In the Christian life, what you see isn’t what you get. Appearances aren’t just misleading but the opposite of what you expect. What looks like a curse is the opposite; what looks like glory is unrighteousness. In his comparatively brief book on the intrinsic weakness of the life of faith in Christ, aptly titled Weakness Is the Way, the late J. I. Packer unpacks this apparent paradox, most especially in 2 Corinthians 4, where the apparent decay of his “outer self” wasn’t definitively true of the work God’s Word and Spirit were accomplishing in his “inner self,” which was being invigorated “day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). As baffling as this may sound, this accords with what we might refer to as Paul’s theology of the cross, which, like Luther’s after him, understands God’s will, works, and nature often through their opposites.
While we might expect God to reveal himself in grandiose displays of power and glory and righteousness — which is what Luther called the theology of glory — he is inclined to manifest himself through suffering, weakness, and death. As with Moses in the cleft of the rock, the face of God is hidden from view, concealed in order to reveal himself to creatures who would otherwise be crushed by the awesome brilliance of his fullness (Ex. 33:18–23). “Thus God becomes visible as he conceals himself,” Walther von Loewenich once wrote, “and only in this concealment does he become visible” (p. 29). God discloses who he is in the Crucified One, cloaked in death and rejection and defeat. He “wraps himself in his word,” von Loewenich continues, and therein “becomes the ‘clothed’ God” in whom is found reconciliation and resurrection (p. 33).
The God who is hidden yet manifest in crucifixion is the one who brings sinners to himself, even as he bears the brunt of our forsakenness and sin. In so doing, he reconciles “the world to himself,” precisely by “not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). Our hope of pardon, in other words, emerges from the cross, where the greatest injustice this world has ever seen became the very place where God’s justice was satisfied (Rom. 3:26), where he “who knew no sin” was made “to be sin” for us (2 Cor. 5:21). “God is ‘God’ as evident in his opposite,” Jürgen Moltmann once put it, “in godlessness and God-forsakenness.”[1] The cross’s dissonance speaks a word of deliverance to those who believe. The Spirit of God brings the good news of the dereliction and death of the Son of God into our hearts and ears as the very genesis of life, reconciliation, and wholeness. The rejected ones are reconciled by Christ himself becoming rejected and scorned.
Even there, in the weak and naked and forsaken figure of Christ on the cross, God was at work. This, of course, leads us to consider what is often termed “the great exchange.” Sin being put on the Sinless One and righteousness clothing sinners — this, in brief, is elemental to the promise of the gospel. Furthermore, this language of exchange gets to the heart of the incongruity of grace and the life of faith in which “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). In typical fashion, Packer deftly brings these threads together as he expresses the staggering reality of this reconciliatory exchange:
The method of God’s reconciliation is here revealed, then, as a two-way transfer, or exchange. On the one hand, the Lord Jesus as our substitute took our place and tasted on our behalf the penalty — that is, the death and banishment into hell — that we deserved. On the other hand, we are made sharers of the Father’s eternal approval of and pleasure in his always loyal, loving, and obedient Son, who now has borne, and borne away, the sin of the world. Retributive justice has been done, once for all, and just justification — justification, that is, on the basis of justice thus executed — is now ours for the taking.
Well may we speak of this double action on God’s part as the great exchange, the wonderful exchange, and, as I like to do for maximum emphasis, “the stupendous exchange.” It is overwhelmingly awesome, almost beyond belief. It is holy love in action — the holy love of the Father, who sent his Son into this world to die for our sins; the holy love of the Son, love for everyone whose sins he bore; and the holy love of the Holy Spirit, who works in our hearts to create and sustain the faith that brings the blessing of reconciliation and acceptance home to us as the supreme gift of divine grace (p. 45–46).
We who are called to take up our crosses are, therefore, drawn by faith into a life that looks very cruciform, that looks like the cross: weak on the outside, alive underneath. Though we die daily, we yet live by union with him who rose from the dead. There is no hesitation or reluctance on God’s part to embrace us as his own — yes, even with all our infirmities, failures, and sins. Just as at the cross, God meets us in our weakness, not on the other side of it. He is present there. He is at work there. Weakness, in other words, is no obstacle to grace. Weakness is the way.
[1] Jürgen Moltmann, “The Crucified God: Perspectives on a Theology of the Cross for Today,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 9 (1974): 26.
