When our church members submit applications to become Stephen Ministers, they let us know about events in their past lives. They recount normal things like employment, degrees, and references. They also let us know about more painful events in their timeline like divorces, losses, illnesses, unemployment, support they relied on, past difficulties, and setbacks. Sometimes when I have an interview with them, they express concern that the hard times they have lived through are somehow disqualifying. But far from being disqualifiers, these scars of the past, now that they have healed, become sources of strength for those they will care for and support. Those scars become credentials, special knowledge that will help me to assign them to people going through crises and transitions.
In our passage, Paul produces his credentials as an Apostle. In his former life, he used to boast of his lineage and accomplishments, his education and worldly position. Now he is boasting about things that normal people of his time would have concealed. He must have been nothing but scar tissue and gristle! Beatings, stonings, and lashings? Shameful. Putting himself in constant danger? Strange. Deprived and anxious? Maybe a change of profession is in order.
But in this new life in Christ, in this new career as the Apostle to the Gentiles, he knows that Jesus is making use of his scars to make a church. He is using Paul, warts and all, boasting, drive, ambition, weaknesses, to help the church to be born. And the way Jesus works with him is through his weakness, his brokenness, his frailty. It could be that his literal scars showed early church members, “Paul really believes in this Jesus and is willing to suffer for him. This good news must be so important that Paul is ready to risk everything for it. I want to listen to Paul because he really is putting everything he’s got at Jesus’s service. This man is full of God’s power, or else he would not be here speaking to me.”
May God be able to do amazing things through our own lives, and may our scars and brokenness speak to others of God’s power at work in our own lives! For when we are weak, He is strong.