God's Weakness

In God’s weakest state, the world—and everything in it—is forever changed. Love saves us. That is the gospel Jesus proclaimed. 

Paul writes in the opening salutation of his letter to the church in Corinth:

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

I’ve always looked at that verse through the eyes of wisdom, never weakness.

Today I saw it differently—that God’s weakness is stronger than my strength. And what is that weakness? After giving it much thought, I’ve concluded it is love.

For years, I read this verse as a meditation on wisdom, not weakness. But lately, I’ve begun to see the deeper paradox: that God’s weakness is, in fact, stronger than my strongest effort. And that weakness is love.

In our cultural moment, something unwise (and disturbing) is happening. Love is being framed as weakness. Compassion is dismissed as “soft.” Empathy is treated as indulgent. We are told that those who practice such foolishness must be weak. Fragile, like snowflakes. And those who promote such ideas equate stupidity with being smart.

If this rhetoric was just from the fringes, we could shrug it off as foolishness. But sadly, we’re seeing a resurgence of this kind of toxic thinking—that strength is domination, certainty, or control—is creeping back into our institutions. Into the workplace. Into our politics. Even into the church.

Dorothee Soelle once wrote, “God’s power is not the power to dominate, but the power to suffer with and for others.” To the world—especially to those who clutch their weapons—such power looks like defeat. But to Paul, it is the very heart of God.

​How, then, did the church come to embrace such folly?

The great mystic Julian of Norwich reminds us of who we are and who God is: “The love of God creates in us such a unity that when we see and love our neighbor, we see and love God.”

This is not weakness. It is a strength that remakes the world. Just as hate ignites more hatred, love begets more love.

In God’s weakest state, the world—and everything in it—is forever changed. Love saves us. That is the gospel Jesus proclaimed.

​By contrast, human perceptions of strength lean on exclusion and control.

I have personally seen it in boardrooms where “leadership” is defined by posturing rather than listening. I’ve seen it in political rallies that call compassion naïve while baptizing violence in religious language. And I’ve seen it in churches that reward certainty more than hospitality. I’ve seen all three, up close. And I walked away—from a career, from a political tribe, even from religion itself—to pursue God’s “weakness.”

Paul’s letter begins with this reminder: the cross itself—the very symbol of weakness and shame in the Roman world—is the site of God’s greatest power. What empire mocked, God exalted. What the world dismissed as foolish, God called wisdom.

So if we’re serious about following the way of Jesus—if we actually want his words to shape us and transform us—then we’ve got to resist the lie that empathy is weakness. We must refuse the temptation to equate love with foolishness.

For it is precisely love—long-suffering, tender, and resilient—that dismantles the false powers of domination. “The great paradox of God’s love,” wrote Henri Nouwen, “is that it is most fully revealed in weakness.”

So let us live in that paradox. Let us embody the strength of God’s so-called weakness, building a community not on fear or force but on the radical and risky power of love—the very love of God that has brought empires and emperors to their knees.


Work Cited
Dorothee Soelle — Dorothee Soelle, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 37.
Julian of Norwich — Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), 184.
Henri Nouwen — Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (New York: Image, 1979), 37.