Reflections from the Heart – July 7, 2024

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
by Fr. Ivan Olmo

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” The concept of weakness seems foreign to us. In fact, we would rather not think about our weaknesses at all but would rather believe we are not weak but strong, much stronger than we would like others to believe. There lies our weakness. We fail to admit, acknowledge or recognize that we are weak, vulnerable, and dependent on God for all things and everything that is good for us. Those things that are good, holy, wholesome and true that lead us to everlasting happiness in life. Left to ourselves, our weaknesses would destroy us and consume those around us. Our weakness is to believe that we need to be strong always, always dominating and overexerting our strength over others by using harsh language, demeaning talk and a boisterous tone to indicate to everyone how wonderfully okay we are, when in fact we are hurting inside, depressed, insecure and interiorly suffering loneliness. To admit, acknowledge and share those things with God makes you stronger than you know and not weak at all. For even Saint Paul said, in his weakness, God’s grace strengthened him. The desire to be self-ensured, self-reliant and to want to give the outward appearance of strength or to go at it alone is in fact our powerlessness that reveals and exposes our innermost weaknesses. The standard of the enemy Satan is to make us go through life everyday self-assured, independent, self-reliant and to view weakness, all weakness, any weakness, as people who are simply too weak to cope, weaklings, the weakest link, too poor, ever so vulnerable – those who could not make it on their own, those who are unable to defend themselves. Do you see God as strong and powerful or weak and vulnerable, unable to help? Yes, of course, no one, no entity, no person, no false god is stronger or more powerful than God, yet God is powerless in his love for you. God is helplessly devoted to you. To love always, sacrificially, unconditionally, always, in every circumstance, in every place, throughout time and even into all eternity, one might say and view God’s merciful love as weak, his weakness, but it is what makes God so strong. Jesus clearly made himself powerless in the Incarnation, helpless and poor in his Nativity, weak and vulnerable in his ministry, and very dependent and reliant on the Father in his Passion and Death on the Cross. A love so vulnerably weak it conquered and destroyed death for evermore.