How vulnerable was Jesus?

One of the habits we’ve developed as a church staff team is to have a book that we commit to reading and discussing as part of our weekly staff meeting. Normally we opt for something theological but occasionally, to keep things lively, we go a bit rogue.

Recently we’ve been on one of our excursions into left field and have been working through Brené Brown’s bestselling book on the subject of vulnerability, Daring Greatly. In all honesty, to employ a clerical metaphor, it’s a bit of a curate’s egg of a book.

Flashes of brilliant insight rub shoulders with good old-fashioned common sense, along with occasional descents into psychobabble, all underpinned by an anthropology that doesn’t fully match the Bible’s balanced view of us as possessing inherent worth by virtue of being created in God’s image, while being fatally flawed by our, also inherent, sinful nature.

Are evangelical churches good at vulnerability?

That said, the book has been well worth delving into, and has caused me to ponder, a number of questions, including: ‘How good are we as evangelical churches in making spaces in which people have permission to be vulnerable?’

I suspect a straight answer to the question would be: ‘Not very’. Our natural propensity to fall prey to feelings of shame and our fear of rejection, along with evangelicalism’s tendency to foster a ‘success culture’ aren’t exactly conducive to ‘letting it all hang out’. Should we be bolder and more willing to bare our souls and admit our fears and failings to our brothers and sisters? Probably. Less guarded about doing life together? Almost certainly. But what if there’s more to vulnerability than just the ability to articulate our fears and failings to a friend over an americano or caramel latte?

All of which, eventually, got me to thinking about Jesus. Yeah, I know, it should have been my starting point, but I’m sometimes a bit slow on the uptake. There are a number of recorded incidents from the life of Jesus that point our attention to His vulnerability – His public tears at the grave of Lazarus, His asking for the prayers of others in Gethsemane and so on, but supremely so when we think of Him as the baby in a manger or the man on a cross.

I’ve recently become a grandparent, and been reminded first hand of the completely dependent and defenceless nature of babies and find myself awestruck once again at the condescension of Jesus, the one who left His home in glory to become not just a human, but an infant human.

But it wasn’t the baby, it was the crucified Jesus that really got me thinking. Because it seems to me that, in a strange way, it was His invulnerability that allowed Jesus to be vulnerable. In the garden, when His disciples wanted to scuffle and draw swords, Jesus reminded them that it was within His power to summon 12 legions of angels to defend Himself (Matt. 25:53) and, unlike the ones Paula White was attempting to recruit to somehow help Donald Trump’s failed 2020 US election attempt, they really would have come! At any moment during His Passion, Jesus could have pulled the plug on the whole thing. Hands that flung stars into space might surrender themselves to nails, but it really wasn’t the nails that kept Him there. Jesus’ vulnerability in no way threatened His authority. Similarly, for us, our identity in Christ gives us an eternal invulnerability (check out Rom. 8:31-39) that should enable us to take risks and be vulnerable in the here and now.

It seems to me, the path to vulnerability lies less in the contents of a Ted Talk and more in the example of Jesus. Maybe, we’ll discover that it’s through more fully understanding our identity in Christ and viewing the challenges we face in time through the lens of our eternal destination that we give ourselves permission to take risks and make ourselves vulnerable.