other images in popular culture we are all familiar with, not different from what Jews expected of Christ during His first advent.
Yet the Christ we encounter in the Gospels, immortalized as the lion Aslan in C.S Lewis’ Narnia series, is a God who goes against the grain.
This is a God who takes the long and torturous path of incarnation, as opposed to our much more preferred one of instant results; our sense of immediacy is somewhat offended by this, no doubt.
For a God desirous of the salvation of men and a fallen world, no better testament could exist to submission and weakness; incarnation does it over and over again.
Are we walking in His incarnational steps today in that troubling career, relationship or academic subject?
Is anyone seeing Jesus in how we respond to our world’s crises, hopes and fears?
Submission and weakness, it also seemed to me, would be incomplete without vulnerability.
So much that makes for life in our days renders us unwilling, if not incapable, of being vulnerable, – vulnerable to be the light that shines in this dark world, vulnerable to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit in a world run by the flesh.
For the romantics, no word could be more double-edged.
Yet again none could be more liberating from sin and fear into salvation and perfect love.
So today Jesus invites us to listen to those Scriptures again, and allow Him to work in us a submission and weakness unto Himself and His purposes for us and His world.
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