The Vulnerable Church
Christ made vulnerability one of the touchstones of his ministry, and that is something we don’t think about as much as we should.
To be vulnerable, is to allow ourselves to be put in a position where we can be hurt.
The more worried we are about being vulnerable and the more frightened we are of experiencing pain, the more we close ourselves off to those around us, to the world, to experiences. To life.
The more we struggle to be invulnerable — the less we are able to love.
We know that one of the most beautiful and heartrending qualities of childhood is vulnerability. The openness to being hurt. Because children are so open to hurt because they trust. Because they need love. Because they are not self-sufficient.
And the problem is that this vulnerability — particularly our experience of vulnerability as children — means that we get hurt. And we develop strategies for coping with that in life. We develop means to prevent ourselves from being hurt. And often the harder we have been hurt, the harder we build up the walls around us to withdraw behind.
Because, as human beings, we hate being vulnerable.
And the problem with this, is that without being vulnerable — that is without being open, and trusting, and aware of our need for interdependence — we cannot experience love.
Love builds communities, and love cannot exist without vulnerability.
In order to be able to develop communities of love, in order for our church to be a community of love, we have to start with this quality — the allowing of ourselves to be vulnerable.
Christ modelled this way for us. He lived in vulnerability.
Christ was homeless.
This was a deliberate choice of his. He did not have to be homeless. He had a family, he had people who loved him. He had friends and supporters.
Christ chose to be homeless.
‘As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
Luke 9:57
Being homeless made Jesus vulnerable. It took away his security and meant that every day he had to depend upon the grace of others.
When we have our own house, we don’t need to depend on others so much. We can be self-sufficient. We can ignore others.
When I finish work, I don’t look around my colleagues and think: Who should I turn to?
I don’t walk down a street and think: Who will show me grace?
Instead, I get in my car and drive past everybody, hoping they don’t get in my way, hold me up, slow me down. I’m self-sufficient. I don’t need them.
I cut myself off from them.
Christ had to be open to the people around him. Each night he would need to ask for the grace of being allowed to share a room.
That was how he was born, and that was how he lived.
And because of that vulnerability he developed communities of love. He allowed others the opportunity to be graceful.
He was without a home, so they gave him somewhere to sleep.
We see this same grace in vulnerability in the last few hours before he died on the cross.
On the morning of the crucifixion, as he was being led out to be crucified he stumbled and fell.
He had obviously been beaten up during the night and in the morning he was in a bad state and he was forced to carry the beam of his cross out of the city up to Golgotha.
And as he made his way out of the narrow lanes of the city, he stumbled and fell under the weight of the cross.
And the soldiers grabbed this random man out of the crowd in the street. Simon from Cyrene. And they made him pick up Jesus’ cross and carry it. Simon lifted the burden of the cross from Jesus’ shoulders and walked the mile or so up to Golgotha with him: up to the foot of the cross.
And this was a remarkable act of generosity: not on Simon’s part, but on that of Jesus.
Because Jesus was a man of extraordinary power. This, after all, was the man who had placed hands of healing on many, had cast out demons and cured leprosy. He had shown his power over nature, calming the storm that raged on Galilee. He had reduced a fig tree to a withered stump.
But in this moment of weakness, Jesus did not call upon angels to help him, as he could have. Jesus allows himself to be weak. Because, in his weakness, another man is lifted up and glorified.
And two thousand years later we still talk about that random man in the crowd: Simon from Cyrene.
The fact that Christ was willing to walk vulnerably converted the hearts of the first Christian church. The church he built was based on an openness of love.
So often we forget that we do not convert souls by winning arguments.
Love is hard, because it asks us to live in a vulnerable relation of interdependence with others.
That was what Christ called his followers to.
And that was how the early church lived.
Paul wrote:
Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”
2 Corinthians 8:13
The early Church was called to live in loving interdependence. To rely upon each other.
After Jesus death, the disciples locked themselves away. That’s what vulnerability does to us; the fear of being hurt, the fear of being shamed, the fear of being rejected makes us lock the doors of our hearts.
But Christ came through the locked door. And what did he do? He asked Thomas to feel his wounds.
And it was his wounds that opened these frightened men’s locked hearts.
Having touched Christ’s vulnerability Thomas can’t help but shout out:
‘My Lord and my God’.’
He believed because he had touched the fragility of Christ. Because he experienced Christ’s openness to hurt, to being hurt in order to live a life of love.
One final thought.
When Christ established the church, he promised to build it on a rock — that was, on Peter. But when Jesus finally invests leadership on Peter following his resurrection, he feels the need to remind Peter of his three-fold denial of him just days before.
‘When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’
‘Yes, Lord,’ he said, ‘you know that I love you.’
Jesus said, ‘Feed my lambs.’
Again, Jesus said, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’
He answered, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’
Jesus said, ‘Take care of my sheep.’
The third time he said to him, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’
Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ He said, ‘Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.’
Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep.
John 21:15
By this threefold demand for Peter to affirm his love for Jesus, Christ deliberately mimics Peter’s threefold denial of him at that terrible moment of his interrogation. And this pains Peter. Ironically, the leadership of the church was not built on a firm rock: it was built on weakness and failure.
We need to embrace the vulnerability that Jesus modelled for us. We need to recognise that there are times when we cannot carry the cross and we need somebody beside us to lift it for us.
We need to recognise there are times we will fail badly and require the forgiving love of others.
We need to recognise that we cannot do things alone; that we require a caring community around us.
We need to build communities of interdependence and care.
Bishop Desmond Tutu wrote, ‘We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia, in peace. . . . We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence. . . . A person is a person through other persons.’
